"[t]hey said this time would come/it has come and gone...."
The couplet quoted above summed up nicely Disaster Amnesiac's feelings about Lungfish, when they were at their creative hight as a band. I would wait, and watch Dischord Records, and wait some more, for any new release from the band. Eventually, a new release would be forthcoming, and I would dig in, and listen, over and over, savoring the sublime sounds and mystifying lyrics. Disaster Amnesiac held the band's music in an almost religious regard. Lungfish music meant a lot to me. New releases were heard as Revelations, and, after digesting them at length, I would be almost mournful at having done so. The only consolation was that "this time" would come again with a new Lungfish release or, if I was lucky, a live appearance.
Lungfish seems to have ceased activities in about 2006 or so, and, yes, Disaster Amnesiac has missed them. Since that time, I've enjoyed Daniel Higgs' solo music, along with his art and poetry. I have grooved to Asa Osborne's Zomes project. Additionally, in 2008, I ventured to publish an interview with Lungfish drummer Mitchell Feldstein at this blog. It continues to get hits, and I am duly proud of it. In late 2012, Charlie Scheer contacted me via Youtube, and asked if I'd be interested in pairing up with him to publish interviews that he conducted with Lungfish in 1999. My response was an enthusiastic "HELL YES!" Since then, we've communicated patiently, as Charlie needed to free up some time to do a massive transcription job. As you'll read, these interviews go deep.
I want to thank Charlie for offering me the opportunity to serve up this interview! The interviews run in this order, made up of three posts: 1) Intro and Daniel Higgs portion, 2) Asa Osborne portion, 3) Mitchell Feldstein portion. On account of blogger running posts in a very linear fashion, the order in which the actual interviews with Daniel and Asa took place is reversed on the time line of this blog. My apologies for that are needed, as the sequential nature of their process is important.
Now a few words from Charlie.
Enjoy!
These interviews with Daniel
Higgs, Asa Osborne and Mitchell Feldstein of Lungfish took place on October 8
and 9, 1999. The locations for the
interviews varied between different sites in the city of Baltimore, Maryland,
and all the interviews took place individually. Then-bassist Nathan Bell was in
Europe during the interviews and could not participate for logistical reasons.
A little context: first, at
the time of these interviews, Lungfish had begun to curtail most live
performances and almost all touring, redefining what it meant to be an “underground
rock band” in the late-90’s in comparison to their Dischord-class peers who
performed tirelessly and, in some cases, had found mixed success by signing
contracts with large record labels. Although the discussions of shows, touring,
and the mechanics of audience relations seem quaint in 2014, back then it was
somewhat novel to abandon performing if you were a “productive” underground
rock band. It was interesting to watch a very prolific band get better while
simultaneously fading from the public eye.
Second, this decision to
curtail performing (conscious or not) only fueled what was at that time a
growing mystique surrounding Lungfish, contributing to an image of the band
that stood in stark contrast to their peers. Consider the climate: their label
was Dischord, whose roster included no shortage of bands that had “something to
say,” a curious relationship given Lungfish’s steadfast refusal to label their
music as having a “message” at all. Despite an almost overbearing intensity,
Lungfish perpetually distanced themselves from self-definition and analysis. Their
catalog seemed to exist far outside even the most intriguing bands of the
time. They really had no “peer”,
which only solidified their musical and artistic reputation.
I had emailed Asa Osborne of
the band in mid-August of 1999 and (in a rather embarrassing email in
retrospect) proposed the idea of interviewing the band because “an interview or
feature would be welcomed and appreciated by a wide range of listeners”. To my
extreme surprise, we began to dialog about the idea and it came to fruition.
For some reason, I printed my original email to Asa and tucked it away with a
partial transcript of the nearly eight hours of resulting interview recordings. The cassettes themselves remained in
the bottom of a shoebox. The
interview was published in the January/February 2000 issue of Punk Planet magazine, a lively and standard-bearing underground
rock magazine of the 90’s which had a strong following and readership for many
years. The interviews as published
were naturally revised and edited for clarity and brevity. However, many of the original interview
transcripts were unpublished, including the entire discussion with Mitchell
Feldstein.
In the 14 or so years since,
Lungfish has become inactive as the original members work on other
projects. The influence and
impression provided by Lungfish has not diminished in the time since they were
a working band. It’s a cliché to
say that their stature has grown, but in the current context of independent or
underground music (itself a designation which has lost relevance since this
interview was published), Lungfish continues to attract interest and respect.
Interest in republishing
this interview, this time in its entirety (save for a few side discussions the
band and I agreed to omit in 1999), was rekindled entirely by chance. Last
year, a blog post about the interview caught my attention, and I emailed its
author, Mark Pino, asking if he’d like to publish the entire unedited interview
on his blog since so much of the original interview hadn’t ever seen the light
of day. He agreed enthusiastically. I then tried to locate the original
transcript file, which I suspected was on a 3½ -inch floppy disk in a huge box
of them which hadn’t been opened since Y2K. (The original transcription was done on a Power Macintosh
6100, OS8, using MacWrite II.) To say the least, finding a system able to read
these disks was a challenge, but once I did, the elusive transcript was nowhere
to be found, and I’m thinking it was on the one damaged disk labeled “1999”. I eventually
had to re-transcribe the entire eight hours of interviews, which was actually
pleasant because I hadn’t heard them in over a decade. I was reminded of the challenge of
making sense of a band whose songs and intentions defied the tired zine-style
descriptors, of my sometimes idiotic questions, of the birds descending around
Asa’s front porch whose sounds found their way onto his taped interview, of
Mitchell’s casual humor, and of the riddle of trying to figure out what I could
talk to Daniel about now that I actually convinced him to sit down to a rock
& roll interview. It was a crazy, fun, interesting, and challenging moment
to be in Baltimore that weekend talking to Lungfish about their band.
In the years since print
media was overtaken by democratized online journalism, the expression of ideas
made possible by the internet is often taken for granted. Reflecting on the
changes since then inspires a sense of reluctant nostalgia.
At the time of this interview, Lungfish were recording what would eventually be
released as A.C.R. 1999, the
foundational sessions for the album Necrophones. Their excitement over this new landscape of
creativity is infectious, even 14 years later. Those recently-unearthed
recording sessions make a nice companion to these interviews, printed in their
entirety for the first time.
C.S. January, 2014
C.S. January, 2014
---------------------------
Daniel
Higgs
Oct 8,
1999
Evening
He thinks
that the modern-day Christian church is perverted beyond recognition… I don’t
wanna put words in his mouth, but it was interesting because I had to interview
that guy you know, and I noticed as soon as I hit the tape deck, the whole tone
of his voice changed, his posture changed…
His
monologue…
Yeah. But I was in your position. I was the
interviewer. And it was really weird, because then I realized that, to him, it
was an opportunity to spread this very particular message, and he didn’t want
to have a conversation, he just wanted to say the stuff he always says, which
is cool.
I wonder
how easy it would be to continue to do that, either for you, or any public
figure, to have like a set way of dealing with “the people”…
I don’t
deal with people the way you may assume. I mean, because, we don’t… we’re not
an extremely popular band. So,
most often when we meet people as the band, while we’re with the band doing the
band, it’s uh… usually it stays about as normal as it can meeting a complete
stranger. We’re kind of lucky I
guess, in that regard. We never
really have to deal with putting on, you know, a charade, not when we’re
talking with someone one-on-one generally. We just haven’t… I mean a really popular band, where people
are constantly approaching you and constantly wanting to get your attention to
share a word with you or whatever, I’m just assuming maybe it would be easier
to get kind of callous. And then you would revert to sort of these just
prepared responses just to get it over with. But that never happens with us.
Maybe
because you’re not out there as much as… I mean you don’t tour as regularly and
you don’t come in contact with everyone, but there’s definitely a lot of people…
I mean Lungfish is just not the type of band that seems to invite that
casualness. People don’t seem to want to approach you with the standard fan
questions.
Right.
I don’t
feel the need to do that, nor do I think people see the need to do that. I mean
it doesn’t necessarily turn people off to it…
Yeah, I
guess. I just don’t think we put ourselves in anybody’s way you know, for it to
happen. I don’t know, though, I really don’t know.
Would
you want that to happen?
Not
particularly. No… I think if we
had wanted that to happen, I don’t know if it would have happened… I don’t know
if it could have happened or not.
We didn’t take the strides to try and make it happen. If we had, it may still not have
happened, you know, becoming more famous or whatever, or more well-known…
Why not?
We just ah…at
the group, we get… the group, when we discuss what we’re doing with our music,
after the discussion goes on long enough, we do kind of assume kind of a
singular mind, you know, but that single mind, it’s like really conflicted you
know, like a real shattered mind, the shattered mind has just never allowed us
to do any of the things, whatever those things are, and it’s not even clear
what they are. But I know, for instance, you try and get in the press as much
as you can, and you try to tour as much as you can, and you want to kind of
force your way into peoples’ stereos, you know. And we don’t do that because, fortunately, we’re allowed
through the label, Dischord isn’t like a big promotional machine either, so
there’s never been any pressure from them to try and be more public than we are, and they
haven’t… I think they do all they can and all they wanna do, to put the records
out to whoever it is that may want to buy them and listen to them. So it’s all… it’s cool with me. I really wouldn’t change a thing, you
know, I think the rest of the band would be in agreement with me about that.
You don’t
seem excited about taking those strides either.
We’re
excited about the music. We’re not excited about all of these other sort of theoretical
maneuvers we could be trying to pull off, as far as getting more people to hear
it or getting specific people to hear it. No one in the band, or no one in the
group as a unit… we’re incapable of doing whatever that work is to make that
happen.
It is
work, in a way.
It’s not
even by choice, it’s by our nature. You know, it’s just not… now you could say
we could hire someone to do it, you know, they could do that work to try and
help us accomplish that type of goal, well that’s where we make a decision, you
know, we’re not interested in that either, you know. We just want to play our
songs.
For
instance you could go to every single spoken word restaurant and do your
poetry, but you’re doing it the way you’re doing it…
I just
know, where we are, I mean, it sounds so simple, but we concentrate on the
music, and that kind of… when we’re playing the music, then we’ve reached our
goal, you know. And we reach the
goal every time we play the music.
The goal is to play the music.
Now, but we do like to share it with others, and there are totally
different variables at work and it’s a totally different experience playing the
music with other people listening, but we play together all the time.
Just by
yourselves?
Yeah, just
the band.
And
maybe a couple of people over?
Very
rarely. It happens, but not
often. It’s usually just the four
of us.
Where do
you play now?
We play at
a house, next to Nathan’s house, maybe you’ll get to see it while you’re here.
It’s ah… we’ve been blessed… it’s a really great space, it’s out in the woods,
but still in the city. And uh, it’s good.
It’s a good place.
How
often do you write new songs?
We write a
lot, we make songs up all the time, but a lot of them only get played once or
twice, you know, cause the cycle seems to be you make up the songs, and then
you start thinking about recording them, and then we zero in on ten or twelve
or fifteen of them, and we may have other ones that we liked, but if they don’t
make it past the studio, we generally never return to those. And you know, we view them as all being
part of the foundation, of the songs that actually got recorded, I guess… but
we’re all the time, always making new songs.
How are
they actually written?
It’s become
kind of, there’s definitely a system now, where it’s generally… you know, I
write the lyrics independently, I have them all ready before I’ve heard any
music.
Really…
so you wouldn’t listen to the music and then…
I listen to
the music and see if I can try to recognize which music is calling for which
lyrics, both in the rhythm and the phrase and the feeling of the music, you
know, if it suits it. You know,
Asa generally initiates the melody, and then it’s um… everybody for themselves,
you know? No one… we help guide each other, you know, but everybody has to sort
of respond to… generally the songs sort of start in very rudimentary form, you
know. It’s not until the whole band starts approaching it that it turns into a
Lungfish song, you know, that we’d play in front of strangers and record.
You’re
playing guitar now.
I played a
little guitar in the studio, and I played live last year.
What was
that like?
It was
insane, man. Cause I had never
done it. You know, I had never
played in front of people.
How did
you feel sitting there with a guitar on?
It was
weird, I mean we… I was playing, the first time I played guitar in the band,
was the spring a year ago, the spring of ’98. About halfway through the first song I played guitar on, it
hit me that I wasn’t nervous at all.
As soon as I acknowledged that fact, my legs just turned rubber. And I
started to quake, and I could barely hold the pick and uh… it was intense. I’m glad I did it, and I might do it
again, but it’s not vital to the band that I play guitar at all. It’s just…
when I do play guitar on a song, it’s another variable and it influences which
paths the song would take. And we’re all interested in that, but uh… I’m not
gonna… I’ll play guitar here and there, but I don’t know if I’ll play it live
again or not.
There is
a definite change in the variety of music from before you started playing
guitar and now. It sort of
violates what people say about Lungfish, that there isn’t any progression.
Yeah…
You went
to Europe as well?
We did
once.
What was
that like? Was it to record or…
No we went
over there to play, we went for like eight weeks.
Just
recently?
No this was
years ago, in like ’93.
Oh, ok.
Yea, so I
don’t really uh… to tell you the truth, I’m sort of still digesting that trip.
I still think about it sometimes.
Cause… we moved through the continent so quickly for one thing, you
know, you have to, cause we did a lot of driving, and the longest we spent
anywhere was like two days, we were in Amsterdam a little longer, cause that’s
where we landed, and took off, we had a few days before we left… so I don’t
really know what… I can’t really describe it to you because I don’t know what
it was like, you know.
Well you
were going through so fast it must have been difficult to digest anyway, like a
slide show.
Well I was
digesting something, you know, but I don’t know if I can tell you about any particular
country, I can tell you about shows in particular countries, it wouldn’t really tell you about
the country, not necessarily – well maybe it could, you know, it was strange,
and I’m glad we did it. I had
never been to Europe before that.
I
thought that the new album said it was mixed there or something…
Yeah it was
mixed, we sent it out there… a lot of them get mastered over there.
Are you
planning on going again?
Ah, not
planning on it, no. There’s a possibility, but there’s no plan. You know, we
may… I mean, we don’t know if we’ll ever play in California again, much less…
Why so?
I mean
because we don’t know, because of the way the band operates, we don’t like
record a record and wait for it to be out a month and then tour, that’s not our
plan, and I don’t know if the band will be together in a month. I believe it will be, and I’m pretty
confident it will be. I’m pretty
confident the band will be together a year from now. Still fairly confident the
band will be together two to three years from now. I think there’s a really
good chance we’ll still be together five years, and there’s, you know, a good
possibility we’ll be together in ten.
But we could break up next week. So I can’t really say if we’re gonna
tour or not again. I mean, we’re gonna play some shows, hopefully, we haven’t
played out yet in ’99. We’re going
to try and play some shows in December, before ‘99’s over. But we’re not going
on tour so much.
There
was a big announcement from Dischord about touring…
But we’re
talking about touring in 2001. Is that what it says? But it’s not really a
plan.
Any
reason why that particular time?
Well that’s
maybe when we think we can all do it. Yeah. We haven’t done it in a while, our lives aren’t arranged for
us to easily tour. You know, but
we may tour again.
You
can’t just drop everything…
But the band
is more active in our minds now than it ever was, even though we do far less in
public. I know it occupies a larger place in my heart and mind than it ever
has.
Why?
Ah, cause I
think because it’s… coming to fruition, you know, like musically, in a way I
never really could have predicted.
Because we knew, years ago, that we wanted to hear the Lungfish music, you
know, and we didn’t know what it would sound like, you know… we had to keep
playing it, and we’d hear a glimpse of it in a song, and the next song would
turn us, and every song there were multiple forks in the road, you bounce off that
song, and you know, you write the songs in a linear progression, one song at a
time. It’s a chain of songs. But once each song is completed, if it
ever is completed, then, you know…which way is the song leading us? You’ve got
a variety of ways.
Well,
you’ve changed as well, added different instruments, taking on a variety of
different roles…
It’s all
about listening, you know. We had to listen to the Lungfish music harder than
anybody else, you know. Cause the music… I would hope it speaks to people, but
it’s speaking to us as we’re making it, you know, and we gotta listen, and
it’ll be telling us many things at once, you know. You’ve got to try to make
sense out of it. That’s why it takes all four of us to make sense out of what
the music is saying to us, cause if you were to just ask one of us what the
music is saying, you know, you would probably get like four different
impressions of what the music has just said, you know, it takes all four of us
to listen, and then to take orders from it, and to go on to the next song. So…
I forget why I was talking about this…
You were
saying how it’s all really coming together…
Yeah, we’re
on the verge of something.
What is
it?
The
Lungfish music.
Sort of
like that mathematical thing that keeps approaching but never really reaches…
Like Zeno’s
Paradox.
Well I
wasn’t very good at math!
I think it
was Zeno, it might be somebody else’s paradox, but as an object approaches a
fixed point in space, it must continually halve the distance, so the idea being
that if it must keep halving the distance, it will never get there… yeah.
That is
really not a bad thing, even if you never exactly hit on what it is…
Who says it
is a bad thing! I mean who would
say that.
Well
maybe people who see creativity as a sellable commodity…
For us, yeah. I mean we may go that route, there’s
no telling what we’ll do. It’s
definitely not impossible. But it
doesn’t seem possible at present. If we stay together long enough, who
knows what’ll happen, you know? We feel like we’re making the best music we’ve
ever made. I’ve talked to people that may disagree. But we feel like we are. But
you know, we might begin to make the worst music we’ve ever made, and not know
the difference, you know. We might
get too close, you know.
That’s
what keeps people wanting to watch this, to see what happens next, you know…
Well, we
want to hear what happens next. I
mean, that’s where we’re at. We want to hear what happens next.
That
makes you unique, because of the emphasis on the “big statement”, or the end
result.
I’ll have
to take your word on that, cause I’m not living in that world.
[break]
The
lyrics, are they concepts?
Concepts…
yeah well I think they’re probably like… yeah they’re just probably universal
concepts, I think most people are confronted by, in their lives, and some
people sweep them under the rug… I think they get in everybody’s mind, but not
everybody navigates it the same way.
[A large rat is seen]
We’re
being listened to… he’s really close too, he’s right there.
They’ll
bite you, you know.
Wherever
he is, he’s pretty close…
[laughs]
I mean I
don’t think that people do that consciously, you know, maybe at different times
in their lives…
The rule I
made for myself, whether it’s a dull rule or not, is I try, it’s difficult, but
I try to never to make any assumption about anybody else’s mental processes,
you know what I mean? I figured
the only assumption I could make is that uh… I have more in common with other
people, in what I think about and how I think about it, than not. Now that can be a gross assumption, but
that’s one I choose to make. Because I figure, I’m living, presumably, in the
same world with all these other human beings, and I’m getting all the same,
relatively the same, you know, information, you know, I’ve been taught that I
walk upright, or up is up, and down is down, north, south, east and west, all
that… all those sort of orientative terms that we use, and they’re the first
things that we take for granted, you know. I’m this many inches tall, I weigh
this much, I live on planet Earth, the Earth is round, you know, I’m a human
being, these all seem to be the answers to questions, but they’re not really
answers at all, you know. They’re actually like question stoppers, you know
what I mean? Cause you say, “what are you?”, and you say, “well I’m a human
being”, you know, and the question seems to have been answered, but there’s no
answer there.
People
are always going to want to know more, though, they’re not satisfied with
question-stopping maybe. I mean that’s how many of us are raised… it becomes a
ritual, in a way…
Well there
are sort of ceremonies and rituals that take place, they have become things
like, what TV shows do you watch at dinner, you know what I mean, and… stuff
like that! And it takes on a
certain, you know, a point of focus that is the small community that is a
family, we all come together at the table, we all sit down, and we watch “Star
Trek” while we nourish ourselves, you know what I mean? There are no obvious
metaphysical over- or undertones, but they’re definitely present.
[break]
Where
scripture led me to is to concentrate more on language itself, you know what I
mean? Like what are the words, where do the words come from, why am I using
these words, who first said the words… I feel like I’ve always been speaking
these words, you know.
It’s an
educational exercise in a way, trying to determine what the meaning of certain
words are, instead of examining where the words come from.
You mean
like the academic sense?
Well
also the linguistics of it, like where did the words come from, and then what
do they mean… like it’s a matter of trying to determine in what order this
discovery is supposed to take place…
I can tell
ya. I’m gonna tell ya. What’s
supposed to take place when you’re reading scripture, I believe, is that you’re
reading scripture. It’s… you read scripture for its own sake. And that is really… it’s difficult to
do, sometimes, and that’s the end of it.
That’s it. But every time
you read, you could read the same scriptural passage over and over again, and
it communicates something totally different. And you could say that occurs with any text, and it does,
but… the Bible is charged, historically, culturally, blah blah blah, and even
if you say, “well I’ve been indoctrinated to acknowledge it as such”, that
doesn’t mean you’re not going to respond to it as such, even if you acknowledge
that obvious fact. It’s the Bible, that’s all there is to it. Everybody knows about the Bible. You reach a certain age, you know about
the Bible. You may never read it,
you may never look at it, but the Bible is a very famous book, you know. And when you read it, that’s swimming
around in how you interpret these words, and all the translations that have
come down to us, you know, because some of the stuff is written so long ago,
these books were written before novels were written, you know, a lot of the
writing structures that exist now didn’t exist then, you know. I think that
comes through in any translation, it’s a very odd type of written language. And
because, of course it’s a translation like I said, it has a very weird rhythm
to it, and maybe we don’t know what its intent is, but its’ clear to me when I
read it that its intent is unlike any other type of text I read. And this holds
for all the scripture, I’ve read scriptural writings from other philosophies
and religions and outlooks, and the good stuff always has that kind of, almost
has this… I can’t think of the right word… it speaks. But I don’t think that
makes me a religious person, reading scripture, that’s more of an intellectual
pursuit, not that I claim to be an intellectual, but I think that’s where it’s
taking place, in the intellectual centers of my brain, you know. I mean the
Bible could ultimately stand in the way of a greater understanding of reality,
it seems to for a lot of people, and it has for me, at times. Especially if
you, you know, a lot of people think they’ve gotta worship scripture. But I think that’s a mistake, you
know. You’re not to worship it,
you know. I don’t think.
It seems
like Jesus himself may have had a lot of problems with words, and language,
like he had to break it down for people.
Well, some
though… he deliberately encoded a lot of stuff. That’s how it’s come down. Sort of cryptic…
He did
deliberately do that…
Yeah, I
think he says so. But the thing is, I don’t even care about Jesus Christ, you
know. I care about the words Jesus
Christ said, I care about the words that are attributed to the words “Jesus
Christ”, I care about the words. You know, I don’t care what Jesus
intended. I don’t care what Moses
intended. And the reason I don’t
care is because I don’t. I haven’t been led to care. I don’t care about any of that. So I want to backtrack and say I think you can and maybe you
should worship scripture, but you shouldn’t worship the communicative
exchange. If you’re gonna worship
scripture, you should just worship the book as an object. And even worship the
individual letters as objects, you know, or as pictures, pictures of things,
you know, abstract pictures of sounds, you know. It’s a… I think there’s a music to it too, you know.
Like the
whole shaped-note thing, trying to make sense of that. I mean they don’t care
of anyone’s hearing it or understands it.
I think
that’s what you’re trying to understand, you’re trying to understand what
you’re doing as you’re doing it.
If you get beyond that, you know, you have no foundation. You know, when we play the music, we’re
trying to understand they music we’re playing. And often the only time we approach understanding the music that
we’re playing is when we’re playing it. As soon as we stop playing it, we left
our understanding in the song, which is now decaying into infinitesimally small
sound waves, you know, and it’s gone.
And if we still want to understand, we have to play the music again,
because the understanding, if it occurs, in any slight degree, will most
certainly occur while we’re playing the music we’re trying to understand. We can talk about it, and it’s fun to
talk about, but we don’t go anywhere when we talk about it.
Would
you say playing the music then is a spiritual pursuit?
I think
that I do, but I’ll say that I think that’s all everybody’s doing, in anything
they do. In anything they do. And I mean anything. I don’t even want to cite any examples.
And now, what they may be doing may be off-base, you know, it might be brutal,
it might be wrong, but it’s a spiritual pursuit. Their world as they’re perceiving it has led them to live in
such a way. And the way such a
person chooses to live reveals about the person what they feel their place is
in the scheme of things. You know, every time. With the human species. I won’t
go beyond the human species.
[laughs]
I wanted to talk about punk bands and stuff. Does it bother you that we’re talking about this instead?
No, I’d
rather talk about this, but I don’t know if this is what I would want to be in
an interview because… I’m talking to you now.
I understand…
I have a lot of respect for that... I mean I know what it’s like to be
misinterpreted…
It’s not
even that, I mean, I’ll stand behind what I’m saying, the only thing I’m
uncomfortable with is, I don’t know who I’m addressing. I don’t know if I’m addressing
anyone.
I think
that you are, in a different way than if someone puts a Lungfish CD in their
player…
Well
everything I’m saying though is present in our music. And if it’s not covered
in the lyrics, then the music and the lyrics in tandem are dealing with all of
this stuff we’re talking about. I
mean, I think. I think they are.
But I don’t know if they are. It’s not the conscious intention of the band, but
it’s what it’s become, you know.
But what else can you, you know, why sing a song in the first place? Why
play guitar in the first place?
Well, you wanna make a sound.
Well why do you wanna make a sound, you know? I guess cause you want it to be heard. Now maybe you will hear it, maybe
that’s who you want to hear it is you, but you want a sound to be heard. And you can keep digging deeper, why
why why why why, why make a sound, why hear a sound, you know, that’s what the
song will be about probably, you know.
It’ll be about the “why you’re making a sound”. You know, does that make any sense?
Yeah it
does. Like the skeleton is everything.
Yeah.
What was
your earliest recollection of punk music?
My earliest
recollection of punk would be, however early it was, like in ‘76 or something, I
read an article about the Sex Pistols in Time Magazine. And I remember it well,
I read the article and I thought it was interesting. That’s my earliest recollection.
Did you
seek out the music after you read it?
Um… I kept
my ear to the ground, but I didn’t rush out and try to buy it, you know. But I
was interested, I knew I was interested I think, I was interested because I
didn’t understand it, you know, I didn’t get it… but I hadn’t heard it, I just
saw it in words, what this music was like and what it was about, and how these
people in this band behaved, you know, so I guess my first experience in punk
rock was a journalistic one I guess.
What happened
then?
The first
real band that I was into that you didn’t hear on the radio was Devo. And that
was a real revelation to me. I never knew that there were records of bands that
you didn’t hear on the radio. It just never occurred to me.
I
remember seeing them on “Saturday Night Live” real late, all bug-eyed, and I
was saying, “what the hell is this?”
You didn’t hear that anywhere, it was such a shock… what did you think
of that?
Oh, I was
sold on that pretty quick, on Devo, I was really... I couldn’t believe that
there was a band making music which to me at that time, and still, was like highly
unusual, and then what they were singing about, you know…
Bizarre,
really bizarre.
Yeah, I
couldn’t get my mind around that. I’m still dealing with a lot of Devo lyrics.
There were so many layers of meaning. One the one hand, I think they’re real
masters at like creating multiple layers of meaning in their lyrics. Anyway, so then, seeking out their
records led me to particular record stores that had more underground records, and
records that were more underground, and I eventually got ahold of a Black Flag
EP and things of that nature…
So you
started getting into American hardcore type stuff.
Yeah.
What did
you think of that?
Really I
think if I recall… I think I just thought it sounded really good. It struck a chord in me, as they
say. I responded to it
immediately, you know, I thought it was…. I was really excited about it, you
know. And then… then I started hearing… I heard Minor Threat, I got their
record, and at that time I had already begun playing music in a band, and our
revolutionary idea, we thought, was that we were going to play our own songs.
Because we didn’t know any band that did that, because every band that we had
ever seen played covers. We thought we were really onto something. We’re gonna
play our own songs. So we started
writing songs, and then we get this… I got the Minor Threat 7-inch, and it was
all their own songs,
and they made a record! It was mystifying
to us, like, how in the hell did they get this thing out? How would you get a
record out, I mean that’s insane! It was really inspiring.
When did
you start to play?
The first
band I was in was called the Goon Girls.
And it was just some…
Was it
here?
Yeah, in
Baltimore.
Did you
play out?
I think we
played a party, we played at somebody’s house, uh… that may have been our only
show.
What
happened?
As I
recall, it’s very dim, but I think there was zero response. Yeah. We’d finish a song and you’d hear
people in mid-conversation.
[laughs]
That’s the worst thing.
Yeah. And uh… people started yelling out
names of songs that they wanted to hear. And we were incapable of doing them.
Do you
remember who was in it?
Yeah, I
remember them all.
Ever see
any of them?
Nah, not
really.
Why have
you stayed here in Baltimore?
Well I was
born here.
But you
could have gone to a punk mecca.
Punk
mecca. That sounds suspect.
[laughs]
I mean to
me Baltimore is a punk mecca.
I mean,
I grew up so far away from everything, punk seemed so distant…
That’s the
thing though, people don’t know, and maybe they shouldn’t know about Baltimore,
is that there’s always been, ever since I was a teenager, and far beyond that
from what I’ve been told by people who are older than I am, there’s always been
there’s underlying stream of very bizarre, really stretched out musicians, and
painters and writers, it’s always been here, it’s still here, and will continue
to be here, so if you lived here, and it’s a very small almost invisible, not
really a kind of community, but… it is a community… but if you lived here, and
you were lucky enough to find a door into that world here, then you wouldn’t
feel like you’d have to go anywhere else.
Because there always has been and still is vital stuff happening here.
Well you
were a part of that from the very beginning then.
Well I
don’t even mean just punk rock, though, I mean… across the board, there are a
lot of dedicated, devoted people here to whatever their craft or pursuit is
that do it without really any regard for what they’re supposed to do with it
after they’ve done it, you know.
The people just do it to do it, you know. It’s why a lot of people never hear about any of these
bands, or artists or writers, because… of course some of them would like to be
heard about, but a lot of them seem to just keep making the music, keep writing
the poems and… that’s that. So I
think that’s why, I mean, I did move to San Francisco, but not for that reason.
Not for the music or anything, and I loved it there. But that was really more of a weather experience, I really
loved the weather there, and its effect on me, you know… that’s what I remember
San Francisco as best, is the weather system, you know.
[laughs] A good weather feeling?
It’s the
weather drone. You know, it’s like good weather there for me. It’s just a lot more extreme here.
The way
you’re describing Baltimore… it’s so much different than DC, and Dischord, and
that whole sense… what led you to that?
Was it convenience because you played there?
I really
honestly, it’s sort of a mystery to me. I mean I’d been acquainted with Ian,
you know, and I’d been acquainted with a lot of other people in DC, you know…
I’ve been acquainted with Alec MacKaye, you know, a lot of people I was
acquainted with, in a loose kind of fashion, and then when I became better
acquainted with them after Lungfish had started, they started coming to shows
or going to their shows and… I don’t know, at that point we had been around a
lot longer, and I don’t really know why Lungfish is on Dischord.
Did they
come to you?
Dischord
did our first release, which was a split release between Dischord and Simple
Machines, so that was our first arrangement with them, and that led to us being
on Dischord somehow. I lived in
California at the time, so I wasn’t completely involved in… I don’t know if any
discussion took place beyond… I don’t know how that went down.
I sense
it’s a good fit, they’re a group of people who like to do what you do, they
have a lot of integrity.
Well we
feel blessed to be, you know, involved with them, in several capacities that we
are, you know, as friends, as a band that they continue to put our records out,
which is definitely a big part of what keeps the band going, is that we have
the opportunity to keep recording our music and keep releasing it and… that
helps move it along, you know.
There’s
a community there that is distinctly different, but also different from here… a
different community that you don’t usually see… did it mean anything to you at
all to be a part of that?
Yeah I’m
sure it meant something… but I can’t tell you what exactly… I don’t know. I mean I was, when we first got with
Dischord, and I’m still very glad to be involved with them. I mean at the time, I don’t really
think about that now, I mean as far as Lungfish records goes, the people that
work there are as much a part of a Lungfish record as we are. You know, we make
the music, but they’re a part of getting it out to whoever might like to hear
it. So they’re part of the
process, you know. And we feel,
they’re people we like to share in the work with, and they seem to like… I mean
they obviously want to put our records out because they do. I think that we got really lucky
because… I’m not crystal clear about what the “Dischord philosophy” is, I don’t
know if anybody is crystal clear on it…
Including
them?
Yeah, I
mean there’s definite points, you know, but overall I don’t know if anybody
knows for certain, you know I think though that there are parallels between the
way Dischord operates and the way that Lungfish operates as a band that make it
a good collaboration, but I don’t know specifically what those parallels
are. We know people at the label
personally… but the relationship is unclear, you know. We know what we do, we make the music,
and they make the records. You know, but we know them in other ways, you know
what I mean? We know them as
people, we know them as friends. We know some of them as musicians, or all
these ways at once. So my relationship
with Dischord as a member of Lungfish is a manifold one, you know.
It’s
really evolved. And it’s not
dogmatic really, but they seem to be focused on allowing people who are
interested in pursuing things like you are…
I think
most of the bands that they put out, but not all, the main focus of the bands
was the music, you know. Which I would
hope that you could say about a lot of labels. But I think that Dischord, I think, I’m not positive, I
haven’t heard every record they’ve released…
What
else do you like from them?
Well… at
different times and different places, the first Minor Threat release… then the
next thing that really blew my head off from them would’ve been probably the
Rites of Spring album… and then… I used to listen to a lot of “Get Your Goat”
by Shudder to Think… and there’s a lot I’m leaving out… I loved Faith…
But you
followed what they were doing…
Yeah I
heard a lot of it over the years, I haven’t heard all of it, I checked out for
a while and missed the sort of chapter of it, a lot of bands that I still
didn’t hear at all then, and still never heard really, and I liked some of the
Fugazi records a lot, I like the new one a lot, the soundtrack record… I think
that’s a really great album…
A great
concept too.
Yeah I like
the film, but aside from the film it’s a really good record.
But what
I was getting at is a lot of people might have a preconceived notion about what
a band is going to sound like, or think like, based on their record label…
Well that
is true even in publishing, you know I think, whether they intend to or not,
labels sort of have an identity you know, and people start of expect things
that a label releases or that a publisher publishes, they start to expect it to
maintain this kind of consistent message-making, you know. So people maybe make assumptions about
Dischord or whatever. Or maybe
people still make that assumption or they force what they hear coming from the
label to fit that assumption, and that’s on them.
Well
over a long period of time you’ve been together…
The
band? We’ve been together almost
12 years.
I mean
by now you know what you’re after.
We’re after
the music.
[break]
As soon as
we finished The Unanimous Hour, we took like a month off, and we got back together,
because there were still songs flying around, waiting for us to grab them, and
we didn’t want to put them on the back burner, so we just made up a bunch of
songs and thought we’d better record them, before they mutated beyond our
control, you know? And none of
these songs have ever been played live.
It’s
pretty prolific for you to just jump right back into it and keep going.
Yeah, but
we’re not really stretching ourselves too far, it’s all a matter of how you use
your time. There were more songs
than we could complete for The Unanimous Hour, and we wanted while they were
present, we wanted to take advantage of it and play them, and so we did, and
now we record them, and the recording is nearly done.
What are
your reflections on The Unanimous Hour?
I don’t
know, I haven’t really listened to it much since it came out, I listened to it
a lot while we recorded it of course. But I haven’t really sat down and
listened to a record from start to finish, and I don’t really, you know, I
don’t really know much about that album really, I don’t know much about
it. I know a lot of people, I met
a lot of people that seem to like it, and I’ve met a few that didn’t and… it’s…
I think it’s a pretty… It’s a Lungfish album, for sure.
Are
there any moments that you feel particularly fond of?
With
Lungfish?
Yeah.
Ah there’s
scores… of those.
Which
are tops?
Um… I’d
have to think about that one.
What
about that three-song seven inch?
The three
songs.
It
doesn’t seem like it could have gone on any particular album…
No… it’s
complete.
Yeah, I
bought it not even knowing it was released…
Yeah… it’s
its own thing.
If you
listen to older albums, what do you think about?
I don’t
really know if I think about… it depends every time I hear it. Sometimes I
think about the way it sounds, how it was recorded, whether I still think it
sounds good like that or not, or I think about the lyrics and kind of marvel
about the fact that I have zero recollection about when I wrote it, or why I
wrote it, or what I was thinking about, or if I have any relationship to any
type of message that may be in the lyrics or in the music and… sometimes it
sounds really foreign to me, sometimes it sounds really good, sometimes it
sounds really bad… sometimes it’s embarrassing.
Looking
at specific pieces…
I see a
map. That’s one way I view the records, I can see which songs on each record
lead to the songs on the successive record, you know. So I view it that way sometimes, I see a vein running
through it, through particular songs.
You know I see the door in each record that opens up to the next record,
and it’s not every song, like each album’s like a door with all these songs
clustered around it, but only one of the songs, or two maybe, actually swings
open, and leads to the next bunch of songs. So I view them that way, and that’s interesting to me.
Because I mean any one of the songs could have been the point of departure for
the next record, it’s interesting to me “why this one”, I mean we know why, I
mean we all still have distinct memories of when a particular song was first
played and that we all immediately while playing it acknowledged within
ourselves, “this is where the Lungfish music must go, this is the song we’ve
been striving to play.” You know, and those are really pivotal songs, you
know. I don’t know if there’s one
on every record, but there are songs like that.
Well, a
song like “Black Helicopters” kind of hits like that. What do you recollect about that?
I think
that record was radically different.
What do
you think about it?
That
record? Shoot… um, not to be coy,
but I mean I think what I think about it most should be present on the record,
you know. So I don’t know what to
really say about it. I think it’s pretty… that record is self-evident,
really. I think. I hope they all are, you know, but I
think that one in particular is.
That was
your first record with Nathan.
Yeah.
What was
that process like, including him?
Well, we
played for like a year and a half or so with no bass player, with no specific
intention to get one. We hadn’t
ruled it out, but we weren’t actively seeking anyone. But he was talked about
on and off for that whole period, and then he finally was in a band.
Was he
playing already?
He plays a
lot of music with a lot of people, even still. He’s a very devoted musician. He’s with music all the time. He’s very musical.
Does he
do his own stuff?
Ah yeah… he
plays a lot of different instruments, but he just plays bass in Lungfish. Yeah I don’t know, he’s our bass player
now, I don’t really think, it seems like, John, our first bass player, one of
the founders of the band, you know, is an amazing person and an amazing player,
and I remember he was in the band of course, he contributed so much and we
shared in so much, and then the same with Sean who followed him for a little
while… but now Nathan is the bass player and it seems, even though I know
otherwise, it seems like he’s just always been the bass player. I mean the
records prove otherwise, you know, he hasn’t always been the bass player, but
when we play, he just seems like he plays bass in Lungfish, you know, he pretty
much got with it. I mean he’s
still learning how to play bass in Lungfish, but I’m still learning how to sing
in Lungfish, so we’re kind of in the same boat, you know.
Personnel
differences may matter in ways…
Yet it’s
more about individuals’ intent, as opposed to their ability.
Were
they all that radically different, all three?
Oh yeah,
they all three play the bass totally differently. They hear what they ought to
play, what they hear is almost zero relationship except that they happen to be
playing it on the same instrument, you know. So each one of them helped make
Lungfish songs sound totally different, you know, to me. But the intent of each of those
individuals, while they were in the band or as they were in the band, I think
pretty much was the same. They
were, you know, they were part of the group, you know. They had pretty much the
same target in mind, that was to find the song, play the song, be in the song,
you know. And everyone who’s been
in the band put their whole mind into it while they were in the band. Nathan’s
doing that now.
Do you
socialize with each other all that much?
Yeah,
yeah. I mean some way, we play
together often when we’re in the cycle of playing, I mean I may not see them
beyond practice, but when we practice, we interact.
[break]
You had
left a message on my recording, you said, “it may or may not be a good idea” to
do an interview, what maybe led you to believe that it might not have been…
Well cause I’m
not clear on what the function of an interview is… I mean I’m clear on the supposed function, but I know, from reading
interviews myself, usually, I feel like they take more than I get. Know what I mean? You know, you read a person who relates
some stories, or their philosophy about things, or you know, answer the
questions when they’re asked, and it just never quite…I never… like I’m drawn
to read it especially when it’s an interview with a person whose music or
whatever I’m interested in, you know, that I want to read, but then ultimately
it doesn’t really affect or inform me about the music, and I just feel like I
was a lot better off just listening to the music. And yet, I will read more interviews, but in doing them, we
haven’t done a ton of them, I’ve done some, and they just never… there’s
something… you know, like I was saying when I was interviewing that friend of
mine the other day, the first interview I ever conducted, he kind of really, in
a very direct fashion, took advantage of the situation. It’s gonna be for a
small magazine, I mean who knows how many people are gonna read it. But he knew that regardless, someone
might read what he’s now saying, and he took advantage of that fact, he has a
particular message that he wants to deliver and he doesn’t want to bandy
about. He knows what he’s gonna
say is going to be transcribed, and he wants to address these theoretical
people, you know, with this specific message.
Well
let’s assume you have a readership of, you know punk rock fans or whatever…
Here’s what
I think really. I don’t think
we’ll know if it was a good idea until it’s published. And uh, for me, though, the difference
is we are not trained to address a readership. We are trained to address a theoretical listenership, and we
already do that, we do that through our records. I think I would hope people are more interested in the music
than in us. And you know, I think
of the music, and I don’t mean it in just an imaginary way, I know it as an
entity, and anything that I have to share with strangers, or people that may be
listening, I share in the music, and then I add to the music, and the music
goes on and shares it, you know what I mean?
But
there are so many people who want to know about you, specifically…
Well I
don’t know that that’s true.
But it
is! I mean there are people who
want to know about you as a person, that’s part of the music too. I mean I have
a friend who uses Lungfish lyrics to teach creative writing to students, people
like that.
These
people you’re talking about, whether they’re real or imagined, I would hope, if
they would acknowledge in themselves, because they occasionally listen to
Lungfish music, that if they desire to know more about me, then well I hope that they could
somehow transmute that, you know, and take a look in the mirror, you know what
I mean, and find out more about them, you know, cause there’s nothing to know about me. There’s
nothing. There’s no more for them to know about me than there is to know about
themselves, you know? And for them to reflect on themselves would ultimately be
far more rewarding for them, and far more interesting. Because it’s them, it’s their reality,
it’s their world, you know. And my world and my reality, I mean allegedly we’re
all sharing in a world and in a reality, you know, and I abide by that and I
believe that.
So is
what you’re doing when you’re singing…
Is it me
singing?
I don’t
know.
I don’t
know either! I mean, haven’t you ever watched a band, and you get drawn into
the music, the power of the music kind of draws you in, and you begin to
identify with the music, and you’re no longer watching musicians perform their
music, you are with the music, you know. It’s not their music anymore, it’s yours, you know. And maybe you have the experience of
hearing music where you know, you have no precognition, but as the music is
occurring, you know the music, you know where it’s leading as it leads. You know what I’m saying?
Yeah.
And uh…
that’s what I hope it’s all about with our music, I mean, when a person hears
our music, it’s their music, they are perceiving it, it’s in their mind, and it
goes through their interpretive processes, and it makes them feel the way it makes them feel, the words that I transcribed
are their words, they mean what they mean to them. Each individual word.
I mean, each syllable is psychologically loaded. You know what I mean? And its effect on
the individual listener is like uh, none of our business, you know? We’re not trying to manipulate anybody,
we’re doing what we must do. We
must make the music. Now “must”
someone else listen to it? That’s
not our business. I mean, we want to
share it, I mean all of us, well not all of us but a lot of people want to
share something, you know, it’s kind of an innate drive, in human beings, we
want to share something, but we’re not going to force anyone to engage in the sharing
process with us. We can’t, nor do
we want to.
But by
doing what you just said, you’re doing something that is incredibly impacting
on others…
An unknown
amount… many or few, I don’t know. I don’t think it’s as many as you’re
implying.
Well it’s
a lot more than you think! Isn’t there a certain degree of interest on their
part, not as much to analyze why this is happening, or specific lyrics, but
about you as a person?
But I can’t
tell you that in an interview. I
could counter with like a prefabricated persona, but I just can’t tell you that
in an interview. I mean if you and
I were to become lifelong friends, I couldn’t tell you what I was all about in
twenty years.
But you
know why the listeners might want to know that?
No, I can
understand why, because I’ve been on that end of it too. You know, I hear a
music, or I read a poem or I see a painting, and I wonder, how could this
person have done this, what led them to do that? What do they think they’re doing, you know? I’m interested
in that, so I do totally, I can identify with these people.
Well you
do that as well, like if you go back and listen to your own things and say “at
that time I was doing x, y, and z…”
But I’ve
also come to understand that my memories, and my past are always in flux, and
that the past is never static, is never complete, and the thing is, I listen to
an old record that we did for instance, and I view it as perhaps a marker or a
milestone in my life, and this is what I was going through at the time, but every
time I recollect that, I’m recollecting a totally different set of ideas and
feelings that may not have been present at the time. Cause I can give you the… all the circumstantial stuff, “at
that time I was that old, I weighed this much, I was married or I was not
married, or I was riding the bus, or I lived on this coast or that coast,” you
know, I had…but that’s just sort of an empty framework.
But
maybe not to the listener.
But the
thing is, if that’s what I had to share, I’d write totally different lyrics,
you know, “I woke up this morning, and brushed my teeth, you know, and my
hair’s falling out.” Or I don’t
feel well today, or today’s a great day, or whatever. And I think that stuff, I
mean my personal life does intrude in the lyrical content of our songs, but I
try my darndest to keep it out.
Well what
does come through?
All sorts
of opinions, that I view as like pollutants, that must be neutralized.
Well I
don’t want you necessarily to clarify anything, but do you understand why
people can listen to your albums and in their own context, they read all
various things into it?
That’s the
nature of language. That’s not the nature of me. That’s the nature of language.
But what
is it, specifically, that is there?
What causes you to let that out?
I’m not
privy to that, I don’t know. It’s
none of my business, you know?
It’s not my business.
That’s up to scientists who can tell us what it’s all about. You know, it’s your genes, you
know. “It’s your genes, every
decision you’ve ever made is predetermined,” you know. Your genetic likelihood
to behave in a certain fashion in a particular situation.
Danny,
come on. You wrote a song about talking to a bunch of animals who said, “don’t
shun the world, shed it.” In that, there was like a shred of advice in a way,
and I know that there had to be something to cause you to want to get that idea
across to people.
The
words. The words lead me. I mean
you write, you said you write, you know there’s all these forces at work, you
know, the language is trying to pull you one way, and the mind is constantly,
you can’t, you know… the mind makes rhymes, and goes through processes of
identifying alliteration between words, and your mind is taking over the rhythm
of words, and that part of your mind is the part of your mind that tends to be
led by the language. There’s
always an obvious word to follow each prior word. But that might not be the right word to communicate within
that instant. So I say, “don’t
shun the world, shed it,” you know what I mean, that’s English, that’s a thing
that English can say. And that’s
what I write, I write down what comes to me, it comes to me and I must write it
down, you know, and a lot of the things that I’ve written are things English
would like to say. And English
being like a very hyper-abstract, kind of a structured improvisational music,
you know what I mean, it just gets funneled right into the Lungfish music. The
music has something the music wants to say, the language has something it wants
to say, via my language center, which is according to some each one of us is a
complete fabrication based on a particular schematic, you know. So, I don’t know, “don’t shun the
world, shed it,” I don’t even know what that means. That’s all I can say about it. Don’t shun it, shed it. And with
what authority do I say that?
Well,
there is a listener somewhere who hears that, who goes out there and does it…
But what’s
he going to do? They’re
responsible for their interpretation.
If they’re really that interested in finding the answers, they can find
them in the songs. Now maybe the
answer to that particular song lies in another song, you know. Each individual song is not exclusive,
you know what I mean, all the songs, I mean even the older songs I wrote, which
are completely perverted and just wrecked, they all speak to each other, it’s
just one big… I mean what sometimes is a criticism and what sometimes is a
compliment that we have only written just one song, holds true in some
contexts, you know. I would
imagine, I don’t know all the lyrics I ever wrote, but I would imagine there’s
a lyric in some other song that would completely negate that lyric. And then what have you got, know what I
mean? Nothing. But the songs
ultimately, maybe all the songs will completely nullify themselves, they will
all become mutually opposed and vanish, you know, in the mind. I mean they’ve
already vanished, I don’t hear any Lungfish music right now. Do you?
But the
person who hears these contradictory messages…
We don’t
know this person though!
[laughs]
I’m just using a facetious Lungfish Listener to just allow ourselves to see a
fictitious event, because people do that.
Right. But
is there anything that needs clearing up, do you think? Is there anything that needs clearing
up?
Well I
do in this way, I mean if you want our conversation or our interview to be
interesting or successful or something people would want to read…
I mean I
won’t know until it happens, you know… I mean I don’t know. I mean, that’s all
for naught, in the end, anyway. I
mean we’re all just going to be tinder.
And that’s okay, you know. Some people can come to grips with that and
some can’t, you know what I mean?
We’re a species in decline, you know, and that’s beautiful, you know, it’s…
Why do
you think that?
It’s
obvious. It’s just obvious to me,
you know. That doesn’t mean I’m
right, but I mean to me, it’s perfectly obvious.
Where is
the evidence?
The
evidence? To me, the evidence is
just in my instantaneous interactions with my fellow human beings every
day. You know, the people… I mean,
perhaps I’ve done it too, I mean perhaps I’ve created this web of occlusion
that leads me to believe I’m not occluded, and I’m willing to admit that. But a lot of people that I meet, and my
impression of them, and my interpretation of them and their behavior, is that
they willfully and deliberately, however perhaps sub- or unconsciously, decided
to be less than themselves, less than their… you know, I don’t want to use the
wrong word… People that I meet, a lot of people that I meet, and not all
though, a lot of people I meet are the opposite, but they just… they want to be
idiots, you know what I mean? You
know, and maybe I’m an idiot, as I said before, I’m willing to admit that. Unfortunately,
it’s sort of this broad generalization that it’s just, you know, it’s a sign of
the times as they say, it’s symptomatic, you know. People, the mind… the mind is in decline, you know.
Like a
generalization on all our parts?
No I mean,
you know… people want something they can’t get, but then they trick themselves
into thinking they’ve gotten it.
But what they gotten is what they never wanted in the first place, you
know. It’s pretty apparent to
me. I think what people want
ultimately is a type of freedom that is impossible for us to achieve. But that is no reason not to strive
toward it, you know what I mean, there are questions that we can’t answer,
that’s no reason to quit asking them. I mean, when I say impossible, I mean
impossible, you know. My dad told
me when I was a kid that nothing’s impossible, a lot of things are highly
unlikely, and border on impossible. But he said at present, we have no proof
that anything is impossible. You know I took that to heart and I remembered him
saying it, so I said it once, you know. I don’t even really know. I said we’re
a species in decline, and now I’m going to change that and say we’re not, we’re
a species ascending. But that’s
okay too, I can’t commit to that, because I don’t know, I’m not in a position
to make a statement about that.
But you
are, you’ve made statements of that sort, on records, in songs.
Yeah, and
I’ll continue to make them, but they’re statements, they’re… I view them primarily
as statements about the nature of language. And I think I said in one song, that there’s “songs about
music”, you know what I mean, which sounds overly simplistic at first, but when
you think about it, it’s really not, you know. It’s not songs about musicians,
because we’ve had generations of that, you know, like musicians singing about
their exploits as musicians, and their social standing, etcetera, whether it’s top
of the heap or the bottom or whatever.
I feel, I don’t know, but I feel like I require music. I hear music in my head. So I have music all the time. You know, music to me, it seems to me
to be a vital necessity. That
makes me wonder why, you know what I mean? It’s not food, but I feel like I
need it like I need food. It’s not
shelter, but I feel like I need it like I need shelter. That to me is worth
thinking about: what is music?
What’s it for? You find out
when you play it or when you hear it. You know what it’s for sometimes. Music
is graceful, you know, it’ll let people use it for anything. There’s martial music, there’s
nationalistic music, there’s religious music.
What
turns you on musically?
I have all
kinds of music. All the music I
listen to, which is like a wide variety of instruments, and traditions, and
intents, you know like a lot of different intentions… but I can hear it, I
don’t know what it is that I recognize, I recognize something similar in all of
the musics, and that’s what I’m responding to in all of the music I listen to,
but I don’t know what that is, you know, I hear it as you hear it in a
recording sometimes, like you were saying earlier, like “this person must do
this”, you know, like I call it the “mustness”, and it’s like, they’re not
using the music, they let the music use them, you know. And that’s what I like to hear.
An
example of that would be what?
Well I’ll
give you an example everybody’s heard would be Jimi Hendrix. Now of course
people might disagree, but I hear that in his music, in his recordings. Like it’s just… he’s letting the music
lead, you know. And because he
was, his abilities were so great, that he could follow the music even further,
you know what I mean. So, I don’t
need to hear the virtuosity, but you know, sometimes the virtuosity makes the
person disobey the music, because they feel like they mastered the music, I
don’t feel like Jimi Hendrix thought he mastered the music, he may have
mastered his instrument, but I don’t hear in his music “I’ve mastered the music”.
I hear that he’s mastered the guitar, and there’s a big difference. I think he put his masterfulness to
what I agree is the proper end.
Which is
what?
To follow
the music.
I don’t
know if it’s for us to say, what I just said about Jimi Hendrix, I don’t know
if Jimi Hendrix could have said those things. Maybe it’s not for us to determine, I mean, we are in the
grip of finding the music… if we are searching after the music in a, you know,
in an honest, sort of… humble way, humble towards the music, maybe it isn’t for
us to know. We could try to strike
that pose and adopt that stance, but will we or won’t we, maybe we can’t hear
if we have or not, I don’t know.
It’s not… you can’t know it all. It’s not for me to know. We don’t know
why we’re a band. You know, we’ve come to that conclusion. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be
in a band, you know? We want to be
in the band. Together, myself and
the other band members. I don’t
know, it’s scary.
I mean
if you’re playing in Lungfish and the music is “playing you”…
I mean we
get in there. It’s coming through us and our abilities.
… then
why do you suppose this may be interesting for some people to know about?
Because
maybe what they’re hearing in our music is they… and maybe it might not be the
songs themselves, I don’t know what they’re responding to that would make them
curious. But maybe the music that
we play and that we record doesn’t sound like the other stuff they listen
to. I mean it’s guitar and drum
music, so it has a lot in common with a lot of rock and roll and other music
with similar instrumentation, but I don’t know what they’re responding to. I don’t know that what we’re doing is
radically different, I know it’s what it is. I don’t know if it’s good music, or if it’s bad music, I
know it depends on who’s hearing it.
I don’t… we were asked the question years ago, and it still holds, we’re
not trying to play unique music, we’re not trying not to… we’re trying to play
our music. If it sounds like other
music, that’s good, if it doesn’t that’s good too. If it repeats itself, and
it’s uh… any adjective you could place on our music is alright with us. We’re not trying to make it be any
particular way, we’re just trying to, as I said… we each play a particular
instrument, we each have a particular level of ability with that particular
instrument, we each respond to music, particular musics in particular
ways. We each come together, and a
particular type of music must happen based on those variables, you know what I
mean? But then the nature of that
music is not really… we have not tried to subject the nature of that music to
our whims. Or our wills, you
know. The only thing we’re willful
about is playing our particular instrument, you know. And we’re willful about listening to the songs as we create
them, and determining if this song is an invader, or if we are in need with
this song, you know what I mean, and sometimes you can’t tell, one can
masquerade as the other, I mean you never can tell. I mean I can’t tell anybody the answers to these things,
because I don’t know it, you know.
I mean I was led to be in a band, somehow ago I wound up as a teenager
making up songs, and playing them in front of people, and I don’t know why, I
know I feel like I ought to, and I feel like I must, sometimes. And because I feel like I must, then I
trust, and I do. That’s all there
is to it, you know.
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