Download: Dirty Projectors “Ascending Melody”

(from the Temecula Sunrise EP out now on Domino)

The New York Times called him “indie rock’s workaholic mad genius,” but L.A. RECORD finds the measure of Dirty Projectors’ David Longstreth somewhere between the most subtle implications of Philip Glass’ Music In Fifths and the sudden desire for a sandwich. This interview by Drew Denny.

People have decided they can call Dirty Projectors an ‘experimental’ rock band—does the term ‘experimental’ have any meaning for you?
David Longstreth: Not really. It’s sort of a dumb term. I don’t know what the experiments are really testing. I don’t know if there’s a control group. It’s not some Cage-ian thing of pushing against the notion of the socially acceptable or it’s not some chasing down of the—what’s that term? The Michael Crichton book?—the ‘event horizon’ of fucking modernism or something like that.
This would be an awful interview if it were about that.
David Longstreth: True!
Do you have a sense of humor about what you make?
David Longstreth: Fuck yeah. A lot of it is funny. I like the idea of something just being like imbued with this good humor. You know what I mean? I definitely look for that.
In your music and a lot of what’s popular right now, there’s a lot of co-opting of other traditions—African guitars, for example. As someone who has a background in academia, how do you critique the process of co-opting those forms? Do you think it borders on fetishization? Or at least gimmick?
David Longstreth: I guess I wouldn’t critique it along a political post-colonial line but just more… for me the thing that always pops one way or another is whether it seems legit on an artistic level, whether it seems interesting or whether it seems stock or kind of half-baked. I was listening to Music in Fifths—a really early Philip Glass piece from I think ‘69 the other day. I hadn’t listened to a lot of Philip Glass in a long time but that early shit from the early sixties and through like the Einstein on the Beach era I fucking love. And it occurred to me that Music in Fifths… Well, I was listening to that piece Atmospheres by Ligeti as well, and that’s from ’61 and Music in Fifths is from ’69, and I was thinking about how if you listen to pop music from ’61 and then pop music in ’69—even within a single band like the Beatles or something like that, you can really see the whole cultural arc of the ’60s. And how—superficially at least—you don’t see it at all in the Ligeti or the Glass. They both seem just about this weird terrifying gaping expanse of like—I don’t know—they both seem to approximate the end of civilization. But then I was thinking about it in a different way and it’s like, ‘Yes, the Ligeti does seem to be about this involvement with the Western art-music canon, but the Glass seems to be looking outward in this amazing way!’ I really recommend this piece! He’s trying really hard to synthesize all these different things—that kind of developmental aspect of Austro-Germanic music and the kind of modal weird raga explorations of the Indian music he had studied with Ravi Shankar. And it seems like the collective improvisational aspect of jazz and rock music at that time, too, because apparently it’s for a small combo and somehow the music is in parallel fifths the entire time. But the exact shape of it is improvised and the length of it is improvised. The music is so good because it doesn’t sound like any of those things. It doesn’t sound like classical music. It doesn’t sound like Indian music. It doesn’t sound like rock music or jazz. It’s completely its own new thing, but it really does draw from all these things and sum them together in this really fucking digested way. I guess that to me is more interesting than just like throwing a fucking humbucker pickup with like an 8th note delay on your thing and calling it African. But I don’t know. Whatever.
What was it like working with David Byrne?
David Longstreth: It was awesome working with him! I’ve been a fan of his music for like 10 years. It came about because the Dessner brothers from the National were curating this charity compilation, and they just wanted to put together artist collaborations that were surprising but logical in some way. I don’t know if I could put into words really what I learned or what we learned but it was definitely mind-blowing.
You’ve gotten to collaborate with such amazing people—Bjork for instance. What’s your connection to her?
David Longstreth: With Bjork—so many things, God—it’s a melodic sense, a harmonic sense… She’s just a great songwriter. The way she’s capable of combining really intricate and really kind of unique musical ideas with an immediate pop sense. It’s pretty amazing. Showing that those kinds of things aren’t opposite. That they belong together. It’s pretty cool.
It’s interesting that you’re having a hard time describing these collaborations and influences because writers seem to have difficulties describing Dirty Projectors. What do you think about that?
David Longstreth: I think music can get at something that can’t be talked about. That’s cool. I like the idea of it being more than the sum of its influences.
I’ve been doing some research into the use of memory in art making—could you describe the process of making an album by memory?
David Longstreth: It’s kind of like making an album that’s not from memory. I feel like most songwriting is just pulling something out that is a poorly remembered version of something else. So it’s kind of similar.
How would you feel if someone did that with a Dirty Projectors album?
David Longstreth: I don’t have a feeling about that that. It’d be kind of dumb.
My roommate is Austrian, and she says ‘Bitte Orca’ really nicely—
David Longstreth: Yeah! That’s it! I was really depressed when I got to the UK and I realized they pronounced it ‘Bita Rorka!’ It’s really ugly in the U.K. accent.
Do you think in the future you’ll make different versions of titles to compensate for potentially ugly pronunciations?
David Longstreth: Yeah—probably just phonetic spellings and lots of umlauts.
I’ve heard this album described as a ‘breakthrough’—what does that actually mean?
David Longstreth: In order for me to talk about what that would mean, I would probably have to agree with the premise. I don’t mean to be flippant. When they’re describing it like that, they’re referring to the fact that a lot more people hear this album than any of the others we’ve made. Whether it represents something more than that—some kind of artistic breakthrough—I would say yes and no. I kind of feel like I’ve just—in various Dirty Projector albums and with the band solidifying—my aims have always been the same. It just feels like more music.
Your aims have always been the same? This album sounds very different to me.
David Longstreth: In the past, once I had an idea I just put it down and that was that. This time I took a lot more time—rehearsing everything and recording it and making sure the ideas were brought to coherence rather than just being laid out there like a puzzle for someone who is really curious to put together on their own,
It reminds me of hip-hop in that way—everything seems like it was put in a place for a reason. It’s very produced.
David Longstreth: I know what you mean. The spaciousness of mainstream R&B production—particularly a few years ago—and how there are a few elements that can sit in this emptiness and just pop so big. I love that feeling.
What’s it like for you to write for other singers—especially women?
David Longstreth: It’s pretty cool. The register I tend to write things in is kind of a register that ends up being good for ladies. For me it’s pitched sort of where I go into falsetto but for them it’s really in their heart of their register. Pretty natural.
Do you feel like a puppeteer or a director?
David Longstreth: Not a puppeteer! Maybe a director. I just feel like a songwriter.
How much agency do the other band members have in terms of writing and performance?
David Longstreth: A fair amount. It really comes together—when we play it live it becomes its own beast. Takes on a whole different life. Becomes very collective. A different thing. This album I really tried to write for specific personalities, which I’d never done before. So I guess you could say they have agency in that sense as well.
Are you painting now?
David Longstreth: I’m doing a little bit of drawing. Right now we’re on tour so I’m not right now but before that I was drawing a bit. I love to make really flawed analogies between media all the time—comparing line quality to melodic shape and insisting that there are correspondences, and what that means when a line does one thing and a melody does another. You know—that kind of shit!
What are y’all gonna be for Halloween?
David Longstreth: We’re thinking about being Fleetwood Mac but we’d have to have some double Lindsay Buckinghams? And double Stevie Nicks.
Are there crazy romances in your band?
David Longstreth: No—nothing crazy.
Because if you’re Fleetwood Mac…
David Longstreth: That’s true… OK, I should go get a sandwich.

DIRTY PROJECTORS WITH LITTLE WINGS ON SAT., OCT. 31, AT THE JENSEN REC CENTER, 1161 LOGAN ST., ECHO PARK. 7 PM AND 9:30 PM / $20 / ALL AGES. ATTHEECHO.COM. DIRTY PROJECTORS’ TEMECULA SUNRISE EP IS OUT NOW ON DOMINO. VISIT DIRTY PROJECTORS AT MYSPACE.COM/DIRTYPROJECTORS.

[ed. note — apologies to all of planet Earth for delay in posting this!]

As I pulled fifteen bucks from my now-empty wallet, I wondered what Sky Saxon would have done if he’d brought a hot date with him to a show on Saturday night and been told he had “no plus one.” The young lady with the clipboard at the VIP entrance even spent five minutes ID’ing Rodney Bingenheimer. Good God, gal, do you not see Sunset Boulevard up yonder? Is he not the Mayor of Sunset Strip!?! Now that Sky’s gone, Rodney’s the biggest flower punk left!

“Sky Saxon is the father of garage rock! He’s one of the very first people I met when I came to Hollywood. I’ve been a really close friend with him. I even put one of his songs on one of my Rodney on the Rock albums. He used to call me from Hawaii, and I’d put him on the air.” —Rodney Bingenheimer (KROQ DJ)

Thank God—or should I say YaHoWha?—that the show started with a cathartic bang in the form of Ya Ho Wa 13’s Djin Aquarian. A thin spry Santa Claus in a white robe, Djin Aquarian (along with violinist Ysanne Spevack) gave perhaps the most amazing performance of the night right out of the gate: a song done half live and half with Sky Saxon’s recorded voice itself, a la the Beatles’ “Real Love.” This was not to be a wake. For musicians, death means nothing, not even your last live show.

“He’s the ultimate teenager. He’s going to live forever. He didn’t really die!” – Kari French (performance artist, Luxuria Music DJ, go-go girl)

Djin followed the tunes with some hippy calisthenics—something called the “Star Exercise” that required us to stand with hands outstretched, breathe in and out 120 times in rapid succession, and visualize a white star in our heads that we could then shoot through the chakras in our body. This was supposed to shake loose any negative vibes we might have carried about Sky Saxon when he was alive. And the room did seem to brighten. Folks even stuck around for Djin’s short lecture on “The Name of God.” (Surprise: it’s “YaHoWha.”) Djin explained how the Hebrew letters for God look like a gender-neutral person standing upright and got into the last day of the Mayan Calendar and Sirius the Dog Star and goddamn it—if that’s not the perfect benediction for Sky Saxon, then Jason Voorhees wears a catcher’s mask.

“When I joined the Source family in 1972, at that point I met Arelick Aquarian. Arelick Aquarian had a long brown beard, and long dark brown hair, and he was Sky Saxon. We lived by the same teachings that Father Yod, YaHoWha taught, so our relationship is an eternal, spiritual blood relationship. I’ve shared my blood with him when he was leaving the body in ‘77 because of a bleeding ulcer. He wouldn’t take anyone else’s blood. He’d rather die than have a non-vegetarian, non-Aquarian person’s blood.” — Djin Aquarian (musician, spiritualist, carpenter)

Next up, the young tykes in the audience swooned as a the super group Spirits in the Sky assembled on stage, headed by that most Smashing of Pumpkins, Billy Corgan. You could almost hear the audience rumble like tectonic plates as a wedge of grungy adulation nearly forced itself across the trenches of hip disdain. I didn’t know what I’d make of Corgan, that former Courtney Love boy-toy whose recorded history could best be described as “spotty.” He and his smooth bald head sauntered onto the stage covered in a military cap, baggy pants and a ratty red and black striped sweatshirt—it was like if John Malkovich from Empire of the Sun was simultaneously playing the role of Freddy Krueger.

“The last time I saw Sky was at Billy Corgan’s house. They were recording music together in his studio, and me and Don Bolles and his girlfriend and my dad James went to another part of the house, which happened to have Billy sitting there, eating his raw food. And Sky was stoned out of his mind, and Sky immediately just says out of nowhere, ‘Everybody stop looking at Billy! Stop watching him eat, man!’ And we were not even looking at him! It was so hilarious, but uncomfortable at the same time, making it seem like we were these super fans. So to get Sky out of his weird mood, I go, ‘Hey, Sky, what about that time you kicked Kim Fowley’s ass?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, man, I fucking kicked Kim Fowley’s ass, man! I fucking kicked him in the back of the knees. I brought him down in Vegas!’” – Giddle Partridge (singer)

Corgan may have dressed down and dirty, but the band was a celestial mind fuck: Mark Tulin of the Electric Prunes on bass, Mark Weitz from the Strawberry Alarm Clock on keys (looking exactly like my dad if you threw a Nehru jacket on him), members of Ancient Chinese Secret and even the first live appearance of Smashing Pumpkins’ new 19-year old drummer, Mike Byrne. Sounding neither like an oldies revival nor like some watered-down Pumpkin Seeds, their cover of the obscure Saxon classic “900 Million People Daily” was an almost tropical psychedelic delight. Though Corgan looked nervous about playing for us fickle Echo Park patrons, his guitar-god licks and David Byrne awkwardness won over anyone paying attention. They even premiered a new Corgan ditty called “Freak” that made far more sense at a Sky Saxon tribute night than a grungy version of “Pushin’ Too Hard” ever could have.

“He was a magician. He’d appear and disappear. One day he’d be on your couch, and the next day, he’d be gone!” — Billy Corgan (musician)

“Sky Saxon took on life and music on his own terms. Unlike many of us who went through the ’60s Sky remained true to the peace and love mantra of those electric years. He was truly a free spirit unbound by societal norms. He was the shaman, the jester, the philosopher and the fool. He performed his music, his way, right up to his death. No musician can ask more than that.” — Mark Tulin (musician)

Up next were back-to-back sets by the Alarm Clock and the Prunes, both with far more original members than, say, that recent Zombies show you jerked off over a few weeks back. The Prunes seemed a little tired—far less magical than they’d been in the early 2000s when they’d toured with their old keyboardist’s son and gave the BJM/Warlocks crew a serious run for their money. Tired or not, though, they still rocked it on out, and their Strawberry Alarm Clock brethren proved to be even more balls-out now than they had been on album back in the day. It kind of floored me thinking that some of these guys had fucking appeared in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and still could play guitar dressed in a Caligula throw-over and make kids one fourth their ages groove on a hot night that technically—technically!—was somebody’s funeral.

“I always tell people—Gram Parsons died one day before Jim Croce died. In those days, nobody cared about Gram Parsons, and all people could talk about was Jim Croce passing away. Sky Saxon died right when Michael Jackson died. But at the end of the day, Gram Parsons is a lot larger now in his legacy than Jim Croce is, and I think we’ll see the same thing with Sky Saxon in the future because the Jackson 5 only made about seven or eight good songs, and the Seeds had three really fucking amazing albums. You hear ‘Scarecrow’ by the Pink Floyd and you hear ‘Mr. Farmer’ by the Seeds about a year earlier and you go, “Oh, so that’s where that came from!’” – Dominic Priore (author of Riot on Sunset Strip)

So many friends, historians, and musical well-wishers! I was overwhelmed. The next act—Simon Stokes and friends—should have been killer. How often do you get to see a sixties garage punk turned Elektra recording artist show-off turned black-leather grandpa play on stage with the Knitting Factory’s Bruce Duff and a Fleshtone or two? But under the circumstances, I found things far too aggressive and serious, and headed out on the smoke pit’s bleachers. Here the Star Exercise from earlier had clearly made an impression on folks—the vibe was full of remembrances and good will towards Sky Saxon, even warmer than the summer air.

“He was always very positive. Jealous was something you couldn’t feel around that guy. Jealous is a mad, dark feeling… there’s no need to feel anything dark around Sky!” – Lee Joseph (Dionysus Records)

“When I first heard Sky’s vocals on ‘No Escape,’ I knew that this was something beyond anything I’d ever heard before. This would essentially become an obsession with raw 60′s garage rock that I can ultimately blame on Sky Saxon. I’m sure there’s plenty of other people that feel the same way about Sky, and this memorial proves it. I wonder if any of the dudes from Axe body spray are here?” – Rick Barzell (bassist, Thee Living Sickness)

“He’s going to be dancing with the dogs in heaven. He loves dogs more than people. His spirit will be mingling with the dogs.” – Kari French

A solo singer-songwriter chanteuse named “SofizeL” hit the stage next. A Frenchwoman who now hailed from England, I’d like to believe she was jetlagged or grieving. Her performance was a bit lethargic and more than a little nervous, like she knew she didn’t belong. Of course, she truly didn’t, having only barely ever known or performed with Sky as part of “The Europe Seeds” for some tiny portion of 2005. But hell, it wouldn’t be a true tribute to Sky if everything made sense and professionalism ran rampant. And hey, I doubt my death will cause singer-songwriters to spend a day on a plane each way to come to L.A. for a three-song set.

“I met him at this gig in London. I was the only one who brought a record to be signed that wasn’t a bootleg. He said, ‘Brother, I love you!’ He stayed about eight months at my house, partying and partying and partying, and bringing back young girls every other night. I would lend him money, and he used to buy knick-knacks all the time! Like lighters, or things from a 99 cent store, coming back and saying, ‘Michael, look at this, can you believe it? This is so cool! Isn’t it great?’ But on the other hand, he was a very bright character. Often he was just listening to music, getting high, but when he said something, it was really brilliant. He had visions all the time, not to make a million dollars, but to make a billion!” – Michael Wolf (designer)

This was one of those tributes where truly everybody from all walks of life is getting up on stage in support, and it was hard to keep up—for example, who was that random vintage-looking woman between 35 and 40 who was occasionally announcing bands? And who was Sunny Sun-downer? Did I miss the Woolly Bandits’ set entirely? And was that really the Fleshtones guy I saw earlier? And why was a strange girl go-go dancing on the side of the stage with the flimsy tube-top dress that she had to keep tugging upwards? How many people had Sky touched, and in what ways?

“When Spindrift first moved to L.A. in 2002, we were lucky enough to open for the Seeds at our first show at Spaceland. Shortly after that I got a call from Sky to join his band. I refused though, figuring I wasn’t up to speed with a psychedelic legend. He was—is—a big influence. I’m more a Saxon than a Jackson.” – Kirpatrick Thomas (singer, guitarist)

But there was no mistaking Sky’s ever-patient widow, Sabrina Sherry Smith Saxon. I’d recognized her from years ago, when a friend had banged his head against my van’s door after a Seeds show at the Bigfoot Lodge, and Sabrina had made Sky give him a healing benediction. This night, sadly, there was no healing that could lighten the mood, and her thank-yous to countless friends and relatives in attendance (Sky had how many grandchildren?) and obituaries from those who could not attend reminded us all that there was more to Sky than just music and colorful scarves.

“Every morning a screwdriver. Vodka and orange. I gave him the money, but most of the time he spent the money for the screwdriver on knick-knacks and lighters and lollipops and toys, and then I had to give him another five pounds to get a screwdriver. But that made him happy and that made me happy, too.” – Michael Wolf

Nels Cline, L.A. RECORD favorite and a man seemingly too somber for flower power, played maybe the most sorrowful Seeds cover of the night: “Flower Lady and her Assistant.” It’s my favorite Seeds song, and last time I had heard Nels play it, it was alongside Sky Saxon himself in the downstairs lounge at Zen Sushi a few years ago, when Nels’ beautiful cacophony of notes and effects pedals shimmied all around Sky as he huffed and puffed his way back and forth through the song for about five people. Now Nels played to a packed room, including some bona-fide flower ladies, but there was no Sky to assist.

“It’s really weird. I grew up listening to not just the Seeds, but also the Strawberry Alarm Clock and the Electric Prunes. Sky rocked out with the Seeds for two hours for like ten people two months ago. It’s like, how long are we here for? We don’t even know.” — Nels Cline

Too bad I drowned my sorrow in an extra Jameson or two, because suddenly a new super group emerged on stage, with Djin Aquarian and Billy Corgan on bass! This was “YaHoWha 33” and suddenly the calm, meditative breather from before must have recharged his chakras! Djin rocked and cooed and smiled from behind his beard like nothing I’ve seen since the Soggy Bottom Boys appeared on screen a few years back. No hippie love jam this, unless by “jams,” you meant things to Kick Out. There was rock and sweat and vitality, screaming dudes in robes, and man, I just could not believe Sky Saxon was dead, because I felt so alive!

“It calls for a change, and I just turned the knob up to 11! And then I can make my ascension at 11, and then I go to 12 which is bringing down the consciousness, and then I go up to 13, which is take the consciousness up beyond death, beyond the spectrum of the third dimensional density.” – Djin Aquarian

I didn’t have much mental density left when the Seeds took the stage. Of course, it’s hard to call them the Seeds without Sky out front, but this was definitely more authentic than a Misfits or Dead Kennedys reunion. Leighton Koizumi of the Morlocks and Don Bolles took turns screaming out the vocals, and my favorite Seeds/Love/Kind Hearts/Red Hearts alumnus, Justino Polimeni, was rat-tat-tatting out the drums of their greatest garage hits like he wanted Sky to hear him in heaven. Well played, sirs, especially Leighton’s turn on “Mr. Farmer,” which would make even his NA sponsor want to smoke weed.

“Sky was the kind of guy where you could drop him off in the street in any town, and in two hours, he’d come back with a new band and a new album that’s ‘going to be bigger than the Rolling Stones!’” – Justino Polimeni (drummer)

“I think the music says it all. The music’s going to live on forever. I can see from all these fans that are here, I’m thankful for everyone who came out. God bless Sky, and wherever you’re at, I know you’re having a great time, and your legacy lives on.” — dude from the Seeds

The whole thing ended with virtually everybody and their dad on stage, Alarm Clocks mingling with Pumpkins mingling with Germs and Prunes and Woolly Bandits and, yeah, by this time, I was happily working my way through some vegan slices at Two Boots Pizzeria, next to the Echo. We’d all had a great time celebrating Sky Saxon, but funerals make me hungry. In honor of Sky’s love for canines, I took my leftovers home in a doggy bag.

“His music is going to live forever. He’s definitely a legend.” — Rodney Bingenheimer

“On one side, he was the Father of Punk Rock. On the other side, he was the Father of Love!” — Lee Joseph

I’m very sad that he’s gone, but I believe he is here with us. He always said he was eternal.” — Giddle Partridge

“Have you been checking out the vibe, here? This is the legacy. The legacy is loooove, establishing a quality of psychedelic music that speaks wisdom and love and teaches the holy name, the sacred name of God, Ya Ho Wa, and stands up for the children and the dogs and wolves and human rights and medical marijuana, and just free marijuana!” — Djin Aquarian

“I think Sky Saxon’s legacy will ‘mushroom’ in ten years time.” — Dominic Priore

“He left us with the battle cry, ‘I choose love!’” — Isis Aquarian

—Dan Collins

Next was the band Headlight, basically a one-man project lead by Axel Enoc, a skinny little man with short hair and a stripey shirt and what looked like hospital EKG machines spread all over the floor under his keyboards.  Eddie and Sissy from the Polyamorous Affair had shown up just to see him, so I expected a treat.  Though the first song didn’t really deliver—it was a little too chill room for my tastes, especially following Capillary Action—by song two he started rocking out some songs he had written that very day, and we started seeing some more humanity in the keys and bleeps, not least of which because his girlfriend Ela, who looked like a four year old Russian child (god, what a cute couple!),  got up and started playing guitar.  “I’m really nervous, so learn to listen with your eyes closed,” Axel told us.  No need for the warning, buddy, as by song three, you were sampling yourself playing guitar on a bow, then adding a layer of great guitar picking on top of that, then back to the bow, creating a beautiful, delicate, moving soundscape.  Everybody automatically closed their eyes and shut the fuck up as you took us to an unexpectedly transcendent plane of emotion.  Your fourth and final song was a brave attempt at the Velvet Underground’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” accompanied by Korg effects and what sounded like a broken calliope.  It was kind of a letdown ending, but still better than Nico in the eighties.

Just as soon as Headlight started, he stopped, and we were all a little depressed that his set had lasted only four songs!  But then came 60 Watt Kid.
Electronic noise pioneer Terry Riley was fond of telling audiences in the seventies, “I do have a tape recorder up here, but there is nothing on the tape. I use it to create some of the loop effects that you will hear tonight. Everything you will hear me play will be live.”  60 Watt Kid’s trio of rockers are not noise experimentalists in the Riley sense, or even in the screamo/feedback sense that has become a second language for many bands.  But their brightly melancholic yawps into the void share something with Terry Riley’s live aesthetic that few electro-tinged bands can claim: an insistence upon constructing songs anew each time they’re performed.  A look upon the Echo Curio floor  revealed no laptops, yet where was that disembodied glockenspiel coming from?  They’d sampled their own strange chime-y noises on the spot, when we weren’t looking, like magicians.   Invisible jangly loops ensnared the crowd from the moment the first song’s bubbling softness jumped into its second, more rhythmic gear, and then promptly into fifth, as singer Kevin Litrow writhed, St. Vitus style, into the audience.

It’s hard to describe Litrow’s vocal style without saying “echo, echo, echo, echo, echo.”  His cavernous howls and moans warp into a dark cluster of incomprehensibility.  It’s harsh echo, like what Alan Vega from Suicide uses.  Yet if you put your cave ears on, you realize he’s addressing you directly, calling you out, or maybe calling upon a character you embody in the setting of that particular song.   He’s a bit reminiscent of a young David Byrne, back when he was more visceral and less World-ly.  But instead of Byrne’s detachment, with Litrow you get the sense that some real catharsis is going down.   Hell, the guy’s mom fucking died not too long ago, and yet here’s a song where he looks into the audience and yells “Hello, Mom?!?”  It wouldn’t have shocked me to hear her voice echoing back at him from the walls around us.

It was a commitment to the music shared by his band mates. Sometimes live it’s hard to catch how skilled of a guitar picker Derek Thomas is, but Tuesday his bright open-chord picking on a blue Fender Mustang made my brain go into sensory overload until the synapses popped and little spurts of truth pulsed out of every hair follicle in my body.  Drummer Dylan Wood, too, constructed his drum parts as densely as the strings, and banged his foot on the floor to make sure his ankle-rine chimed to match the pretty pickings going on in front of him.

Finally, a strange dude with a saxomophone came out and blasted through a tune that Kevin called “An American Standard!”  This was rock of the more basic kind, which 60 Watt Kid played ample portions of on their debut album but which normally doesn’t work its way too much into their live sets.  Good stuff, and fun!  Though the ghosts were still winding their way through the corners of the room, the bright light of good cheer was dead center, and we left beaming, our tall boys empty, and knowing grins upon our faces.

—Dan Collins

Download: Telepathe “Chrome’s On It”

(from Chrome’s On it out now on IAMSOUND)

It’s good to admire Kate Bush—probably the holiest female producer of all time. Telepathe knows what’s up, and while they’re not ‘Wuthering Heights’ anywhere, the girls throw down a dance number in their ‘So Fine’ music video. Cross-breed Bush with Dre and a little David Byrne and chop and loop until you’ve got a whole new mutant, and that moody avant-garde hip-hop will make Melissa Livaudais and Busy Gangnes a pair of happy mother fuckers. This interview by Daiana Feuer.

Melissa Livaudais (percussion/keys/more): So no cuss words?
You can totally say cuss words.
ML: Oh, good—fuck yeah!
What’s your favorite cuss word?
ML: My name’s Melissa and my favorite cuss word is ‘motherfucker.’ I’ve always loved it. I love to throw it around whenever I can, you know. It just sounds good. I wore it on a t-shirt once, which said, ‘Dance Mother Fucker.’ Which is actually the title of our record, but then we made the ‘fucker’ part silent and invisible on the title. But it’s there. It’s our little secret we like to fill people in on when we can.
And you—what’s your favorite cuss word?
Busy Gangnes (percussion/keys/more): My name is Busy and I say ‘fucking’ a lot. Like, ‘That fucking person!’ or something. I like emphasizing my sentences—whatever I’m talking about—with that word.
It’s a good—is it an adverb? An adjective?
ML: I think it’s both! You can use it both ways. They’ll have to invent a new grammatical term for it.
Can you recall the last time ‘fucking’ came out of your mouth?
BG: In that fucking way?
ML: You probably said it this morning.
BG: Oh yeah—‘This fucking taco sucks!’ Our breakfast tacos were horrible.
Bad eggs?
ML: Busy got so sick from eating them. They were from the health food store. They had sprouts in them and stuff.
Actually, I had a dream of talking to you about this.
ML: Wow, really? And it’s happening!
How do you like to make eggs?
BG: I like omelettes and frittatas—making them. My favorite style of egg is over-easy. It’s pretty basic. You make a sunny-side up egg and flip it over for two seconds, and it’s done. When I was a kid I used to eat them soft-boiled a lot in those little cups. I’m Norwegian and that’s how they eat them every single day.
How do you say egg in Norwegian?
BG: Oh, fuck…Oh! It’s just ‘eg,’ E-G. ‘Eg.’
ML: You should ask her what blueberry is.
How do you say blueberry?
BG: ‘Blobar.’
ML: ‘Can I have a blobar?’
You’re not both from there, right?
ML: No, I just went there. It was awesome. I went there twice. Once we went there for fun and stayed with Busy’s family and once we went there this past summer and played a music festival.
BG: We were there in August and the sun is up practically 24 hours a day. It goes down for like four or five hours a night. We got to see—
ML: We saw Clipse and My Bloody Valentine in Norway in the same day in less than two hours.
What’s cool about playing different types of venues? Or what’s the worst?
ML: It took us a lifetime to figure out our sound on stage. Busy needs a good snare and hi-hat. Ideally we like to have two bass amps, two big cabinets behind us with heads for monitoring that we run all of our tracks out of and have the monitors from the PA of where we’re playing for vocals—so that it’s loud as shit. And you can feel the bass and hear all the stuff on top of whatever’s in the house. We used to rely on a venue’s sound system, which is never reliable! Usually monitors at a venue don’t have all frequencies—they’re only for vocals, so there’s no bass or low end. It would sound really tinny and we would be like, ugh, why does it sound so weird!
BG: We’ve completely revamped our set since last fall. This mainly came from spending more time with Ableton Live as a live tool. We’d always used it to record but we wrapped our head around it more and took all our electronic tracks and filled them out and separated them and re-sequenced them and made different live arrangements. Before we were trying to make it sound too much like the record, but then realized if we stripped it down and rearranged some things, we would have way more fun with it live.
So you are remixing your own songs?
ML: It was a very tedious process. We spent three months working eight-hour days—trying things out and reworking material and treating our sounds so they would be really loud, really punchy and compressed. Since we already played our live set in a handful of clubs, we finally figured out what we would need to do in order to make our setup the best it could possibly be, depending on the sound engineer and how much control we needed to have on stage, and what we could give over to someone who never heard our music before when we show up in a new city.
Does taking this producer approach change the way you conceive music?
BG: In our old band, having that more traditional setup—playing music was about each member of the band knowing their parts and playing them at the same time with everybody else. Ever since we started getting more into electronic music and producing, we ended up seeing ‘the song’ as a whole made of different ways it can be arranged or composed. I think we already listened to music in that way and that’s why we wanted to make music the way we do now, and have our hands in more aspects of the song-writing process. The stuff that we sample, we’ve chopped it up and slowed it down or reversed it and added effects to it so it’s completely indecipherable. We’ll take an obscure piece of a song and loop it with another piece of a song in such a way that you can’t tell where any of it came from. Mainly that’s a cool way of getting an idea for a beat or melody or tempo, or a key signature, and we’ll build all around that.
What’s a difference between male and female brains?
BG: I could talk about this for hours, and usually get myself in trouble. Let me give an example. I came into the idea of being in a band later in life. Even though I was technically trained on piano, I didn’t know drums, but I was a drummer in our old band. In teaching myself how to play that instrument, I just relied on my own intuition—how I respond to music—I wasn’t really worried if people would think that I was really good or could tell if I was technical. I feel like guys have more of a hang-up with that from what I’ve noticed. They feel like they need to play the right way, and excel at the rules. They’re stuck in this right way of doing things. I always wanted to play well. I didn’t want to be a sloppy musician but I was fine with the idea of making up my own version of how I play that instrument. It seems like guys, the way they play, the way they act, they have something to prove. A woman’s approach is more intuitive. We do what feels right.

TELEPATHE WITH ABE VIGODA, BLUE JUNGLE AND NITE JEWEL ON SAT., JUNE 13, AT THE SMELL, 247 S. MAIN ST., DOWNTOWN. 9 PM / $5 / ALL AGES. THESMELL.ORG. AND ON TUE., JUNE 16, AT DETROIT BAR, 843 W. 19TH ST., COSTA MESA. 9 PM / $10 / 21+. DETROITBAR.COM. TELEPATHE’S DANCE MOTHER IS OUT NOW ON IAMSOUND. VISIT TELEPATHE AT TELEPATHEMUSIC.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/TELEPATHE.

Download: Gangi “Commonplace Feathers”

(from A coming out in May on vinyl from White Noise)

Gangi will be playing their final residency at Spaceland tonight so we are lifting this interview out of our archives. The vinyl version of their album A is almost out and they are already working on the follow-up Gun Show, with a title track that sounds like T. Rex and Funkadelic put together. They speak here months before when issues of toxic mold were much more on their minds. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

Is your new attic in Glendale healthier than your old bedroom in Williamsburg?
Matt Gangi (guitar/vocals/samples/drums): Definitely. I don’t know if it influenced the record, but there was black mold and mushrooms growing out of the wall—bigger than the size of my hand. And growing out of the ceiling. The place was rent-stabilized and the landlord didn’t care because I was just like a noisy kid paying cheap rent.
He didn’t care if you lived or died?
M: It was pretty terrible. They cut open the ceiling and this green and brown stuff was dripping all over my stuff. My neighbor came down and said, ‘That shouldn’t be exposed! I built your walls out in the ‘60s and that’s asbestos!’
Lyle Nesse (drums/keys/samples/vocals): Matt always called me thinking he was dying—that’s just his personality.
M: I’m a hypochondriac in general.
L: That’s an understatement! But I went up there and there actually were huge fungi and mushrooms growing out of the wall.
M: Completely non-edible.
Did you try?
M: We don’t go that far out, man! People in the building got really sick. In Williamsburg, people were getting all these cancers—sarcomas. Someone got cancer in my building, and the person who lived above me got nose infections from the toxic mold. And he got an autoimmune disease akin to lupus and had to take HIV medication. I was finally like, ‘Hey, man, the album’s done—let’s get on the road!’
When you came to L.A., were you like, ‘Ah, smell that fresh air?’
M: Exactly. Better that than aspergillus.
What are your favorite two songs to DJ together?
L: When we DJ out, Matt and I are pretty much switching every song. I usually bring hip-hop, Afrobeat, some gamelan music—so beat-heavy music and hip-hop and then Matt playing a lot of psych and reissues. So that idea of bringing together all of that and people who listen to all that music, and the people who listen to only that music exclusively.
Have you been to Low End Theory?
M: We’re really into Low End Theory. We were there just the other day to see Gaslamp Killer. He’s amazing. Crystal Antlers played a couple weeks ago. It’s really exciting when these communities come together. There shouldn’t be a separation between those scenes, and there’s not.
What is an information bomb and how do we live in it?
M: We decided before not to burden you with this kind of an interview.
Really?
M: ‘What if we just took it really conceptually and answered by putting every interview question into Google searches?’ Why even answer an interview about ourselves when you can type in a question and get so many voices and experiences? That’s more interesting than anything we could say.
What is interesting then?
M: What’s interesting is what would survive. Lyle comes from a hip-hop background—so it’s which samples survive—which ones are interesting and relevant. What’s interesting about an information bomb in general is the back catalog of information. A catchy little phrase or word combination in the future might be really interesting to people in a way it isn’t now. We played at Little Radio and the sound guy was talking about John Titor. It’s just kind of silly but an interesting idea. That a blog from the past could foretell the future. That’s kind of why I’m into all the reissues coming out now. I’ve really been digging on like Brazilian recordings that made it out when all the psych recordings had been destroyed by the government for being subversive. That Marconi Notaro record.
L: To me what’s interesting is what part is preserved and what ends up in a basement somewhere. From a sampling and beatmaking background—it’s the more obscure things that you as a producer can blow off and bring into the light.
Like the Skull Snaps.
L: Just bringing it back into circulation. Like in psych and folk with all the reissues coming out. It’s so confusing to me that appropriation is looked down upon in some circles. It’s so important to culture to bring things back out.
M: The act of appropriating in general is a political act because of all the things it brings up. Every phrase is like trademarked now—the Situationists had that line ‘revolutionize your everyday life’ and now that’s how products are being sold.
L: You just made me think of the book I’m reading now—by an author Matt’s been corresponding with. Sebastien Doubinsky. For his first draft of his new book Potemkin, he took the titles for his chapters from the songs on our record.
M: It’s interesting how the internet creates all these new worlds. When I was creating the album, I was just throwing new ideas on Rupert Murdoch Myspace and you’d get people writing me like ‘Check my work! Check my blog!’ He was like, ‘Read my writing!’ And it ended up his writing was really interesting. As I was recording, he was taking the song titles and writing along with it. But that’s my idea lyrically—by writing with disjunction or different voices, hopefully the person who is listening has more room for interpretation. ‘Commonplace Feathers’ has a line about ‘these matters shook up the community.’ The line is taken from a farming book. People are like, ‘Oh, September 11?’ It’s those things that the culture is putting in and interpreting. A lot of words and images from outside. But we’re creating them as much as any other author who is like, ‘I am the author! I’m speaking from the energy flowing through me!’ If you approach it more conceptually, you can kind of make a statement about the fact that most stuff is regurgitation. A catchy sample or a catchy meme—information that’s surviving and moving into the future.
L: In the book Sebastien wrote—the writing is very much sci-fi. The dystopia he creates in his book—the way people escape it is through this internet world that’s very commercial, where you create your character and go in their shops and buy their things, but this group of hackers has created another world in that world. I don’t wanna give it away but in the world within that world is the black market for culture. It’s where you go to buy all the records the government burned, all the books—to have a meaningful exchange with people.
M: We’ve been reading Virilio and he’s talking about scientific advancements—kind of how science is more destructive because we’ve created a way to completely destroy each other, and the advancements don’t outweigh the negatives. I was reading how in the ‘60s and ‘70s performance artists—a woman could take her top off and walk down the street and get arrested, and they’d say, ‘You’re a woman—you’re not allowed to walk around topless.’ And the woman would say, ‘Oh, I’m a man.’ That was really interesting politically and culturally then. Now with technology you can just get your ID scanned—‘No, you’re a woman!’—and get arrested. Today we have to find new forms. As a performative act, a hacker could hack in and change their gender from female to male, and then they’d walk free!
L: Just to be clear—I don’t endorse anyone hacking anything!
How does someone make music under the domination of the info bomb?
M: Making art that makes people think is really important.
Who has done that for you?
L: I was really into the first Eno and David Byrne record My Life In The Bush of Ghosts. Just the idea to me with all the sampling—you put that record on and it brings up all kinds of things—what you think about, what you haven’t—but it doesn’t preach. And they’re often using samples for simply the way they sound. So anything that encourages anything but passivity.
M: When Lyle and I take samples, that’s kind of the first concern—how it’s working sonically. For our cover of ‘Fire In Cairo’ on the Cure tribute Manimal Vinyl is putting out, we had that sample from the Egyptian workers’ strikes. We were listening to the different commentators—it was less about the language and more about the tonality of the voices, and how it affects the listening experience.
L: I’m listening to Rainbow Arabia and the fact that they take from so many sources is interesting—Middle Eastern sounds, Asian, African—that’s synthesis!
M: Danny from Rainbow Arabia imports all his keyboards from Afghanistan and Iran. We were talking about covering the names on our gear because it’s like branding, and he was like, ‘I have to leave this one—it’s Casio in Arabic.’ There’s something in that—how many people are creating your sound? People are so anti-sample or appropriation, but every synth sound—every plug-in in Logic or whatever interface—how many artists and designers went into making those sounds that we’re using? So many other people were involved in creating our sound. It seems it could go even further. Sampling text—emotive bloggers to corporate propaganda—because there’s already so many creative people giving input into the sound.
L: It’s great that in underground music circles that the obscure is always prized. Instead of rehashing old shit, you’re bringing something new into the cycle.
M: You can’t get away from appropriating. Just from being in a certain environment—all you are is a rehash. You can’t create outside what you know.
Public Enemy sampled Wattstax for sort of the same reasons.
L: The Bomb Squad is a huge thing for me. That brings to mind something Matt said. It’s impossible to not be political—the way the Bomb Squad sampled, it was so claustrophobic—and if you’re not taking anything from that, it’s your fault. There’s so much there.
You have that United States of America sample on the album—what else is in there?
M: ‘Ground’ sampled the EPA and the New York Times. Brooklyn was a really loud place. I recorded in my apartment and there was so much noise. I recorded sirens on my street, ambulances going by, chattering on street corners—and the EPA talking at you.
L: At our live show, we look for all kinds of stuff that catches our attention in the sampler, and because we’re looping through the mic, it’ll pick up some of samples I hit. We have a sample of Hugo Chavez in front of the U.N. yelling that Bush is el diablo, and that will get caught and create some new word.
The Chavez Diablo Vortex?
M: We’ve also been sampling news about the Large Hadron Collider.
L: This amazing propaganda film. ‘CERN in three minutes! CERN is good! The Large Hadron Collider will probably not destroy the universe!’
M: There’s a rap video my friend Kari turned me on to—people rapping inside of CERN.
How’s the production?
L: Godawful.
What would be an appropriate way for someone to build on something you’ve made?
M: However they want.
L: That’s part of the fun. Do whatever they wanna do with it. In a really cool alternate reality world, I imagine in fifty or a hundred years when it’s all dusty in someone’s basement—some kid will find it and sample from it and bring it back to life somehow. There’s a scene in Scratch where DJ Shadow is down in the basement he’s been digging in for years, and he’s basically like, ‘When you’re down here, show respect.’

GANGI WITH WARPAINT, LOCAL NATIVES AND ALEXANDRA HOPE ON MON., MAY 25, AT SPACELAND, 1717 SILVERLAKE BLVD., SILVERLAKE. 8:30 PM / FREE / 21+. CLUBSPACELAND.COM. GANGI’S A RELEASES ON VINYL THIS MONTH ON WHITE NOISE. VISIT GANGI AT MYSPACE.COM/GANGIMUSIC.

The public demands and Cinefamily provides! A second showing of Joe Rees’ Target Video presentation (co-presented by L.A. RECORD and featuring never-before-seen-except-at-the-7:30-pm-showing clips of first-wave punk bands like the Plugz, the Suburban Lawns and many more!) has been added and will begin at 11 PM tonight! Tickets are available ONLY at the Cinefamily box office. Cinefamily is located at 611 N. Fairfax Ave. (just south of Melrose and just north of Canter’s) and you can visit online at cinefamily.org or call at (323) 655-2510. Read our interview here to find out what wild things you’re in for!

What are we going to see at this screening that no one has ever seen before?
I have some things I’ve never shown before—for example, Suburban Lawns. They were from the Western Front festival. You have to understand that some of these don’t have the best audio quality because in those days we were working with a paper cup and a string for audio. But I tried to select the performances which were the most effective and gave a good representation of the bands. I mean, I love them all but there’s some that I care much more about. The situation was better for a band called Female Hands—they have a song called ‘Get A Job’and it’s a real pounding beautiful performance and you’ll see it in the show. Many of these bands, they may have had one or two songs that were outstanding—I usually got at least three songs from everybody but Female Hands, I got a half hour of their stuff. And then you had some nights that were better than others. When I’m working in a place like Club Foot or the Deaf Club, they had a real problem with AC power and they had a real problem with lights. But you know how it isyou get a good combination of energy and an outstanding performance, like the Flesheaters when they came on—it didn’t make any difference, it communicates. So that’s the kind of thing that goes down. You’re going to see stuff like Geza X. Geza X was the audio person for so many groups for many groups like the Screamers—he was the genius behind the Screamers. But he never really got a lot of his own recognition. Now I know Geza as friends and I admire him but I don’t think he got the breaks that he deserved. I do have a couple of Geza’s records. It was a battle between him working on audio things for the Screamers and various other groups and doing his own work. It was tough. I’ve got the Bags where you have Alice Bag in that band and you’ve got her in another group called Castration Squad. You can see the thread that goes through a lot of these things and that’s what’s really nice—that’s what I really enjoy. Now I didn’t know the L.A. scene all that well—I met these people and I wish I could have spent more time down there but I was living in San Francisco and of course I was dealing with the Dead Kennedys and the Dils and that was my main focus. Negative Trend was one of my favorites. But I always loved going to L.A. and I loved shooting it and of course I was a Screamers fan from the very first day.
Do you think they’re L.A.’s greatest ‘lost’ band?
I think so. This is the honest to God truth because I’ve looked at hundreds of punk bands from all over the world—I went to Europe and spent three years over there shooting punk bands—but the Screamers had a unique style. Tomata, Tommy Gear and K.K. and Paul really had their own unique approach and let’s face it—Tomata did plenty! He was an incredible person and he really projected a performance style—I love it. Sometimes I think it was better that they didn’t get a lot of breaks but on the other hand I’m just so grateful that I have a lot of video tape of them and a lot of audio recording of them because I’m still not through with that. Every time I go back to it, I get excited—I get goose bumps all over my arms. It’s that exciting and that’s why I opened my show at the Museum of Contemporary Art with the Screamers because I really think they had that savage, wild Los Angeles scream.
How many bands are there who were documented only by Target Video? What do you have that exists nowhere else at all?
It’s hard for me to keep up with that part of it because I work with so many different groups. I don’t compare myself to other things that are out there. I do know my experience and the people that were working with Target—you know we had a three-story brick building in the Mission District in San Francisco and people would actually live there for a while, so it was a family thing. We all had business to deal with and that’s the number one issue. We weren’t just screwing around all the time. We wanted to get serious. Especially when I think of bands like Black Flag who would come around. Whenever they would come into town, for me that was like, ‘OK, clear the decks!’ I’ve got from when they had Chavo. Black Flag was an exceptional band just because of their commitment and their dedication, you know—all the miles they put into hauling around in that van. They were great to work with. Chuck—thank God we’re still close friends and Henry, Henry is off doing his own things, but we formed a bond, and Dez, I love him—he’s another person that is so easy to get close to. When I look at—for example, today I transferred over some old material again of Black Flag and Dez is the lead singer, not Henry. But my God, they could stand against any band any day with that intensity. Dez singing—it was just kick ass. It just rips me out. I get energized—it gets me excited, it gets me really pumping. And I can watch Henry, he’s got a different style. I always tried to shoot Henry like King Kong—I tried to get a real low profile on him because he had that real muscular build and he does that song ‘Rise Above’ and I wanted to just drive that thing right through the screen. I wanted Henry coming out like King Kong belting it out.
Is that kind of energy what made you decide to start shooting punk bands?
My background is that when I was a little kid I was totally crazy about rock ‘n roll. I wanted to be a performer myself. I played a guitar and was in a band for a while. A band that was never heard of—just a local band in a little town in Iowa. We went on the local television broadcast and did a pantomime kind of thing but I was only about 11 years old then. I had this determination but I kind of lost that—lost my way for a while because I was also really into being a visual artist. I grew up in a place where it was pretty rough to be an artist period. In the middle of Iowa they always rejected those kinds of people but when I got a chance to go to art school because of my visual art abilities—my talents—I got into that right away. I got into art school as a painter and then I found my way to sculpture but I always had a total fascination with music. I had to have it in my life. When Lou Reed came out with Rock n’ Roll Animal, I thought that was the greatest breakthrough. When I heard punk rock in the ‘70s, oh my God—it just hit a button with me. That was the message. I’m a social-political animal—I’ve always had an anger about life and the way it treats people and to combine that kind of assault with music, I mean—my God, right away I was totally blown away! Obviously the Clash and the Sex Pistols came out, but even other bands like early Killing Joke and then the California bands when they rolled in one after another—the Weirdos’ ‘Life of Crime,’ it just got my blood pumping. So when I got to art school I met the Mutants—they were all friends of mine and they were forming a band and Penelope at the Art Institute was organizing the Avengers at the time and then I met David Byrne from the Rhode Island School of Design and he was doing that band Talking Heads. When he came to town, he came to the studio and it was great. He was enthusiastic about what I was doing and gave me so much support. I shot early stuff of the Talking Heads doing a free concert at Berkeley which was mind blowing. All of this kind of stuff stirred up in a big mixer and I became totally addicted to performance art and noise. We were also going through this problem the whole time. I was into performance artwork myself and the thing of it was we were going through this problem with art galleries and museums—they didn’t want to cooperate. They only wanted stuff that was saleable—that was marketable. So there was this great thing going on about alternative spaces in the ‘70s—an alternative space, an abandoned building. Some place where you could do your thing and invite your friends over to watch and it usually involved song and dance and movement and poetry. So that’s what the deal was. I worked with a lot of those people. Some of them made the change and started to deal with night clubs, some of them stayed the other way and that was what was going on in the ‘70s. And I got really excited about it and one thing led to another.
Why do you think it was necessary for Target to exist? What made this such a part of your life for years?
Back then I was a so-called established sculptor—in other words doing sculpture in galleries and art museums. That was a real disappointment because I was on a roll and had a lot of support. The so-called art critic in San Francisco was spreading the news that I was hot shit but the thing of it was that I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t getting the feedback that I wanted to get—obviously the people who would come to those kinds of events were real saps. I just didn’t like it. I found a need to communicate to my own peer group—my crowd, the people that I respected. And so that’s why I started an alternative art space myself in Oakland in the early ‘70s to present performances and artists that were what I called fringe—front-line people, people taking chances, real edgy stuff. Because it got me excited—that’s where I saw this whole thing going. So I started that and before Target Video it was called Targeted Open Support System. It was a completely different kind of idea but I was experimenting. I was trying things and so that started working. But then I realized that Oakland wasn’t the place to be—there was too much heavy crap going down. Black Panther Party was going down and there was a lot of trouble in the city so San Francisco was the place to be. So I hitched up my horses and moved to San Francisco. I get over there and as luck would have it, I found this three-story brick building in the Mission District. I met the owner and he told me that there was nothing going on here except some pretty heavy crap on the top floor and ‘I want those people out’ because it was too weird. He wanted to get rid of them so he rented me the place. It couldn’t have been better—they had a loading dock, three stories and an elevator and it was only a couple grand a month. Now I didn’t have that kind of money but I did have skills in those days—and a lot of friends—and we went in there and cleaned it and painted it and turned it into a shiny type of jewel. And I rented out the top floor at the time to a company for storage. They paid the rent.
How were you able to sustain an operation like that for so long?
Well, at the time I was on a roll with my sculpture and the art critic in San Francisco at the time got me a job as chairman of the sculpture department at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco. As a young snot-nosed guy I got this big buck job. I knew that I liked the fine arts scene but at the same time it was only just a step—it was servicing my desire. I took the job of course.
What was the Target Video TV show like? What would someone have seen if they were just flipping around the channels?
After I graduated with a master’s degree in fine art I wanted to learn more about television production because I was already stirring up the thing with Target and I realized that there was a lot of things that I didn’t know. You’ve got to be in the right place to get any information out of these people because they’re so secretive and I was always beg, borrowing and stealing. I was making one deal on one side and one deal on another to get my hands on a good camera in order to do these shoots. When I first started back in the ‘70s, the only equipment available at that time was Super 8 and if you could afford it, 16mm. So I started with that but it was really difficult because you’d always rely on the whole thing of processing the film and waiting for it to come back to see what you got. It was a real challenge. But back in the ‘70s when I was in graduate school, the Sony Corporation donated a new device called the Portapak and it was one of the first single tube black-and-white cameras. And I did some stuff to alter the camera. Once I found out the limitations of shooting at night—a tech geek guy at my campus, he was always trying to give me advice and he was like, ‘Look, put in one of these security camera tubes because they are more sensitive to light.’ and you could shoot in night clubs which sometimes had only a little light. You’ll see, for example, the Dickies—when they first hit the stage, the lights from the stage would kind of blow their faces out so you get this black background with white silhouettes but as I adjust the aperture to try to deal with it—because it is such a radical change—it comes into zone and it looks pretty damn good. But at least we could shoot those! Otherwise we couldn’t shoot them at all—the early video cameras required so much light and so much intensity, it was a nightmare. So of course I signed up at Merritt College and started to take their video class and their TV production so I could have that access. Through that access I found out about a free cable channel that would service the Bay Area through San Francisco called Cable 25. Most of the shows on there were cooking shows or how to breast feed your children—the Maharishi had a show on Wednesday nights. Well lo and behold, I got my little piece—it was an hour-long section right after the Maharishi. When I first started—you have to understand this was the beginning of video, the beginning of editing, the beginning of cameras, but I had this determination. I said, ‘I want to get this stuff out there.’ The first shows were a lot of poetry and art performance combined with punk music but it was a mixture and then I’d follow Maharishi. The problem with the Maharishi was that by the time he finished with his show, it was always kind of sleepy time and I would go in there with my friends wearing our leather jackets and our defiant look and there was the Maharishi who was just his sweet person but it really irritated the hell out of me. I had to come up with an opening to my show that really was different than the Maharishi because he was doing the lotus position. So I came up with the idea of using a machine gun from an old movie and I would edit this montage of all the faces and issues of social political things that I wanted to talk about during the show—I would open the show with about a 3 minute blast of machine gun fire and it was so irritating. It was so completely the opposite of the Maharishi that at first people were totally distraught at the TV station—they thought, ‘What the hell is he doing? We got everyone all relaxed into a coma and up comes Target Video!’ And it was this punk thing. But listen—the Maharishi being the all-knowing all-wonderful guy thought I had a great idea.
So you got the spiritual support of the Maharishi?
Yes, I did! Goddammit, I swear!
Did he ever mention how much he liked Crime or anything?
No, no, it didn’t go that far. He knows how to handle anything—the point of it was that it served my purpose because we did have to shock the hell out of people to get some attention.
How were you ever able to get Crime into San Quentin? Or the Cramps into the Napa State Mental Hospital?
Because times were different then. We’ve got such an anal-retentive society these days you cant hardly do a thing. We’re destroying creativity—we are really destroying creativity with all the laws and restrictions. It’s a nightmare. Even my own kids—I am so sad about what is going on. It is so difficult to be creative. In the ‘70s people were begging. California was an open place, they poured tons of money into colleges, into art programs. I don’t even know if you were born yet, but believe me I would go to universities as a guest lecturer and they would have these incredible foundries for casting metal and making art. And they would have these incredible studios for graduate artists and they’d pay you a bunch of money—you could actually make a good living being an art teacher. The only problem was that it was still really conservative and they weren’t taking the big chances but that’s cool because when you have a situation like that it allows young snot-nosed people to come and say, ‘I want to try and do something different.’ So that is why we had a whole organization of people who were trying to think of ways to break out of the mold and that’s why when we contacted different places like San Quentin prison. I know all about those prison programs because I worked there for a number of years putting these things together—they were so happy to see you, you couldn’t believe it. That was an organization called Bread and Roses that used to exist in the Bay Area—they put together a lot of shows. Some of them real high-end commercial, some of them art-performance type of things but they were just into the arts and like I said, no one got sued in those days. People were willing to take chances—people were open-minded and that was what was so wonderful about the times. If you could come up with an idea like that, they were happy to hear it. The same with the Napa State Mental Hospital. You think that could go on today? No way! There would be like fifteen lawyers standing outside the gate licking their chops. One of the greatest things about that event—even to this day I am so moved when I watch that video over and over. But the thing of it is—those people who were going through such a heavy experience in life and were confined to that mental institution, the freedom and the happiness that they had that day during that event was almost like a miracle! It was almost like watching something biblical—something from a Cecil B. DeMille film but in a real sense, a true sense. Nobody was acting and I have never seen anything in my life so moving and I’ve been told that a thousand times. We were at the right place at the right time but we had the right thing in our hearts. We wanted to have an experience and it all came together with magic.
Are those the twin pinnacles of the Target videography?
There is one that you left out that was extremely important and that was the Mutants at the School For the Deaf. That was mind-blowing and you had to be there because the happiness and the joy on the kids’ faces and everybody. See, when you get this reciprocal thing going down—nobody made any money! It was the magic of putting these elements together. The Mutants doing a free show for deaf kids. The kids responding because it was exciting and nobody ever pays attention to them plus the energy that the Mutants generated because of their music and the kids responding to it—it was just a phenomenal experience. If you could bottle that experience it would be worth millions of dollars an ounce! If mankind could be like that, wouldn’t we be in a better place right now?
Why do you feel that punk was such a positive humanistic thing? And what do you think of its casual reputation for destruction and nihilism?
That’s because there are so many people trying to cash in on it and trying to find a way to market it and in reality the only good thing—and I got kind of bitter about the way things were going because I could see that there wasn’t enough of that true punk spirit that existed back in the ‘70s—but you know what I think? There are new kids who are innocent and idealistic enough to be able to generate the same kind of feeling. And I’m thinking of my own two boys who have a punk band that doesn’t have a name yet.
Have you filmed them yet?
Not really but they’re 14 and they’re getting close because they’ve been playing their guitars now for about three years. And then I’m thinking of Chip Dil and Tony Dil of the Dils and his son Dewey who has a band called the Plimptons and I heard them—they’re incredible because they’ve got that raw excitement and that energy. And I think if we encourage that, if we really support that—if you think of something that is really clean, idealistic and fresh, that’s where it’s at. That is gold! And the problem with the world we live in is we have a tendency to tarnish everything right away and exploit it to the point that it becomes dirty. It’s not good for us to think of anything like that because if we don’t have these fresh things in our life, then we don’t have this wonderful excitement of creativity. We need something fresh like that.
Why is the time right now for this Target Video resurgence? It seems like there was nothing for years and then suddenly the vaults crack open.
Because I’m not happy with the way things are going. That’s why. I’m not happy at all—I just explained to you what I do believe in. I believe in the young people—I believe in really trying to leave these kids alone and it’s just horrible how we trash the youth. They can see this world and they can see we have a lot of problems. We need a way out and we can’t seem to do it because we’re too prejudiced and I’m saying the only thing I can see as an artist is to open up these doors and let these kids talk and leave them alone.
Does that connect to what Target was doing in the ‘70s?
Well, it does. I was in the ‘60s and the ‘60s was a very exciting time—we had a purpose. We had an army of people going in the same direction and I really think it accomplished a lot of good things but then things got real convoluted. Then in the ‘70s you had another rebirth of excitement—and personally I have to say that the ‘70s were one of the freshest and most creative times. Because not only music but visual art, the poetry and all the posters and John Denney designing clothes for the Weirdos. There were so many levels and it was a profound movement of time that never got the recognition because it was saleable enough right away. We might even see a revisit to that in a phony way.
What kind of practical things do you want to communicate to people now who are still working on these same kinds of things?
To be honest I don’t think this show is going to communicate all of it—I think this show is more like a primitive MTV. I talked to the people at the Cinefamily Theater and they want to give a good example of a lot of bands they’ve never seen before—but for me to try to cram 50 bands into two hours, for God’s sakes that’s not Target Video show! That’s cramming 50 bands into two hours and that’s more like a primitive MTV. So I’m saying this is not really the Target Video show. What I’m trying to do is make people happy because a lot of people are curious to this band or that band they’ve never heard of. But give me a chance—if I get more support, and I’m going to do it anyways, but if I get more support I’m trying to break into a new audience. I think there are a lot of young artists out there and I’m trying to pump up a bit more excitement. I might be moving to L.A. before all this is over—that’s the master plan. I don’t know where else to go. I have got this humongous library of material and to be honest, for the last 30 years I’ve lived in Paris, I’ve been in New York, all over the place, and to be quite honest L.A. is where it’s at. That’s the only place that I could see where this stuff could be put to good use and inspire more creativity.
Why do you say that?
Because there ain’t a goddamn thing going on anywhere else really. There’s all that bullshit going on in London, the French are sucking each other breasts, San Francisco is all involved with who’s got the most money—I mean, that’s not gonna work. Artists can’t survive in an environment where you can’t even rent a studio. But at least L.A., for some reason will hire people and put them to work and they can continue as a creative person and besides that, what can I say? Most of the people that I know in the punk rock scene—the older crowd—are living down there.
What do you want to happen to your archive? What’s the ideal future for everything you filmed?
Without sounding commercial or crass, the big dream at this point is to put together a downloadable website and an underground library of visual images of music that people can download and view when they want to in their home—a digital Internet library. I have a rough estimate of my library—I have over 300 tapes that are in ¾ format and I have another 75 or 80 of ½ inch reel-to-reel tape. Not all of those have been transferred over because of the format jump. A format jump to ¾ and a format jump to DV which I’m doing these days—basically what I’ve been doing over the past few years is transferring this stuff over to digital. By hook or by crook! Either I try to talk a museum curator into using their facility or the college where I work—whatever it takes. The thing about it is that no matter what, it does inspire fun and activity—it just does. The beauty about L.A. people to me is that you can put on some music and a video or whatever—get some people together and things happen. They talk and make things happen—they want to make things happen. It’s an enjoyable thing. It’s a part of life, business or whatever you want to call it—it’s just a good thing. You don’t have to be judgmental. We’re not anal-retentive like the New York scene, oh my God! L.A. people take care of themselves and it’s not a perfect world, but the point of it is that I still have fun there. I’ve been to enough events and I’m like a hound dog—if I smell something good, I go for it and this is where it’s at. Thank God I have Jackie Sharp down there. Look, I’m never going to be a perfect politician—not everyone is going to like my point of view, but at the same time I do love art and I do love music and I do love L.A. bands. There are so many bands that mean so much to me with what they’ve done. I want to stimulate—I want to be a part of it! I want to stimulate the arts scene and I can because I might be a bit of an old soldier but I’m still a pain in the ass.

JOE REES AND TARGET VIDEO PRESENT ‘RAW POWER’ ON THU., APR. 30, AT CINEFAMILY, 611 N. FAIRFAX AVE., LOS ANGELES. 7:30 PM / $12 / ALL AGES. CINEFAMILY.ORG. TICKETS AVAILABLE HERE. VISIT TARGET VIDEO AT TARGETVIDEO.BLOGSPOT.COM.