Downbeast - music blog

THE DOWNBEAST: OK, I have only one Wilco question. I just have to know – since I’ve seen so many great musical acts on this show – what was experience of playing Saturday Night Live like?
NELS CLINE: It was amazingly pleasant. I have to say that after having done a few TV shows now it was much more fun than doing a regular ‘walk on, play one song in a freezing room, walk off’ kinda thing. Many of the staffers were big Wilco fans, so they were all excited and that felt nice. The woman who takes the photographs that you see at the commercial breaks was also a huge fan, and she was awesome and made us feel really at home. Fred Armisen is an old friend of Jeff and Sue [Tweedy]. Before he was even in show biz he work for Sue at the Lounge Axe. He was the drummer in Trenchmouth, and Sue as far as I know is the first person to have suggested to him that he go into comedy…I met Fred several times before, he emceed the Wilco/Neil [Young] gig at Madison Square Garden...playing various characters: he did Prince, he did his “roadie” character, his timbale player—all of it. We got to meet his fiance, who’s a tremendous actress: Elizabeth Moss. She plays Peggy on Mad Men.

But beyond that, we played two songs on SNL. They wanted us to play “Hate It Here”— that was apparently someone’s request. Then we gave them a choice of other songs and they chose “Walken.” I think it probably would have been more fun and chill except that night they had both Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani doing cameos, so there were Secret Service guys all around, very tight security. Hillary drifted in and out only for the taping…They do an entire show before the show, the rehearsal show. That’s when I ended up onstage at the end doing the whole ‘waving’ thing.

I bet you towered over everybody!
Well, no, because Vincent D’Onofrio was there, who I love, the Law & Order guy. He did a cameo on the show that night. He’s like six-five, a giant of a man. Anyway, at the run through you do the whole goodbye thing with a whole other audience, who they then clear out and bring in a whole different audience. I turned and all of a sudden there’s Rudy Giuliani reaching out his hand to shake mine. Ohhh God!

Did he say “Hi Nels”?
Naw. He was just smiling and doing the hand pumping thing with everyone.

‘Hi Nels! Nine-eleven! Hi there, Vince! Nine-eleven! Hi you, up in the balcony! Nine-eleven!’
[Laughs] ‘I was there! I was there for ya, city of New York!’

OK, I lied. I have one more Wilco question.
No problem. I really don’t mind.

Well, I know you’ve had like four interviews this week, and this is the last one. Are there any questions you are sick of answering, by the way?
No. I don’t think so. There were a lot of good ones, but then there’s the sort of ‘lack of perception’ questions from people who didn’t know that my brother Alex even had any other records out—THAT always irritates me. Then, there’s the ‘Why did you do a record when you play all of the instruments yourself AT THIS TIME!’ [Sees me crossing out a question in my notebook that is exactly that and laughs heartily] That question is sort of pointless to answer because I’ve thought of doing Coward for 28 years. There’s no reason! It just seemed like time to get it out of the way. And as for the title, Coward, you can scratch that one off too because I refuse to answer that one. It’s for me to know and you to find out! I’m being coy with that one—uncharacteristically I might add.

OK, here’s one: How was Coward conceived, and did you consciously put any limitations on yourself when you recorded it?
Ah, good one. It was conceived of in rough form over many years, as I’ve said. The initial impulse being side two of John McLaughin's My Goals Beyond, where he double-tracks acoustic guitars; John Abercrombie’s overdub record Characters, some of the Steve Tibbetts records, which are not all Steve but he layers guitars in a specific way that was very influential; and Ralph Towner records like Diary where he plays various overdubbed instrumentals...That was in the early 1980s when I thought ‘I have to do this some day.’ Over time it changed about a million times in my mind. There is one early piece on the record called “Prayer Wheel,” which I dedicated to my ex-wife D.D. Faye; I slightly revised it when I went in the studio, because I never liked the bridge, so I had to write a new version of that…and I did it pretty much from memory, and the funny thing was after I was tracking it I was falling asleep – and this happened more than once while making this record – and remembered things that I intended to do. In the case of “Prayer Wheel” I recalled a melody I had forgotten, so I had to go back and re-track the guitar. This is where the computer came in handy, by the way. It would have been so cumbersome to do this record in the old analog way.

Are you a fan of analog recording anyway?
Oh, of course! It’s great. I like all the frequencies. But as far as limitations, I elected consciously randomly not to play any real percussion instruments or keyboards, and at the last minute decided not to play any resistance flutes or recorders, things that I used to play, too.

Why?
I don’t know. I guess I need some kind of handicap, otherwise the whole record would have made even less sense than it already does. I did bring the flutes, but they ended up in the corner. I tried to keep it mostly string-based, with a bare minimum of rhythm machines. That was as close to keeping a coherent thread as I could get.

Was there anything that just didn’t work and you ended up abandoning?
Three was one track that’s not on the record. It’s not horrible; the record just needed a little bit more zip. I can’t remember the title, it just doesn’t seem to stick in my mind. I guess I was trying to write a piece dedicated to Cate Blanchett. I came up with this thing that starts with this baritone guitar with a raga-India sort of feel, and goes into a courtly dance, almost like a Renaissance piece. [Laughs] It had both high-strung mini-acoustic steel string and baritone guitars and a drum-box loop. What the hell did I call it? But not only did it not give the record that much life to it as far as pacing, but that piece wasn’t even good enough to be dedicated to Cate Blanchett. I mean, it gotta be good if you are going to dedicate it to someone so superhumanly fabulous as Ms Cate. I fell short. So I actually wrote and recorded it one evening and mixed another song called “Thurston County,” which has a blatant Thurston riff at the beginning…Of course, every time I drive through the real Thurston County I think of him.

I read a lot of reviews – especially in the blogosphere – of your live shows with Wilco, the Singers, etc. that really emphasize the cathartic parts of your guitar playing: ‘Oh man, Nels really shredded it last night! He tore it apart!’ or something to that effect…
Well, I do play pretty hard…

Have you ever felt that that aspect of your guitar playing obscures the more quieter, lyrical—I guess acoustic—playing you’ve been doing all of these years?
Somehow I became one of these ‘intensity’ guys. I think the Interstellar Space Revisited record I did with Gregg Bendian pretty much cemented that. With Wilco there was that whole 'Rolling Stone guitar god' thing that totally blew a lot of stuff up. It’s humorous and charming, but perhaps it did throw people off the scent of eleven-plus years of Quartet Music or the stuff I did with the Acoustic Guitar Trio. People really do ask me, ‘Do you play acoustic guitar?’ and when they find out they say, ‘Whaaaat? How long have you doing that?’ Actually, Coward wasn’t designed to be that much of an acoustic-feeling record, it just sort of came out that way. And I’m glad about that.

Yeah, I hear a lot of different influences in your acoustic playing on Coward: Preston Reed, John Fahey, Leo Kottke, Ralph Towner…
I wish I’d done one piece that harmonically really went to the Ralph Towner/John Abercrombie duo turf. Next record, I will address that more specifically. Didn’t you have another Wilco question?

Oh yeah. How has the ‘Uncle Wilco effect,’ as you call it, affected your life or career in ways that you did not expect it would?
Wow. Hmm. I don’t think I expected the entire Wilco organization to be as accepting and welcoming or respectful of me as they are. They’re actually almost deferential. The encouragement to do my own work is always more than there. they really believe in my wacky ‘other stuff’ and they love jazz, not that I’m that much in the jazz department…The thing that probably shouldn’t have been a surprise that were to me was that they just take care of me really well. My life’s easier!

Like a dental plan?
No, not a dental plan. I don’t need a dental plan. I’ve been carrying health insurance since the Geraldine Fibber days, because Carla [Bozulich] had engineered a deal that had health and dental plan throughout the record deal. But then when they broke up and got dropped – actually, it was the other way around – and after seeing what my wife D.D. had been though after getting hit by a drunk driver and not having health insurance, I tried to keep the insurance thing going, which was really hard. But did it somehow. That is, until I forgot to pay because I was on the road and then they cancelled me and didn’t let me re-sign. They turned me down, because I’m old and semi-depressed. I was furious, man.

You step back and forth, from the indie rock thing to the avant-jazz/noise thing a lot. There must be a lot of contradictions inherent there. Like I was talking to your brother about the late Dan Morris, who really thrived in the underground scene here and then when he jumped into the Big Rock thing with the Smashing Pumpkins – the planes, the hotels, the egos – that it stressed him out to no end.
I think the fact that he didn’t get the freedom and respect that I have with Wilco had a lot to do with it. Dan’s experience was totally different than mine, to hear him tell it: a total sideman-second-class-citizen treatment. There was a sort of coarseness, a lack of civility and refinement, that was antithetical to Dan as a person, as it would have been to anyone with great talent and sensitivity. I just know it was a really unpleasant experience for him. But the Wilco thing for me is beyond pleasant. I don’t mind all the traveling. We don’t travel first class or anything, but who cares? I’m working ! I’m happy! I think Wilco might be looked at as ‘rock stars’ but the guys in the band aren’t very rock-star like.

Yeah, they’re regular guys.
Total music nerds!

Speaking of music nerds, you and your brother are—
Nerds!

Well, yeah. I was thinking of whether you guys ever plan on doing a duo record together.
We’ve talked about it for years. I’d like to, very much. I’d like to do it with overdubs, make it layered when we want it to be layered and orchestral when we want t to be orchestral, and then stripped down to keep a contrast going…because our mutual tendency towards grandiosity should probably somewhere in the recording be taken to the absolute limit. Just really get the sky to open up for once. It’s really a matter of time and scheduling, and Alex would really have to set aside a lot of time, and Alex is not willing to do that that. He’s got a job and he’s a parent, and I wouldn’t want him to feel some sort of conflict about it. Right now, for me scheduling is an endless dilemma. But looking ahead through the crystal ball and trying to say ‘yes’ to this and ‘no’ to that, it’s really hard because in the rock world there’s a lot of last-minute stuff. Things come together really quickly when necessary, and the so called jazz or new music world works way in advance.

Hmm, I thought it would have been the exact opposite.
Yeah, that’s why a lot of things I get asked to do I can’t commit to because I’m waiting waiting waiting to see what Wilco’s going to do. I mean, that’s my priority, that’s the main thing I’m doing these days. That’s been the one difficult part: The way the two worlds don’t operate the same way. Consequently, trying to schedule time just for myself – ‘oh let’s do five days in the studio with me and Alex’ – I don’t even know even where that would be this year. We have another [Nels Cline Singers] record we’re going to do at the end of March. I’m still trying to work up a concept for that so I can finish writing the music…Right now, the notion of writing more stuff for the Singers and making a record seems hard to wrap my mind around and get excited about it. think I need a construct or a theme in order to do it, but it’s going to be paired with a live recording…They’ll be some of the cover songs we’ve played or some of our songs we’ve reinvestigated or some new stuff that will never be recorded in the studio, and that’ll be very wild and woolly, so maybe the studio record should be a little different.

More restrained?
Maybe, yeah. Conceptually, tackle some new ideas. Maybe the studio recording can have a new wrinkle in it, because we already have three CDs of what I call 'the same old shit,' not that different from what I do with my old trio…I think I need a high concept to help me get though this experience without getting tired of it. That’s why it was such a kick to do other people’s music, like the Andrew Hill record. Or the band where I play some variations on Jimmy Giuffre’s music; I don’t know if im going to record that band but I want to at least working on playing that music better…

Why Jimmy Giuffre?
Totally dig the guy, especially his trio with Steve Swallow and Paul Bley, and that led to me going backwards to discovering his trio with Jim Hall and Ralph Pena, which is fantastic music. Going forward, his groups did a lot of improvisation. I guess I’m just interested in what I call ‘caucasian brainiac jazz’: Shelly Manne’s The Three & The Two record, or a lot of stuff that Shorty Rogers was doing, and this Jimmy Giuffre record with Shelley and Artie Anton on drums, where Artie's doing this weird only-playing-in the-hole drumming -- it's amazing music that combines the blues, which was Jimmy’s main thing, with bebop and contemporary chamber music. It’s restrained but the arrangements are so constantly interesting that it gives me great ideas.

You and Alex also have the 'obsessive collector' thing down pat, not just of others’ music but the meticulous documenting of your own careers. Have you ever sat down and calculated how many gigs you’ve played over the years?
I really have no idea…and I don’t think I want to know. There is something upsetting about it on a certain level, because I think, ‘Wow, maybe that’s why my personal life is such a disaster.’ It’s hard. I don’t know anybody for which that is an easy thing to deal with, all that much traveling. Just don’t have kids. I don’t know how families get through it. They do, but it’s definitely something I don’t like to think about. I’m the ultimate late bloomer. I’m never going to lay back and go, ‘Gee my 20s were so awesome.’ If only! It’s not me. I am feeling the sting of imminent death, mortality, whatever…I’ve never been one of those people who have tried to cheat death at every turn, who is obsessed with mortality. But people are sick and dying all around me, especially the older I get.

Like your friend Rod Poole, to whom you dedicated a song to on Coward….
Well murder’s a little different. Let’s not talk about that. It’s upsetting. But someone like Ron Asheton, there’s one. 60 years old. Poof! Gone! Ron never had the problems his brother Scotty had. I think he was ‘average-American unhealthy’; I don’t think there was anything particularly ‘rock-and-roll unhealthy’ about Ron. You just never know. No one expects the Spanish Inquisition! It’s not so sad to think about, because at the end there was that incredible five-year run of those killer Stooges shows. He couldn’t get arrested before that. If he had died in his house by himself and wasn’t discovered for days and was the sort of guy who people kind of remember – except for the hardcore fans – that would have been depressing. I’m really glad [Mike] Watt made that reunion happen, spiritually and energy-wise. It all came from his passion for that music that brought everybody back together. Those shows they did were so kick ass. I saw them about four times. Fucking kick ass! Great shows. So that was nice, to have a resurgence, a new awareness, new fans, better than what could have happened. I saw Ron back when he was with that band Dark Carnival, at the old Knitting Factory space. No one lists this band when they talk about Ron’s legacy…It was very underground.

Matthew Shipp once said that what unites punk and jazz are that both can be considered ‘fuck you music’. Any thoughts?
Not really. I’ve never thought of jazz as ‘fuck you music’, but the jazz tradition is not really mine to elucidate or protect or expound upon. But I’ll think about that one. Matthew’s an interesting man. Anybody who Stanley Crouch tried to beat up is interesting to me.

Do you have any non-musical influences on your music? If so, what are some of the most significant?
Well, there’s the Cate Blanchett thing. All kinds of human expression influence music for me. Sometimes the idea for a piece doesn’t come from musical idea. Sometimes it’s a humorous idea, like for instance a piece my old trio came up with called “Beer Bottle Collection.” The title came before the piece. I thought it would be hilarious to do this sort of metal-inspired song about the absurdity of male adolescence. It was completely tongue-in-cheek, but that didn’t stop guys from coming to our gigs and shouting for the song as if it was the most heavy thing they’d ever heard. They did get the humor at all. People like Cate Blanchett is perfect. For me, she’s inspirational as an artist, not just because she a hot movie star, but she raises the bar. Sometime you just come across somebody whose artistic work, whether it’s acting or visual art or dance, just raises the stakes so high that it’s inspiring, not daunting. Sometimes that makes you want to rethink the parameters of your own work. Quite often for me, it’s not a musical inspiration or evaluation: those Franz Kline paintings still kick my ass, as does the work of Annette Messager. The best thing about art is that it makes us rethink our reality and our relationship to the rest of the world, how our lives are, that for me is where the musical inspiration comes from, not just the notes.

Your guitar can take on so many different personalities that have nothing to do with guitar. I’ve heard collapsing buildings, sonar, fire alarms, airplane engines, alien spacecraft, CONELRAD…
A lot of funny noises. To me it’s not a big deal, but it is something that I have an ability to conceptualize and then manifest. I’m not purporting to expand the vocabulary of the guitar or anything, but for me it is immersion-based work in which a cool head does not always prevail. I guess it’s meant to create a balance for the listener that’s simultaneously unnerving and at the same time inviting, violent and peaceful, to join disparate elements to create a heightened sense of the moment, of some kind of life drama, and ultimately the fingering of the guitar doesn’t always come into play—sometimes I just put the guitar on the ground and let things happen, especially playing by myself. I get so nervous about fingering the guitar that I usually can’t play anything difficult, so I go into some default freakout mode or something. [Laughs] In the studio, its easy when you’re overdubbing. Live playing solo is really terrifying for me, some guitarists are good at it and I’m definitely not one of them, so thank God I didn’t even try to do that. I did record one solo guitar piece for Coward, a version of Carla Bley’s “And Now the Queen,” but it got rejected. It wasn’t that good. I was trying to get some of that Paul Bley-1960s-improvisational thing going, and it had its moments but once again I think the record needed a little enlivening. I lean on Alex a lot when I comes to sequencing. I’ll dump the gross outpouring on him to get his reactions, or if I’m having a sequencing dilemma, he always good at that.

Did you have any such dilemmas with Coward?
Well, yeah! Alex is the one who said, ‘Take that Carla Bley song off the record.’
[Laughs]

That mountain of a multi-parted song, “Onan”—that was like sequencing inside of sequencing. Could you explain what was behind that?
That’s sort of me having fun. I wrote that entirely in the studio after taking copious notes, mostly in airplanes, about what I wanted it to be movement-to-movement, style-to-style, and the rest I just went for it – a lot of stuff on Coward was written in the studio. Which is funny because I’d been thinking about it for so long that I sort of out-thought myself to the point where nothing remained to record from earlier sessions. But ‘Onan’ was really easy because it’s a slightly tongue-in-cheek combination of various fascinations of mine, the ultimate being “wanking.” It’s fascinating on a language level and on some mythological level that the biblical story of Onan is not about masturbation at all, it’s about coitus interruptus. And the fact that Fundamentalists can turn it into a cautionary tale about how The Lord is angered by masturbators I find fascinating. To me, it's another example of how people always get it wrong and twist things for their own purposes. It's actually coitus interruptus that Onan does that angers The Lord, and in a sense birth control, because he chose to ‘ejaculate upon the land’ rather than impregnate a girl who The Lord has designated him to impregnate…So I took this whole idea of doing a super self-indulgent tone poem in various movements that's kind of a soundtrack to my warped psyche, so the springboard is the story of Onan whole at the same time not being really the story of Onan at all. It’s partly that, partly me playing around with the idea of ‘screwing off,’ which is to say masturbating musically as well as perhaps literally.

Like how the word ‘wanking’ is applied to someone going off on his guitar?
Exactly. Sort of taking the piss out of myself as a so-called ‘guitar wizard,’ but also how art in general is not always but for the most part, as we experience it in the Western sense, pretentious, meaning you are pretending that someone gives a shit…That you do something with the idea that it’s important somehow, that somehow someone might care besides you, which is how we do all art in Western culture, except for outsider art like Henry Darger. I don’t think he cared whether anyone else ever saw those works he did; he was just in his own little world. But the rest of us, we’re kind of reaching out for approval or trying to show something we know or express something new or whatever the conceit is, that to me is essentially a kind of wanking, and what I am ultimately saying by ending it with the idea of Onan as the liberator is essentially that he wanked for all of us, that as such we can all be free if we weren’t such slaves to all this kind of rigidity of our world that says, ‘No, you can’t!’, whether it be wanking or creating art. One person’s pretension is another person’s profundity. So I find it mildly humorous and at the same time strangely inspiring and perplexing.

Throughout your entire catalogue, while not being ‘religious’ per se, you’ve had this fascination with religious iconography.
I have no religious background whatsoever, other than an early fascination with Eastern philosophy. Philosophy was my major at Occidental. I graduated from Western to Eastern philosophy in the mid-1970s, and I have to say I find religion as an organized thing a complete scourge on the planet. But that’s not because I’m being judgmental of those who believe in such things; I see it as more often than not separating people rather than uniting them on a planetary level. But even on a community level, it always seems to be about those who ‘believe’ and those who are outside those beliefs. I’m not interested in any of that. What I am interested in is layers of reality that might exist that we don’t see with the naked eye, and all the incredible lore there is about it. Whether it’s superstition or not, I don’t really care….I find it fascinating and compelling at best, the idea of angelic presences being my main obsession, but I don’t think it has anything specifically formed in my work. It’s vague—somewhat intentionally vague. I’m not interested in defining these things. It’s not even that important to the work, it just something that motivates me and keeps the wheels turning.

And yet 'religious music' -- people singing to their God, whatever that may be -- is always so inspiring to hear even if you're not religious.
I know. All these kind of positive human traits—love, trust, loyalty—seem at times inescapably linked to so-called ‘religious ideals.’ I don’t know, it’s just something I’m playing with. The idea of something being transcendental I think is inherently a good starting point for something that’s aesthetic. It’s not absolutely important, but it interests me….I used to listen to these things that would take me so completely out of my own body that I had to start thinking about why do some sounds do that and others don’t. If you listen to something like "The Rothko Chapel" by Morton Feldman or even Ravel’s piano music; I think you’d have to be made of cement to not find them incredibly haunting and magical works.

On your new records, both you and your brother dedicate songs to your mother Thelma, who recently passed away. What would Thelma and your late father Don have thought of an Obama presidency?
Jubilation, absolute jubilation. In her decline, I told my mother about Obama. I told her I had seen this guy speak at the Democratic National Convention a few years ago, and that he was so inspiring…When she became blind, she couldn't wrap her head around his name, because she was a very visually oriented person. Actually, my brother’s friend Bill lived in our mom’s house for a while, in our old bedroom. After he moved out and got married, he continued to come every week and read to my mom. The last book he read to her was The Audacity of Hope. I don’t think she really had her mind made up about Obama but she was certainly interested in him and she would frequently ask both Alex and me: 'How's he doing? What's the latest with him?'...But I have to say, I never thought I'd live to see my mom so despondent as she was about the state of our government—that was when she was starting to decline and lose it a bit. She and my father were old-school liberal Democrats -- sort of Adlai Stevenson types -- with a positive, informed and slightly militant take on things. And the Bush Administration totally just beat her down to the point where she told me on one occasion: 'I don’t believe what anyone says anymore.' I'd never thought I'd hear my mom say something so completely despairing about those in charge, because she believed in law and order and rules and living by a certain code, and to see that eroded to the extent that it was under Bush was so disheartening, I think she kinda just checked out. Before that she watched C-SPAN all day. She was was poltical junkie. But given the adequate awareness my parents had, they literally would be flipping out about Obama. Not so much his actual policies or his electability or all these different things that went hand-in-hand to create such an amazing success story; I think that his erudition would have been an absolute plus, because after listening to someone who has no ability to form a sentence off the top of his head for so many years, finally hearing someone speak to the nation with that amount of eloquence -- that alone would have been a joy in the family.

(Check out reviews of Coward from the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and All About Jazz. Check out our pal Greg Burk's "twin" reviews of Coward and Continuation here.)