I wanted to post a video of “When Doves Cry” because it’s a song that you really should sink your teeth into in a way that you possibly never have before and experience it anew. It’s a crazy song. So, naturally, I went to PrinceRevolutionTV on Youtube and while the video is there, the song is not. A little message pops up at the beginning and says
(original song blocked by Prince because he doesn’t want his music on Youtube)

So instead there’s 5 minutes and 55 seconds of some sort of euro club music.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkbegMWGoj4

I even looked up Prince4UBaby’s Youtube page, same song. Nevertheless, Los Angeles awaits 21 nights of Prince. Or the band not formerly known as Prince’s band…

—Daiana Feuer

luke mcgarry

Guitarist Matty McLoughlin of the Soft Pack prefers delivering pizza to jerks from high school to getting yelled at by contractors in a Home Depot call center. He speaks now about eating pancakes at Prince’s house and his affinity for Steely Dan’s weird pervert comedy. This interview by Lainna Fader.

How did you very first get involved with FYF?
We saw he was doing Fuck Yeah Fest—he was doing cool stuff so we emailed him. When we were still called The Muslims, we were supposed to play this show in Echo Park but Mr. Free [of Mr. Free and the Satellite Freakout] got super free the fucking day before and was jumping on cars in his underwear and throwing beer and we ended up playing some after party at someone’s house instead. That was our first Fuck Yeah Fest show.
Of everyone playing the FYF holiday party who would you be most inclined to invite over to a family dinner?
No Age. Those guys are really nice! They’d do well in a family scenario.
What’s the best Christmas present you ever got as a kid?
I got a guitar when I was 13. I thought that was the coolest gift ever. My mom’s a flight attendant so we’d have Christmas earlier cause she had to fly. We’d do it on the 23^rd and then we’d go wherever she had to go. I remember that year I was really proud to carry around the guitar case. I thought I was really cool.
That’s totally adorable.
I was walking around the airport and I wouldn’t let anyone else carry it.
What did your 10-show marathon earlier this year tell you about LA?
That it’s really supportive. Ten shows is a lot but a lot of people came to a lot of them. It was a long day. People were drunk from like 9 in the morning til 2 in the morning. L.A. hangs hard.
What was the greatest story a fan told you to get you to play their house on that tour?
There was this one person who volunteered their boss’ house. It was a chain of emails, and he was saying how great it would be if we played his boss’ house. Then his actual boss started replying to the chain and was like “Who is The Soft Pack?” I thought that was funny. I like being called The Soft Pack.
How close are you to getting to play a show at Prince’s house?
Not very close, the record didn’t do that well! That would be cool. He does make pancakes. That whole thing is real, that sketch about him making pancakes and playing basketball. I know he had Adam Levine from Maroon 5 over a few years ago to jam but he said he was too tired for pancakes. I don’t think Prince would be impressed with our shit. I’d play basketball and eat pancakes and watch him play but I think we need to start writing better music for Prince to like it.
If Prince offered you pancakes what would you cook for him if he came over to your place?
I’m not much of a chef. Dave, our bassist is a really good cook. I’d probably make him tofu and vegetables drenched in hot sauce. That’s like the only thing I know how to make. Or eggs. Dave would probably make him something really nice like feta cheese. He’s really good with that stuff. He’s a mid-western dude. He’d probably want some sort of….something more hearty. He’s real skinny, that’s just how he is, but I think he’s more of a man’s man than most people think. Like a cheeseburger. He’d probably want a cheeseburger. Something American and hearty.
How do you feel about bands that try their hand at comedy, or comedians who start up bands?
I think all my favorite bands have a really good sense of humor and that’s definitely something I like. Not necessary like Gallagher.
Not into smashing watermelons?
More subtly funny bands. The Rolling Stones are funny. The Beatles are funny. Actually I think Steely Dan is really funny. Like weird pervert funny, which I appreciate more and more with each year passing. We were just talking about this the other day. I couldn’t appreciate Steely Dan in high school but as I got older it makes more sense than when I was 14. You just get weirder. I think it’s really stupid when people try to be the rock comic or the rock athlete. It usually gets cheesy. But those two worlds—music and comedy—are pretty akin to each other.
Your roommate said that you make yourself all pissed off before you play so you can really go out and be awesome. How do you do that?
A lot of the songs were written out of frustration, like every day stuff like not liking your job. We play these songs so many fucking times so many days in a row, it kind of makes you go on autopilot. Before we play I try and think about what we were doing when we wrote those songs and try not to take it for granted that we get to play it live. We’ve been touring a lot the last few years and it’s gotten to be kind of easy. When we first started we’d have a show once every two weeks and that was our half our. The rest of the week sucked balls but that half hour was ours and no one could tell us what to do. I try and remember that. Plus I’m kind of ornery anyways.
What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?
I worked at Home Depot in the call center with a headset. Contractors would call looking for some specific kind of nail and I’m not a handy man at all, I had no valid opinion on that kind of thing, so I’d just get yelled at all day by contractors and fucking people all day for being inept at my job. I understood, though—I was terrible at it. I think I worked there for a month and then quit to work at a pizza place which was much more fun.
I would imagine delivering pizzas would be less frustrating than having people yell at you all day.
Yeah, it was good. I moved back to my hometown and had to deliver pizzas sometimes to people from my high school which sucked. Like people that didn’t like me then definitely enjoyed the fact that I was delivering them pizza. Other than that it was a lot of fun. We wrote a lot of the Muslims songs and we made demos and just hung out drinking beers and goofing off.
Is it less shitty now running into people from high school now that you aren’t bringing them pizza?
We played the Del Mar Racetrack this summer and I saw a whole bunch of people from high school there. They definitely thought I was a lot cooler. They wanted to hang out and get drinks. People are a lot nicer when your band is doing well.
That’s a little sad.
Yeah, it is a little sad, but I’ll take it. It’s better than delivering pizzas to them!

THE SOFT PACK WITH NO AGE, OFF!, CRYSTAL ANTLERS, LA SERA, DANGERS, COMADRE, LOVELY BAD THINGS AND GUESTS AT THE FYF HOLIDAY PARTY ON SAT., DEC. 11, AT THE GLASS HOUSE AND ALADDIN’S JR., 200 W. 2^ND ST., POMONA. 7 PM / $12 / ALL AGES. FYFFEST.COM.

Download: Dam-Funk “Hood Pass Intact”

(off Toeachizown Vol. 4: Hood out now on Stones Throw)

Dam-Funk grew up on “Scooby Doo” and sessioned for Westside Connection but his life’s work was and will be the stewardship of the true spirit of funk. He’s remixed Baron Zen and Animal Collective and he’s just about to release the 5XLP monster Toeachizown on Stones Throw. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

What happened when you saw your first UFO?
Dam-Funk: It was an orb—a light. It wasn’t just me who saw it. It had an orange glow and it flew across the sky—and nobody talked about it! I still don’t know what it was. But it struck my interest. I always knew better things were out there. I made a song about it—‘Brookside Park’ on Vol. 4—the one called Hood. Listen to the lyrics and you’ll get the visual and how the music sounded to me that day. It changed my life. I started listening to Art Bell’s ‘Coast To Coast.’
How does an experience like that affect what you do with music?
Dam-Funk: That’s part of my inspiration. The reason there are so many distractions on earth—like ‘social networking’ and shit—is that they want you not to concentrate on what else is going on. Because they already know! We get to muddle in Kanye and Taylor Swift but there are other things going on! Sometimes you get stories here and there—‘They found other planets!’ But there’s got to be something beyond what we’re muddling through with this bullshit. I wanna create something now and later on when we get our heads together, maybe my music will be the soundtrack—when we have clear minds and concentrate on other things. Not the petty gossip airhead experience. People are excited about the upper surface, but that’s just the busted pie crust. I wanna be the inside of the pie, not the outside crust!
What’s inside the pie?
Dam-Funk: I wanna deal with mass people thinking along the same lines. If we need change, we’ve all got to get together and make it happen. I got this thing called N.O.N.C.A.T.—it’s funny to some people but I try to practice it everyday. It stands for ‘Not One Negative Comment Action or Thought.’ Let’s at least contribute to getting rid of all this stupid shit going on here! You don’t have to be happy-go-lucky howling in peoples’ faces, but be positive—contribute to a higher level of thinking and the world will start changing. It doesn’t have to be all mystical. But this world can be better—let’s try and do something!
What’s the connection between funk and science-fiction?
Dam-Funk: Funk is the real music of the urban city. Not R&B and not soul—those are great genres of black expression. Trust me. But funk is the one that even expands it more. It was always the people who were a little bit different—people who went out and found new shit. Unfortunately, a lot of drugs in the late ’70s knocked us out of the box. Who woulda known? ‘Crack—it’s the cool new shit!’ Everybody fell for it. A lot of people never recovered. But it was definitely deeper than soul and R&B. Soul and R&B were more about hits. Funk had more real shit inside. It was more a backroom type of expression—the smell of sex! Even sadness. ‘He’s in a funk!’
Dawn Silva told us true funk is hard to control—do you agree?
Dam-Funk: I think she has a point. But one day I would hope people open up. But in a way, I don’t give a fuck if they don’t catch on. Like I talk about Gary Wilson—he doesn’t need to be on the radio. He’s cool—he has his own crowd. Funk will always have its own crowd.
You were funk’s lone defender in L.A.—what’s it like to be the guy who won’t give up?
Dam-Funk: There’s always the truth out there. It happened to Caron Wheeler. Erykah Badu came with the same concept—the headwraps, the look straight from Africa, the incense-burning. And Caron Wheeler was the first. Sometimes it’s timing and sometimes people aren’t ready … and sometimes people do your shit and do it better! But I always wondered—who was the OTHER James Brown? Maybe before him—in a city where they didn’t ever quite get it? Or the other Prince down in San Diego somewhere, but Prince happened to get signed? You can’t complain but it just happens. I thank God Peanut Butter Wolf allowed me to get my side of the story out. I know a lot of people do the ’80s-influenced thing. I guarantee when you listen to Toeachizown, it’s not even ’80s—it’s modern funk. I’m not trying to recreate. I wanna give somebody something new. It’s still the original inspiration, but I try to continue where it got broken off!
Where was it broken off?
Dam-Funk: After P-Funk was interrupted at Warner and they went to regulate on Clinton. ‘Man, you’re a little too up there.’ The concept was getting crazy and getting peoples’ minds open and they had business problems, too. They did revitalize with ‘Atomic Dog.’ But those albums were like pre-Public Enemy—The Electric Spanking of War Babies in 1981 and no one knows it because they didn’t promote it! It was right after Trombipulation—the Parliament album with the elephant nose—and they just regulated on George. ‘Hold on!’ After that, RUN-DMC dropped on Profile and that changed the game, so all the majors were like, ‘Fuck funk—too many big-ass bands! Too many horns!’ It was still made on independent labels—slicked up and geared to dance and that was boogie! Boogie took over—Prelude, Salsoul, West End—and it wasn’t called disco because they’d burn disco records.
Why do you think people felt like they had to physically destroy those records?
Dam-Funk: It could be as simple as people saying, ‘We couldn’t enjoy it.’ Or more deep—‘This is some shit that gays and people of color and whites can all come together—this is dangerous! We can’t have that happen!’ I don’t wanna say conspiracy but you wonder! Radio went nuts on disco—too much disco! Then real labels like Philadelphia International and Salsoul got lumped in with all the major labels and fake groups—fake disco! But Teddy Pendergrass and the O’Jays, they didn’t call it disco. It was black dance music! A 4/4 beat and people could dance—uptempo R&B and it was great! But it was thrown under the rug—bringing too many people together.
How do you know when it’s fake?
Dam-Funk: You can always tell. I’m gonna always be changing. I’ll always be funk-based, but I like too much other stuff to be the same cat. The next album probably won’t be the same sound. You can tell when they’re a copycat. Now everybody is into an 808/Lil Wayne sound and a blippy beat sound and trippy club music—you know, people wanna get in and get money. I can’t be mad—it’s a capitalist country—but don’t you have integrity, you fuck?
Is this why you’ll shout out the names of the musicians when you’re doing a DJ set?
Dam-Funk: I feel the people who did the work didn’t get enough props. And it’s not for the artists alone—it’s for the listening public. If I’m at a club and I play a certain song, they might be timid to come up and ask. People deserve to know who the artists are.
Is Toeachizown your life’s work?
Dam-Funk: I feel funk has never been given an opportunity to be released like this. That’s why I give it up to Stones Throw—funk was always on a major or a real small label, and this time it’s on a small label but in a new era where a small label can do something like this. The verdict is out, but I hope when the judge’s hammer slams down, people will look back and say, ‘This dude stuck to his guns and he did a funk record from beginning to end. And it wasn’t just funk—he even did new wave rock! The funk had all the influences!’ Prince—‘Let’s Pretend We’re Married’—that’s new wave! Funkadelic did rock songs—‘Cosmic Slop!’ That was killing a lot of early metal! I’m being positive but it’s definitely not gonna be a Mayer Hawthorne out-of-the-box hit. But I’d rather have the slow burn. Ten years from now—‘Man, that dude did what he believed in!’
You sessioned for Ice Cube—what did you learn from him?
Dam-Funk: That was some real shit! I learned what people respect—it’s the passion. The fact that you mean serious business about your writing. I even look at ‘Dateline NBC’ sometimes—the host is so fucking into his shit! Me and my lady will be rollin’—‘That’s what I’m talking about! Look how he pronounces his words!’ We’d laugh at first but that dude’s killing it. ‘Dateline’—that’s that shit! With the realest cats—game recognizes game! They respect you if you’re true to your shit. Once you try and fake it, that’s when your ass gets whipped. They knew I could play keys and they saw my talent. I wasn’t scared because I grew up on that shit. I’d see the guns and be like, ‘OK, cool—no big deal.’ When they see you ain’t tripping, you’re invited to the party. ‘I don’t give a fuck how you look—that motherfucker is cool!’ When I do my own thing, those cats are like, ‘Cool—I knew you were gonna do that funk stuff!’
What do the guys in Animal Collective most have in common with Ice Cube?
Dam-Funk: They stick to their guns. Cube—I definitely respected that cat. He was born the same day as me! You could tell he was serious about his business. A lot of people thought those guys were buffoons. This was the same guy who went to Priority and took a bat—he was really serious about getting his money—and busted the window! But sometimes you gotta do that. I hate to say it and I don’t wanna do it, but I’ve been in situations where you have to handle shit. You have to keep respect and integrity on your side. If people see you respect your life and work, they’ll respect you as well. ‘You can’t do that to me—I care!’ Animal Collective started on the porch and then got into drum machines and atmosphere and electronics—now look!
Where do you and Todd Rundgren overlap as musicians?
Dam-Funk: He has heart! It wasn’t about hits, even though he could make hits if he chose to. That’s the aesthetic I like to align myself with. I’m the same person as back in the day when I was riding my bike to the record store in Pasadena. Hits are hits, and they’re great! But the music I gravitate to—maybe because I’m a weirdo?—it’s not on the radio. At a certain point, you grow out of the radio. ‘I love music so much that I’m gonna look for this rare 12” that only did 500 copies!’ That independent release—that’s some of the most magical music out there. No matter how much money or accolades I might get, I always wanna do music for that person who was me. That kid who ventures off looking for music that touches their soul.
What was the first concert you ever went to where you felt that way?
Dam-Funk: Kiss and Mötley Crüe at the Universal Amphitheatre. I couldn’t believe the way Paul Stanley was cussing! ‘This is not like the records!’—I finally got it. They couldn’t put those lyrics on the record—this was before N.W.A. busted the door open. But at the concert, it was like, ‘We’re gonna party tonight, motherfuckers! Make some fucking noise!’ It was incredible, man. I thought, ‘You can really be YOU in concert!’
How do you feel when you’re on stage?
Dam-Funk: I’m on for the people. They paid their money and they’re seeing art. It’s like in an art gallery—I’m the painting they’re looking at, so I have to give them the visual and audio satisfaction to experience their night.
What do you think of L.A.’s music now? Bands like HEALTH and clubs like Low End Theory that are connecting all different kinds of music together?
Dam-Funk: I think L.A.’s got a pretty healthy scene right now. People wanna work together and cross-pollinate. The Internet has diversified things. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, it wasn’t as close-knit. Now black-white-Filipino-Asians-Middle Easterners whatever—we all hang out in the same places. We all communicate. So why not have the music come together and feed this grand experiment? I coulda took my shit straight to a major, but Stones Throw opened the door for a more experimental thing. It’s not just me—it’s about everybody! I do shows in Portland or San Francisco and there’s all colors in there. And it wasn’t lopsided—not like R&B shows where it’s only one side or ultra-rock shows where it’s only one side. It’s everybody! That’s what I hope the future is. I don’t wanna be too contrived—like, ‘Oh, God, this is kind of corny!’ But that’s the natural direction—so far, so good!
Who in L.A. would you most want to work with now?
Dam-Funk: SFV Acid. I like him a lot. I’m just trying to play my part and contribute what I can do. I’m watching everybody and working with different people. The closest thing I have solidified is me and Nite Jewel are gonna do something on Stones Throw together. She’s my buddy! And Cole who was also in Ariel Pink’s band—Ariel and Cole are chill with me. When we were in O.C., we were laughing together about Phantasm—horror movies! We’re all connected more than people think. When the time comes, everything happens naturally and people see that connection, you know what I mean?
You’re a Gemini—what’s your hidden side?
Dam-Funk: That’s one thing my lady laughs about. One side is positive and I treat people great. When I walk with my lady, I walk on the curb side! I respect my elders, even when I’m announcing songs and telling people the groups! But there’s another darker side. If somebody crosses the line, I definitely wanna whup ass, but I gotta check that! I haven’t run into any negativity. The only thing I’ve been hearing is that I better be prepared for critique. Where I’m from, if someone calls me out on my name and gets too crazy, you go looking for ‘em! Now I’m a recording artist—I can’t be out chasing every blogger.
Maybe it would be a better world if you did.
Dam-Funk: Yeah, I know! But I can’t waste my time on that. You know what cures me? I just look at Obama. I’m not saying he’s the Savior, but you know how many hate mails and threats he gets each day? And he walks those stairs looking like nothing is bothering him. This dude is taking the brunt of all types of shit and still looks as cool as possible. You gotta brush it off. I’m trying. I’m not perfect. It’s definitely more the light I try and share.
Is that why you bring Sprite and candy every time you visit Stones Throw?
Dam-Funk: You heard about that? I do it because I know they’re working hard! When I was at jobs, I woulda loved that. ‘Why doesn’t anybody do anything special for us? We’re working hard for these fools—can somebody do something?’ So that’s why I do it—thanks a lot, guys!

DAM-FUNK ON SUN., NOV. 1, AT AMOEBA RECORDS, 6400 SUNSET BLVD., HOLLYWOOD. 4 PM / FREE / ALL AGES. AMOEBARECORDS.COM. DAM-FUNK’S TOEACHIZOWN 5XLP RELEASES TUE., OCT 27, ON STONES THROW. VISIT DAM-FUNK AT STONESTHROW.COM/DAMFUNK OR MYSPACE.COM/DAMFUNK.

Download: Nino Moschella “What U Do 2 Me”

(off Boom Shadow out now on Ubiquity Records)

Nino Moschella started out four-tracking funk-soul that sounded like Sly and Shuggie and Stevie in a mountain shack at midnight and exploded into fidelity once he visited the wider world. His newest Boomshadow is out now on Ubiquity. This interview by Daiana Feuer.

If you were to make a soundtrack for a ’70s crime movie like Superfly or Jackie Brown, who do you want cast in it?
I would make a crime movie that has the Muppets in it. That would be cool. Maybe not Kermit and Miss Piggy but I want to make a gangster crime movie with all Jim Henson-type muppets. That would be silly.
You sort of have an accent from the East Coast.
My dad is from the Bronx. I’m born and raised in California. A lot of people say my accent sounds East Coast. It’s my dad for sure. And my mom’s from Minnesota. My dad’s overbearing. Not really, but he’s very influential, and I guess it comes out. I’m from Cali though. I love it here. I don’t think I’ll ever move. Are you from California?
Florida!
Oh, my grandfolks moved there when they got old. It’s hot and humid. I mean, it’s hot in Fresno—gets 110. But it’s dry heat. When we go to Florida in the middle of the summer, it’s humid and terrible. Man, and big old cockroaches. They’re humongous. Tropical bugs. I couldn’t stand the humidity. You’re always wet.
What kind of bugs are common in Oakland?
No cockroaches. We have mice and flies. I haven’t seen a cockroach. We had mice for a minute but they’re gone now—luckily. I put out some traps. We were expecting our two mice to multiply but they are gone.
It only takes mice two or three weeks to spring babies. In fact, rodents are the most successful mammal on the planet. I guess they didn’t like our house.
Who is the baby chanting on your song ‘I Love Myself?’
That’s my daughter, Stella. Me and my wife and her were in my home studio where I finished the album. Stella was playing the drums. She likes to have a microphone and hear her voice through the speakers. We were asking her questions: ‘What’s your dog’s name? Who are your friends? What do you love?’ That was how the vocals came about. She was like, ‘I love myself! I love the people!’ It was one of those happy accidents that came out. It’s a spoken-word Stella piece. She’s super musical. She’s going to be four in August.
You seem interested in doing things a little bit out of the box. ‘Ok, I am going to stick a song with my baby in between all these funky tracks…’
I am not trying to do anything that is status quo. There’s no point. If I don’t feel like it’s moving things forward, then it’s not worthwhile. Mainstream music might be satisfied with mediocrity and stuff, but for me, if it doesn’t challenge me, then naturally by extension it’s not a challenge. It’s got to perk my ears. But at the same time, I’m not doing it to be like, ‘This song is this type of song and it fits in this type of category and so on.’ When I put a collection of music together, one of my goals is to personally express something I think is fresh. That also lends itself to a flow. The stuff that comes naturally and easily most times is the stuff that is exciting and fresh and new and unexpected. It doesn’t come from a lot of struggle and laboring over it. The stuff you over-think and deliberate is the stuff that can fit into a box—because you have those constraints. Freedom allows you to do things that are fresh as opposed to doing things that have already been done.
Your stuff isn’t hard to take in. It’s digestible but I can pick out the little details happening at once.
I don’t want to create music that’s just heady. ‘Oh my gosh, this is so complicated and out there that it’s inaccessible.’ One of the goals is to make music that you can listen to easily and you don’t have to go to that place where you’re totally listening to every little thing. But if you want to delve into it, it’s there. That’s the challenge as a music maker. Off the bat you don’t have to get theoretical about it to dig, but you want to create something long-lasting so people can come back and hear something new. The music that I love the most is the stuff that originally just struck me and made me feel good. It gives me an emotion or something I can relate to. What I come back to are the intricacies and that brings up feelings too. That’s the beauty of art in general. It’s not a one-shot thing. It’s not just, ‘Alright, listen to this, put it down, you’re done with it.’ I think as a culture in time, that’s naturally what we’re doing. We get something, put it down, and it’s disposable. Good music isn’t supposed to be disposable.
What’s a record you’ve held onto since forever?
There’s so many! That’s a beautiful thing. There’s so much good music and it continues being created. The first record my mom bought me was Kind Of Blue by Miles Davis. She bought it for me when I was ten. I listen to that weekly to this day. That’s the best selling jazz record of all time. Thriller, you know—speaking of which, Michael Jackson was the first musician and entertainer that I consciously said, ‘Oh man, I want to do this. I want to dance.’ I was in grade school, and popping and breaking was huge. I heard Michael and I was like, ‘I wanna pop. I want to sing.’ He was an icon. David Bowie, later, Prince. My mom got me the red Thriller jacket. It wasn’t actual leather—that shit ended up falling apart.
Your mom seems pretty cool.
She was totally cool. When I was maybe eleven or twelve, my mom took me—a kid—to Purple Rain, which was very controversial when it came out. It was like, ‘Do you know what this movie is about?’ Prince and Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder—and Etta James was a huge influence. This was just the music that was in my house. Along with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and Jimi Hendrix and Coltrane and Miles and Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus. My folks were into this stuff. My dad is a musician. They met in Greenwich Village. My dad was a performer at the same time when bop was in the Village. They were seeing Coltrane and Miles. Coltrane kissed my mother’s hand. Bop was huge and folk was huge in their world. That’s what they were digging. It was all going down in the same places. There was a club called the Bitter End that my dad was playing at, and Nina Simone was playing there, and at the same time Bob Dylan was playing there. Music wasn’t, ‘This is folk and this is jazz, and that’s where this goes and that goes there.’ It was all in the same club and area and thriving. Luckily that influence of my folks was accessible to me growing up. I feel blessed for that.
Did your parents give you any advice on what music is all about?
What I’ve learned is that music is about communication. Music is about expressing yourself. My dad didn’t want me to be in the music business. It wasn’t until I started making my own records and putting my stuff on the forefront and him being able to hear it, and that was just a handful of years ago. This was after I became a man—he was like, ‘Alright, you really want to do this? OK, I’m proud of you.’ He always supported me playing music for the sake of playing music but it was clear he didn’t want me to make a living at it because it’s such a hard thing. Very few people actually make it and many of them at the end of it lose everything. It’s not something you get into because you want to make money and be successful. You get into it because you have to. You will do this regardless of what’s happening around you. He knew it was a hard life because he went through it. I mean—now he is a school teacher. He still gigs but he was doing music as a living for twenty years and it was really hard to feed his family. He didn’t want me to live that life. But he realizes I understand that it’s up and down and it’s for the love of it.
Not everyone can articulate their life’s meaning that way.
It’s taken time. When I was a teenager, my idea was, ‘I wanna be famous.’ The important things with time become clear. I know for sure regardless of all the other stuff that exists in this business, I do my thing. I know it’s crucial to my existence to write songs, record them, perform them. That is the stability in it all. Nobody has control of that except for me. Nobody can tell me whether I can do that or not. Regardless of success—and maybe I am not a huge success. This is an underground thing after all. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is you stay focused on the point of it and the point of it is to express it and get it out, and if that’s to 100 people in your immediate community or to a million people globally—the point is that it has to be created for me to feel good about myself and to feel like I’m contributing to the world. I got to make music and that’s how it is. It’s still hard and all that other shit and you can’t ignore that, but when it’s all said and done, I know why I’m doing this. Sorry—this has gotten heavy.

L.A. RECORD PRESENTS NINO MOSCHELLA WITH CHIN CHIN AND ARMEN NALBANDIAN PLUS DJs ON FRI., JULY 31, AT THE DAKOTA LOUNGE, 1026 WILSHIRE BLVD., SANTA MONICA. 7 PM / $10 / 21+. DAKOTALOUNGE.COM. NINO MOSCHELLA’S BOOMSHADOW IS OUT NOW ON UBIQUITY. VISIT NINO MOSCHELLA AT NINOMOSCHELLA.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/NINOMOSCHELLA.

Stream: Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey “Here And Now”

(from hERE aND nOW out now on Bar/None)

Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple were (legendarily) the only people in North Carolina who bought Big Star albums the very first time around, and they’d team up most famously for the power-pop band the dB’s. (Stamey would also release Chris Bell’s ‘I Am The Cosmos’ 45 and Holsapple would go on to play with R.E.M. and Hootie and the Blowfish!) They are now teamed up and touring as a band with no official name. This interview by Dan Collins.

Peter, you joined a band when you were eight?
Peter Holsapple (guitar/vocals): What?
Admittedly, this is from Wikipedia. But it says you were born in ’56 and joined a band in 1964.
Peter: That is true. I played in combos. But they weren’t professional. The first professional band I played in was when I was 12—when I earned money. We lived in a city with a lot of very active places for young people to play. They were the assembly halls for churches. On the weekends they’d get a PA and bands would play. That was kind of fun.
Did you ever cut a single?
Peter: No. Chris and Mitch [Easter] and I had a band that had an album in 1973 called Rittenhouse Square. It was not very good! It was what you’d expect out of 14- or 15-year-olds. We certainly listened to a lot of Yes, a lot of the Move. Things were funny and grind-y, but in retrospect it’s pretty naïve stuff.
Sounds like you met each other early in life.
Peter: Chris and Mitch were ahead of me in school. I do remember him standing in the parking lot of the school with an instrument case waiting for his parents to pick him up. His dad was a pediatrician in town—a lot of people went to Dr. Stamey! I saw him as a sort of inroads in a lot of ways. When I met him, he wasn’t playing music at all. He was learning to record, which I thought was very cool.
Yeah! And Chris, you produced Peter’s band Little Diesel in ’74.
Chris Stamey (guitar/vocals): We made it in an afternoon in my bedroom at my parents’ house. I’d moved the bed a little bit, and I had little tweed Fender amps nailed up to the wall and we made it on a four-track tape recorder. At the time I think they made 10 copies. They recorded it on an eight-track recorder, and by that I mean a little recorder that made 8-track cartridges. There were only literally a few copies made.
Do you have an 8-track you can send to me in the mail?
Peter: No! But a vinyl edition did come out a few years ago. It came out on Telstar records.
Chris: I was talking to Mitch about how we should find that, and he was like, ‘Oh, I’ve got the master tape still!’ So we dug it out and I mixed it up a little better than I had back then, and it’s a really cool energetic record! Anybody who’s heard it loves it.
Peter: There were a breadth of covers that we were trying to tackle. We were doing Free and Spirit and Status Quo. We didn’t really ascribe to the Allman Brothers/Marshall Tucker stuff that was popular there at the time. We sort of rooted for the underdog. That’s probably why we were such huge Move fans. That’s probably why the first song off our new album is by a band called ‘Family,’ who we love very dearly. That’s a band that had really meant an awful lot to us.
Chris: The MC5 had just come to town and just really transformed the Winston rock scene.
Peter: I was in school in New Hampshire at prep school for a year, during which time I did get to play in bands with Bob Tench, who went on to be Tom Petty’s keyboard player. He was one of those guys who was very deeply into the MC5 and the Stooges. The first Mott the Hoople album came out, and we really absorbed that.
Did you see the revival tour the MC5 did a few years ago? Evan Dando and Mark Arm from Mudhoney were singing with them.
Chris: And Marshall Crenshaw playing with them too—I have to say, the night I saw them in Chapel Hill, it was not a huge success, but it was only one night on a tour. It was kind of dark, I guess you’d say—the energy. The singers were reading all the lyrics—it wasn’t totally all together.
Well, enough about the past—tell me about the sound on your new album.
Chris: Well, what’s refreshing about talking with you is that it does remind me of a sixties interview. It’s not the usual questions. But Peter and I think about this as a band that we have together that has its own identity, and we just don’t have a band name for it. We recorded Mavericks in 1992, and in some ways we see this as a continuation of that.
Why is that?
Chris: It makes a connection to I guess what used to be called ‘good guy’ radio, almost like sixties AM radio. My experience with Big Star, for example, was hearing them—they were a hit band in Winston/Salem, and they were on the radio with bands like the Grass Roots and the Seeds. It’s just that they weren’t anywhere else but my hometown. It just isn’t a Porsche—more of a Woody! A family station wagon.
If somebody was a dB’s fan who had never heard this album, what differences would they see between this album and your old stuff?
Peter: dB’s records and the duet records are such that they both have as their main contributors myself and Chris. But if they’re dB’s records, they’ve got Will on drums and Gene on bass and it’s a harder rocking and slightly more frenzied thing.
Chris: The way the dB’s bass player and drummer play together is kind of like you drop an electric blender in a bathtub, and yet it keeps running. It’s a very explosive combustible combination. And we use really good players and we have more drums on this record than we thought we would, but this is more about our guitars and our voices.
Peter: It is two different voices! Even though Chris and I are the main guys writing for both groups. You know, there’s only been one saxophone on a dB’s record—on a single maybe. And here we’ve got Branford Marsalis who played on a couple cuts on this album.
That’s a score!
Peter: Yeah, Bran is a great guy. For years I was the keyboard guy and utility guy for Hootie and the Blowfish, and Branford always came down for their charity golf tournament every year and played. A couple years ago I said, ‘Well, I’ve got these songs that would be really well served if you could find some time to come and play on it. It’s about New Orleans.’ He was like, ‘I’m busy, but let me know! We’ll make it happen.’ Both tracks were lifted incredibly by his presence.
Lou Reed, before he was in the Velvet Underground, cut a single with King Curtis as the session horn guy! But I think you just beat that. Do you want to gloat at Lou Reed for besting him?
Peter: Lou’s contribution is sacred! Even his bad records aren’t that bad. I have no opportunity to diss him, frankly.
A few years back you recorded an album called A Question of Temperature.
Chris: Peter and I just came up with that title, I recall. On a record with a lot of covers, to name it after a cover that we weren’t doing seemed, you know… it was originally called Vote, and it was done as an EP. We did too many things… it became the world’s longest EP! We put it out right before the election that John Kerry lost to try to encourage people to vote. It seems crazy in retrospect. It was then released as a regular record in January. It was never intended to be an album-album.
What songs did you cover?
Chris: We covered a song of mine called ‘Summer Sun.’ The Yardbirds, we did. We covered ‘Venus’ by Television.
Can I get a statement from you about the death of Sky Saxon?
Chris: He was a friend of Chilton’s. I never really met him. When I played with Alex, we used to do ‘I Can’t Seem to Make You Mine’ almost every night. Alex was a really big fan.
How did you meet Alex Chilton?
Chris: I was making a record with Terry Ork. He’d put out the first Television 45, and I’d just moved to New York. And he said that they were putting out a record by Alex Chilton, and he needed a band because he was going to come up for one day—to play Valentine’s Day in New York. And Alex called me up, and we talked, and he asked me what my sign was, and everything seemed to be okay. I was playing bass—I think Tina Weymouth almost got the call, but I ended up getting it. And Alex stayed for over a year, and we kept playing. He’d stay on my couch a lot, and we went up and recorded a lot, most of which never came out.
There was another celebrity death this month as well. You guys once had a song called ‘Neverland.’ Do you think Michael Jackson named his ranch after you?
Chris: I think that would be a stretch.
The dance music movement that came along in the mid-early eighties, with Michael and Prince and Sheila E.—did that eclipse the fame that bands like the dB’s might have earned?
Peter: It certainly didn’t help it get on the radio! But… the music was great. All the music was great. We felt that we weren’t particularly in competition with that.
Chris: I think that for most bands, the whole idea of making it big wasn’t around. Once MTV came along, and it went out into the world, people got the idea, ‘Yeah, let’s make it big!’ But that wasn’t why we were making music. We weren’t trying to win the lottery.
Peter: Even as well known as we are for our contributions to sort of ‘new wave’ with the dB’s, we had already been writing and recording well before that. We just happened to come along at the time. The dB’s didn’t even have an American label for many years.
Of the people who were your contemporaries, who would you say sounded like you?
Chris: I think the Soft Boys! I clearly thought Television had the right idea, but I think the Soft Boys would be the closest.
Peter: Without meaning to be left of center, it appears that we were left of center. My dear friend Mark Brian from Hootie & the Blowfish says things to me like, ‘You’re my favorite eccentric weird songwriter.’ And I listen to my songs, and I don’t think they’re all that eccentric and weird. They’re simple, they’re rock ‘n’ roll, they have verses, they have choruses and bridges. What’s so different? Same thing with a Michael Jackson record. They’re still set up approximately the same way. Yet there’s a world of difference between them. The thing that we’ve all had to learn over the years is that this is not about huge success. That would be wonderful! I’d love it if a song got used in a commercial that would take the load off of being an unemployed musician. If I could ever get my publishing straightened out, maybe I could do something! The great thing is that I’ve got a job that I love. I love to be a musician. I love the reaction of people when they like my songs. Maybe I’m just a ham, but I really do dig it a lot. It feels really good. I’m not really comfortable in the rest of the world. I am on stage, though. Music was just about the most important thing to me until my kids came along.
Can you get your kids involved in music?
Peter: I play at my son’s school. I was the kids’ entertainer at Borders in New Orleans for about five years. I started working on a kids record, but then I realized that practically every old semi-failed new waver had done a kids record! I don’t want to be in that number until I can do something really good. Dan Zanes does a great job! Robert Warren is great! Disney’s got the Imagination Movers—that’s just the shit! I love it! The kids love it! You want to make kids music so that parents don’t jump out the window.
Chris, you haven’t released any kids albums to my knowledge—but you released Chris Bell’s first single on your label, right?
Chris: Right! Again, that was through Alex. Alex told me about it. I was very proud to have done that, but it wasn’t anything very creative except to the extent that A&R is creative. He’d made it a while back. He’d done in a guy’s garage, in a shoe box in Memphis, and then moved to London and mixed it with Geoff Emerick at George Martin’s Air studios.
In the last couple decades, we haven’t heard a whole lot from you! Have you been recording and producing bands or selling crystal meth, or what?
Chris: I do an album or two a month—some mixing, some producing. I probably work on about fifteen records a year. I just did a band called Megafaun. I did Rosebuds, on Merge. The Old Ceremony. Luego, which hasn’t come out yet…
How about some L.A. bands?
Chris: I did a whole bunch of recordings with Patrick Park! I don’t think he qualifies as a ‘band,’ but if anybody qualifies as a one-man band, he can really do it. That would be the most recent thing. I lived there, working there with Scott Litt on a Flat Duo Jets record for a while at Ocean Way, which became Cello. I definitely put in time in California. In a lot of ways, I consider the span I spent with Peter Holsapple to be a California band. We really started in L.A. We live in North Carolina, but the spirit of our birth was really in the Santa Monica kind of thing.
I have the Sharp Cuts compilation you came out on in 1980 on Planet Records with ‘Soul Kiss.’ You’re on there with a lot of other L.A. bands. Did that record come about because of your association with people out here?
Chris: No, I think that would be prior to it. I think we just got a call about it. I do remember they accidentally put the wrong tape on there, which always bugged me. That was a joke mix! It never was supposed to be out like that.
If it makes you feel better, on the album sticker, they list Suburban Lawns twice and forgot to list the Alleycats.
Chris: It figures.
Besides just songs, did people constantly misspell the ‘dB’s’ name on albums and flyers and such?
Chris: I think we knew we were in for trouble. It was interesting to see how things change in translation. I kind of liked that it did change all the time, but I guess it was an uphill struggle.
Did people ever spell it ‘D-e-e-B-e-e-s’ like the Bee Gees?
Chris: I think we’ve had every kind of possible ramification. The embarrassing thing is that we never should have put the apostrophe in there to begin with. It was archaic even then. It’s pretty incorrect.
I was listening to your early discography, Chris, and I feel like you were playing a brand of power-pop that even now sounds a bit more youthful. I feel like other power-pop sounded a bit mannish, and yours sounds more teenaged—even maybe had a bit of a bubblegum feel.
Peter:We listened to everything—depending on what you feel is bubblegum. I was married to Susan Cowsill of the Cowsills, so I love the Partridge Family. I love the stuff that was on Buddah, the Kasenetz-Katz Orchestra and things like that. But I don’t love it anymore than I love Otis Redding or the Dave Clark Five or Big Star. I will admit to having listened to more than the lion’s share of AM radio. Anything that goes from about 1964-1974.
Did you have a hard time convincing your peers to appreciate something more gentle and delicate?
Chris: I always played with good musicians, and we just talk about how to play music. You know on iTunes, they have a little pull-down things for genre when you want to make an MP3? I actually think I do more ‘folk rock’ over ‘power pop.’
What folk rock bands inspired you?
Chris: I would say the Byrds would be the biggest.
Speaking of 8-tracks, you guys did a lot of cassette releases as the dB’s. You did one that came in an actual can! Wasn’t that expensive?
Chris: We didn’t get the bill, but I don’t think it was that expensive. Probably a big waste of chow mein noodles or something! Cans can’t really cost that much—otherwise, they wouldn’t put cheap food in them.
Did the people who bought them actually have to use a can opener to get the tape out?
Chris: Oh yeah!
Why did things end? Why did you shelve the dB’s?
Chris: I think it’s more of a mystery why things continue. I look at bands I like like Blind Faith where they last for five months and a few gigs. It seemed like it went on a long time.
And you guys are still working together as a duo, so it’s like this working relationship that was in the dB’s is still going.
Chris: It had started 11 years before that, really. It’s just that the dB’s got more press because there were press agents involved.
Peter, you had a huge bunch of press when you played with R.E.M.
Peter: I did play with R.E.M. We did a tour for Green, the first album they did on Warner Brothers, and we recorded Out of Time—I played the acoustic guitar on ‘Losing My Religion.’ And then we went to England, and we reached a point where it was ‘untenable’ to work together. Much as I love those guys and respect what they’ve done, it was time for me to move on. I joined the Continental Drifters for ten years, and was serving in the same capacity I had with R.E.M. in Hootie & the Blowfish, which was a great gig I had for thirteen years.
You were saying that the dude from the Blowfish thinks you write weird songs. For our readership the weirdest thing you’ve EVER done is play in Hootie & the Blowfish!
Peter: The guys in the band are remarkable people. They truly are! They worked very, very hard for their success. They did some things that were probably ill-advised—they rushed out a second record out because they were afraid their fans were sick of the first record! They were thinking of their fans, which I thought was really cool.
Yeah, but… Hootie and the Blowfish! Chris, were ever moments where you were like, ‘Peter is killing the brand?’
Chris: I can’t even think in that way! He had been doing flower deliveries in New Orleans before that happened. I can’t think of how many times he went to Vietnam with them. I think it was kind of fun!
Peter: I would certainly rather do this than not work! That’s probably the best job I ever had. I enjoyed playing the music—it was really comfortable music, and really comforting music. It was not like playing with Yes. But to get to back up a world-class singer like Darius Rucker for 13 years was a serious honor. I was able to rope him into a tribute to Sandy Denny—I was the music director for a show that was celebrating the work of Sandy Denny, in Brooklyn, and I asked him to sing ‘Black Waterside,’ and he just tore it up! We got him on the R.E.M. tribute show at Carnegie Hall, and he did ‘I Believe’ with Calexico. People are more inclined to hate Hootie & the Blowfish because they think they’ve heard Hootie & the Blowfish. But Hootie did five really good studio records. Every one of those records had songs that could have been hits on them. The shape of radio changed, and the band stuck with their style. It was tough to go from being nobody, to being a huge hit, to being a punch line. People just think it’s ‘Hold My Hand’ and Darius in a cowboy hat hawking Burger King.
What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever played?
Chris: They all seem so normal! With the Golden Palominos, we played the Montrose Jazz Festival. We were playing after the Herbie Hancock Quartet, with Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock. I think we played after Miles Davis, too.
Have you had any crazy stories recently where you two put out an album or did a show, and some rabid fans did something… rabid?
Chris: I usually hide after shows! You seem to be looking for fun, tabloid stuff, and you’re probably looking in the wrong direction. We come from a very Southern, polite tradition.
I was actually at the 99 Cent Store on York in Highland Park, and ran across the Chris Stamey and Friends’ Christmas album— for a buck! It wasn’t bad! Can you tell me how that came about?
Peter: I did ‘O Holy Night’ on the very first version of the Christmas album years ago. I love that stuff! I grew up in the Episcopal Church, singing in the choir. I love the popular stuff! The Beach Boys’ Christmas record, the Ventures Christmas record, the Phil Spector Christmas Gift for You, the Beatles 45. Love ‘em, love ‘em, love ‘em! And the best part of Christmas albums is that they sell every year.
Chris: Gene Holder, who plays bass in the dB’s, always wanted to make a Christmas record, always thought that would be a fun thing to do. We were so impressed that even after I was no longer playing with the band, I wrote a song called ‘Christmas Time’ kinda with him in mind and got the other guys who had been in the dB’s to record it with me. And we put together other tracks based around that one song.
Who sings ‘Silver Bells?’ That was my favorite tune off the album.
That was Kirsten Lambert. She’s a friend of ours who lives here. That may be her only recorded effort, as far as I know.
That’s a tragedy! Tell her! If she ever goes on tour, I’ll give her an interview.
Chris: Okay—haha!

PETER HOLSAPPLE AND CHRIS STAMEY ON FRI., JULY 17, AT McCABE’S GUITAR SHOP, 3101 PICO BLVD., SANTA MONICA. 8 PM / $20 / ALL AGES. MCCABES.COM PETER HOLSAPPLE AND CHRIS STAMEY’S hEAR aND nOW IS OUT NOW ON BAR/NONE. VISIT PETER HOLSAPPLE AND CHRIS STAMEY AT HOLSAPPLESTAMEY.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/HEREANDNOWPETERANDCHRIS.

Stream: Midnight “Black Rock ‘n’ Roll”

(from Farewell To Hell out now on Nuclear War Now)

Satan’s favorite party band is Midnight from Cleveland, who match the best parts of Venom and Motorhead with the sleazy visuals of the Mentors. They’re true members of the new black trash generation of bands—keeping the faith of rock ‘n’ roll metal and forsaking the trappings of over-technical playing and production. These guys serve up beer- and blood-soaked blasphemous anthems with the best of them and yes, your flesh shall burn as you enter the flaming pentagram. This interview by John Henry.

I was recently down in New Orleans with some friends of mine that do a metal DJ night called Hades Night and they played your new record. I was immediately sold on that Venom/Motorhead trash metal sound you guys do. Is there a scene of other bands in Cleveland doing this kind of music? Have you done other bands like this before?
Athenar (guitar/vocals): Maybe—I guess? NunSlaughter is from here. They’ve been around since the eighties. They’re more death metal-style. I was in a band called Boulder. Some people would call it like between Thin Lizzy, Black Sabbath and Motorhead—I don’t know, hard rockin’ metal? We did like three albums. We started in the early ‘90s and went all the way to the beginning of the 2000s. 2002 was, I think, when the last album came out. I’ve always been a fan of heavy metal but in the case of most of my favorite bands anyway their musical tastes doesn’t necessarily reflect their fan base. You wouldn’t guess the stuff that I listen to by what I play. I don’t consider myself part of any metal scene or punker scene. I just like good music. I like songs. I’m not much of a free-form jazz type guy. I like some or whatever, but a good song is a good song whether it’s done by Love or Twisted Sister, you know? Distorted rock guitars and bass and drums­­—that’s all it is. The lyrics and the singing is maybe all that differentiates it.
The first thing I thought when I heard you guys is that you obviously get the joke. You’re not some guy living with his mom and using her credit card to buy spiked gauntlets and thinking he’s evil.
That would be even funnier, I think. Again it’s just whatever you like, I guess. You look back at Venom obviously—they’re just playing songs. They were fans of Kiss, you know, and so am I. Most music you want to have a good time with. You don’t want to just put it on and then pretend you’re depressed and wear razorblades on your wrists. That’s more humorous than anything else, I would think.
You fool with fascist imagery but you’re obviously not skinheads.
We’re bald but that’s not by choice. It’s just our age—but you know, it’s just imagery. It looks sort of Star Wars. If you look at Star Wars, what was Darth Vader and all the imperial guards? What were the Stormtroopers, you know? It’s the same kind of shit but who made it? George Lucas. It’s imagery. It looks cool.
So the reason you guys wear executioner hoods is not to hide your identities from the cops or that you’re really ugly?
Yeah, I would say the latter!
How did you get the band started?
Originally it wasn’t necessarily supposed to be a band. I do all the crap on the records and stuff. That’s just all me doing everything like the drums and guitars, the bass. The guys I’m playing with just forced me to have a band. They called up and said, ‘Hey, we’re going to have a band.’ I said, ‘Nah, it was just meant to record the stuff.’ Then they came over and knew all the songs and forced me to have a band, which is cool because in the end it turned out all right.
A lot of black metal guys do that—record by themselves and get guys to play it later. It’s just one idiot with an idea and it works out from there.
That’s kind of what I was doing. I was saying, ‘Well, if Prince can do it and Quorthon can do it…’ Those were the only people at the time that I knew that did that kind of stuff, you know—recorded everything by themselves.
Do you do the band artwork as well?
That back patch was ripped off from an old Venom design—Cronos standing in the fire like that. People that know it would think it was funny and people that didn’t know would think it was generically cool. I have no idea how to do that kind of stuff. I have the idea and say, ‘Hey, do this or that’ and let people with tech skills do that part.
How did you hook up with Nuclear War Now Records?
My friend Omid. He does a label called Outlaw Records and I’ve been friends with him for years and I’m the worst at self-promotion which he’s always been good at. I just make it till it’s recorded and I’m done with it. He’s good at actually taking stuff and getting it to people who might be into it. So he gave it to Yosuke at Nuclear War Now and he liked it and he said he’d put out a reissue of everything that’s already been out. Like I said—the way the band started out is I just wanted to record like a mini LP and that was intended to be it, but then my other friend who had some bands booked at a studio and the band ditched said, ‘Hey, can you come to the studio tomorrow and record a few songs? Whatever you want to record.’ So I said, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll make up two more Midnight songs.’ I made up two more Midnight songs that night and then recorded them the next day and that was the 7-inch. Then I was like, ‘OK, that’s it—there’s no more.’ Then Yosuke at Nuclear War Now wanted to put out a compilation and he said, ‘Oh, will you do one song?’ and I said, ‘OK, I’ll just make up one more song.’ So I got all the bases covered—a 12-inch, a 7-inch and a comp track. Now there’s Farewell To Hell which is the newer one that just came out in September. We actually have two CDs worth of crap.
Which has ‘Black Rock ‘n’ Roll’? I fucking love that song.
It’s on Farewell To Hell. That was a tune that when I made it up I thought it was going to be too simple and retarded. I didn’t know if it was going to be too dumb.
What about the live shows? Is it violent or more of a party?
It just depends on the mood, you know. They’re not all the same. There have been full-scale bloodbaths and then there are parties. There’s been some snooze fests, too, you know—we were supposed to be billed before the puppet show.
At the end of your tour this May you end up at the Chaos in Tejas fest—how’d you hook up with that?
There were a couple of people from Cleveland that moved to Texas a few years ago and I guess they turned us on to some other people and that’s where that guys from. It just kind of started from there. We’ve already played Texas and it’ll be our third time playing there. I don’t know what any of these gigs are going to be like. I have zero idea. That’s the way I usually go into it. I’m like, ‘We’ll find out when we get there.’ That might be kind of bad but it’s less to worry about. Just worry about it when you get there. What’s that place like that we’re playing at in East L.A.? Gang members out here are only into rap and shit but you talk about the west coast and they’re into crazy metal—that’s pretty cool. We played Mexico once in Nuevo Laredo—I don’t know, I guess it’s a drug cartel border town? It was pretty shady. They were a lot of people saying, ‘All right, hurry up—go over and play and get back over to the states.’ When we were there some Mexican biker gang wanted us to play for a biker rally coming up in a couple months. I was like, ‘Uh, what?’ But I guess it would be cool as long as we played the right tunes.

MIDNIGHT WITH D.A.F. AND MORE ON MON., MAY 18, AT THE BLVD, 2631 WHITTIER BLVD., BOYLE HEIGHTS. 8 PM / $8 / 18+. THEBLVDCAFEANDBAR.COM. AND WITH SUMERIAN AXE, BASTARD, MUNDO MUERTO AND BROKEN PATTERN ON TUE., MAY 19, AT DIPIAZZA’S, 5205 E. PACIFIC COAST HWY., LONG BEACH. 9 PM / CONTACT VENUE FOR COVER / 21+. DIPIAZZAS.COM. VISIT MIDNIGHT AT NWNPROD.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/ATHENARSMIDNIGHT.

Download: Bob Mould “I’m Sorry, Baby, But You Can’t Stand In My Light Any More”

(from Nouns out now on Sub Pop)

Bob Mould was the guitarist and singer of Hüsker Dü and Sugar before striking out on his own solo career and Dean Spunt and Randy Randall are the L.A. duo No Age. We asked them to interview each other after they played NoisePop together and before they both played Coachella. This is the complete version of this interview.

Bob Mould : How do you guys make your records? How did you make Nouns?
Dean Spunt (drums/vocals in No Age): We recorded some of at Southern Studios in London. I guess we did five songs.
Randy Randall (guitar in No Age): Only three or four made it on there.
DS: And then we did everything without vocals. This is before we even had a label or anything, so we were doing a tour out there already and our friend was like, ‘Hey, his label goes through Southern for distribution—I can get you guys to record at basically Southern Studios.’ And we were like, ‘OK, lets do it.’ Psychocandy was recorded there, you know, so we went there, did a few songs, and we when we got home we have those and that’s kind of when we decided what label we were gonna be on and then we recorded stuff on our own and went to a studio out here in the East L.A. area. That’s where we did more recording and all the vocals.
BM: So when you record you go instrumental and then sing later? Or sometimes you sing with?
DS: Like always later. When we write stuff—we were talking about this the other day—usually the first kind of stuff we’re writing we just kind of come up with samples or guitar stuff and I would just sit there and hear it played over and over and I just sing. That’s when I come up with a melody, and it’s rare that I come up with a vocal melody. Actually, I do it a lot but I never remember it. Like I’ll come up with it while I’m driving and I’ll try to write notes down, but it’s rare that I’ll remember it.
BM: I was doing a gig last July at Maxwell’s—a solo gig in a sound check—and I started coming up with this idea and I freaked because I didn’t have anything. So I went on the app store and bought a little audio recorder on the spot and two minutes later I was recording it into the phone. I was just like, ‘Phew!’
DS: That’s awesome.
RR: On tour I’ll just use my Garage Band. Just for when I wake up in the morning and I’ll just try and catch that little something.
BM: When I’m home, that’s how I make records now. Like the newer record—so much of that stuff—everything—is just composition stuff. Like I’m not recording anymore. I just turn it on and I’ve got a click and I just start recording and singing and I try to keep as much of the first time as possible.
DS: Then you kind of listen to it and you’re like, ‘Oh, that part’s good.’
BM: Yeah, and I’ve got it all at home on the computer and it’s in time, so I just snip it out and then cross fade the thing back together and then I start to make this arrangement—if I wanted a double at the end, I just clip that one and put it there as a placeholder until I get ready.
DS: I think that’s where we wanna kind of be, but we’re sort of like, ‘We have a practice place…’ But its shared and nothing can be set up all the time.
RR: We have to break down after everything so I leave the computers and recording stuff at home and then try to bring it in—try to make it mobile—but I think what we’re gonna try to do is have a set space where we can go and its mic’d up and we can play.
BM: Yeah, all you have to do is just reach over and go ‘boink’ and it’s ready—that’s so important.
RR: We’ve done some songs—like the instrumental songs, we’d be at home with practice amps and its kind of like layer, layer, layer, remove, go back and take it out, kind of much more like a collage idea. But the more structured songs we have to do the live take with it.
BM: You guys have such a visceral thing, too, you know—the process you got going right now is really good.
RR: Yeah, but over time it would be nice to shift into many different places.
BM: For me everything is about composition right now, so performance is touring and that’s just like giving people a song to learn—so for me to just have it at home to hit record and keep it is great.
RR: Do you still find that there are still things that are inspiring?
BM: The things that really dictate the writing process is if I have a DJ gig on Saturday and it’s Tuesday, and I haven’t got any new music and I have to spend days listening to stuff, I’ll get up in the morning and listen for hours to other peoples stuff. And if it’s dance stuff, then I’m in beat mode. So when I sit down and I wanna write something I go for Reason—I try to make a mangled-up loop and then I start putting something on that. But on days when I don’t need to do that, I’ll pick up the guitar and just start with an idea. So it’s really environmental. It’s what I’m listening to that gets me there. The good days are the ones that I just wake up and I got something buzzing in my head when I’m in the shower or I hear a sound or a ringing and it gets me thinking about stuff. So that’s at least in music terms. The words are always coming.
DS: You’re constantly writing words and stuff?
BM: Yeah, either that or just going through old emails. You know, I have a life and my life is filled with all these people and I’m juggling these things. I try to take care of people and have people take care of me and those are the best stories because those are the ones that are happening as we speak.
DS: I think for us this is really a new process of us recording and then touring and that sort of cycles. Now we’re expected to write and record again and its this new sort of space where we’re like, ‘Well, usually we would work our jobs and then after the jobs come to the practice space and just get everything out and off our chests and that would be the next record.’ At least that’s how it had always been. But now we’re in a position that is insulated when it’s not those other jobs. We have a job now—it’s the band—but we’re trying to figure out how to do it. In your writing cycle, do you experience that sort of thing? Or is it linear from one record to the other?
BM: Well, I mean—I remember when I was more where you guys are at—I sent you an email about that. Just don’t listen to what people are saying and don’t stop writing. All that stuff people say—just forget about it. You know—‘It’s good, it’s bad, you’re the best, you’re the worst.’ You know who your friends are—your friends are the ones who are gonna be there no matter what. But like everybody else—it’s great, but the more you listen the harder it gets.
DS: Yeah, I’ve tried to stop reading reviews and stuff because it’s like—I don’t care either way. Interviews are just like generally—it’s what we said most of the time or you feel like, ‘Oh, I wanna see how it came out, if it came out correctly.’ But reviews—it’s like there’s no point in reading that shit.
BM: When you guys played on Sunday and about three from the end you rolled out a new song, it was amazing. I was just like, ‘Oh my God, wow.’ It really upped the game. And you’ll be able to look out and see when you’re playing a new song you probably gotta think about it a little bit, you can feel it. If you get done and you’re getting a golf clap, you sorta know.
DS: I remember that song—we actually played two new ones. After the second new one, people were like… [claps] ‘Yeah.’
RR: That’s always how it was, though—in the beginning when we were writing songs before anyone knew any of our records, that would always be how you could tell if the song was good or not. No one knew the names or anything and that was the best thing because everything was fresh and we really got to read it.
DS: We play ‘Everybody’s Down’ and that was a good song—everybody went nuts.
BM: That was the thing with Hüsker—we were always an album ahead. We were trying new stuff when were touring a record. When we toured New Day Rising, we were already playing Flip Your Wig.
DS: That was the thing I wanted to ask you about Hüsker because bands generally don’t do that anymore—except Animal Collective. The last time we saw them they were playing—except for like one new song—their Merriweather Post Pavillion stuff. But they’ve been known for like putting out a record and then tour just playing all new stuff and people are like, ‘Oh, this is so weird.’ But I remember reading that and you guys would always do that just play the new stuff and when you’re done, you’d go record with Spot.
BM: Yeah, or we’d do whatever. We’d always work the stuff out live so that by the time we got ready to record it was first take. We already knew what we wanted it to be. And you know, Spot was an engineer—he wasn’t producing anything. He wasn’t making executive decisions like, ‘Let’s go back and do that.’ It was like, ‘No, that’s already done.’
DS: That was you and Grant.
RR: What about in terms of overdubs and studio work?
BM: I sort of laid out all the stuff in my head. I was like, ‘OK, this is the part I’m gonna play first, and this is what I was gonna play second, and this is the solo.’ So it was just like playing the thing that would keep the bass and drums in place, and then play like the fun stuff and do the solo and vocals and we’d be done. Grant would play keyboards, I’d play keyboards.
DS: You try stuff and maybe not use it. Like keyboards—‘Oh, keyboards didn’t work.’
BM: Yeah, that stuff is a little bit more—I have this thing with overdubs being like a house of cards. You put one card too many and the whole thing falls and you’re looking at it going, ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’ Or you start over, or you just have to leave the pile there.
RR: And in terms of that stuff translating live would there be…
BM: That was the hard part because then we started to dig ourselves into a hole.
DS: Because you never had a second guitar player.
BM: Or a keyboard player, which I found out is the right answer.
DS: Right—like in your band now.
BM: Yeah—nobody wants to see another guy playing guitar with me. [laughs] Every time I’ve tried it they’re like, ‘What’s that other thing over there making noise?’ With keys it’s awesome because it’s all the strings and it’s like dirty Hammond—it really fills that space and it eases it back for me. So when Rich is doing that stuff—adding all that thick mid—I can just play what I’m feeling. I don’t have to play three chords at once anymore.
DS: Was there a second guitar player in Sugar?
BM: Nope. Three-piece. The stuff went across well that way.
DS: It’s weird because I feel since there’s only two of us playing live there’s a lot of tightening in the stomach whenever we play live because there’s so much shit to do. Like—I have pedals and Randy has pedals and samplers and stuff.
BM: Yeah, you guys are doing a lot up there. I see what’s going on.
DS: There’s something really awesome about it that I really enjoy, but there’s another part that I wonder if… Like we played a show in Australia recently where I didn’t bring a sampler. I just had a mic and played drums and I was like, ‘Fucking easy. Wow, I’m just sitting here playing.’ But in relation to just—bringing it back to overdubbing and playing guitar only and playing live and then feeling like it doesn’t sound right, or something.
BM: But that’s part of the ride. That’s what the ride is when you’re on it. That’s what you’re used to. You do it live and you know that’s what your job is and you gotta get it across.
RR: Was there that sense of urgency in Hüsker Dü? Because sometimes there’d be like two records a year.
BM: Well with two guys writing non-stop…
RR: So the material was there—it wasn’t like you felt like you had to have it there. It was just coming.
BM: We didn’t have jobs—it’s all we did. We toured, we made records on all the tour, and we went home and wrote more records.
RR: That’s amazing.
BM: It just didn’t stop.
RR: Was it a different time then? Did if feel like it was isolated? When you were touring the world with Hüsker Dü, it was still the same stuff?
BM: Yeah, when we started adding Europe into the loop because we always used to go west, then we added east and then we added Europe.
RR: It never became too much?
BM: No, I mean we had one big break towards the end. Like after we toured Candy Apple Grey for Warner just as it was coming out and we got ahead on the touring so then after we got done with that, there was this big stretch for the last six months of ’86 that was down time.
RR: And you wrote a lot of Warehouse?
BM: That was Warehouse plus the slow dissolve started.
RR: Now Dean’s said this in interviews and I know we’ve talked about this a lot but I think Warehouse—you go between different songs, but Warehouse always comes back as your favorite record. As the artist writing it, did you know it was going to be the last record? How do you feel the songs went into that? Or when you look back on the catalogue and hear somebody say that’s their favorite record how does that…
BM: No, it’s great—everybody’s got a different place. I think a lot of people get on their first and then go backwards and I’m always curious to see how far back they can go.
DS: Well, actually I’ve kind of done the opposite—started with Zen Arcade and even Land Speed and then kind of went like, pop—like, ‘Whoa pop.’
BM: It’s funny, if you think about it like refinishing furniture or something. Warehouse is like the finest grit and then you get back to Land Speed and its like there’s a chainsaw on the table. It’s like reverse finessing—it’s more destructive. So I know Zen is, you know, the one people always hold up. It was cool, everything was fucked right then so it was good. That was when everybody had these really crazy ideas in their head. I think Flip Your Wig was the best because that’s when we got rid of Spot. And Spot did a great job but Grant and I did it—that’s when we took charge of everything.
RR: You engineered it?
BM: Yeah, we mixed it. We had an engineer in there with us but we mixed it.
RR: Where did you record?
BM: We had our own studio. We had built our own.
RR: Wow, that’s amazing. ‘Baby Song.’
BM: Yeah, ‘Baby Song.’
DS: What is that instrument in there, by the way?
BM: It’s a kazoo.
DS: That’s also in another part in Candy Apple Grey.
BM: Yeah, it reappears—I think Grant may have brought it back on one of his songs.
DS: So that’s when you guys got rid of Spot?
BM: Yeah, I mean—the Spot era was great, but we had an idea what we wanted and we knew we were a pop band by that point, so that’s what we wanted to focus on and not so much the punk rock. And we really spent time on that record and really tried some different things. So that to me was like the peak cause after that everything got funky. Yea—Warehouse, that was a tough stretch. But it’s a good record. Had it been pared back to a single record it might have had more impact, but we were already loggerheads at that point.
DS: Were you trying to redo Zen Arcade in that concept?
BM: If we did, we failed. There was no grand scheme there. It was just a battle of the writers.
DS: I think that’s why—being a musician and listening to all your records and listening to Warehouse—I think that’s why it hits me the hardest because it seems like the darkest and it seems heavy and I think it comes through and it’s kind of an incredible moment.
BM: Yeah, you see the last side—you can see people saying goodbye and I think that’s where…
DS: I think that’s why I’ve really come to like it because it’s really dark and heavy and cool and awesome. But the songs are incredible, too.
BM: Yeah, there’s fun tunes on there—there’s a few real shining moments.
DS: Did you guys produce that, too?
BM: Yeah, Grant and I did the last three.
DS: Was that hard going from SST to Warner Brothers world?
BM: No. I mean, there was stuff, but no.
DS: Back then it seems like the expectations were maybe lower even.
BM: You gotta remember that’s when 120 was really on fire and MTV and that was the ramp-up for everything that happened in ’91. That’s really the groundwork for everything. So there wasn’t much pressure cause we sold enough records to recoup a way, so it wasn’t like we were fighting from underneath to do things. We set up a deal where we knew we would keep charge of it.
DS: Being able to produce your own record seems kind of uncommon today. In the major label world if you said, ‘We’re gonna produce it,’ they’d be like…
BM: Not unless you’re like Radiohead or Beck or something—somebody that’s really earned that spot. And maybe look at it that way. Radiohead spent how many years to get to that spot? That’s like Husker, that’s like Beck, you know.
RR: I did a little Internet research and you also ran a label as well.
BM: Singles Only Label—that was after Hüsker when I was living up on the farm in Minnesota. We had a generic cutout sleeve that sort of looked like the old Sun Records sleeve so we tried not to do picture sleeves. We tried to do it where everything looked the same. That was fun—that was me and Steve Fallon and Nick Hill who was a DJ at FMU who more or less laid the groundwork for Brooklyn to be what it is. You know we all lived in Williamsburg together in the early ‘90s and it was like They Might Be Giants was getting started, too, and Jeff Buckley. We were just hanging out doing stuff, too.
RR: That was your second label though, right?
BM: Yeah, Reflex was the first. SOL and then Granary Music is my imprint for stuff since.
DS: The first Reflex thing was Hüsker right?
BM: Yup.
DS: You started it basically to put out stuff because no one else would. I mean, the first 7” I ever put out was this band from Portland and then I put out a 7” and I was like I don’t want to do a label anymore. And then when we started our old band, Wives, we were recording and I was like, “I have a label—I could do a 7”.” You know, nobody else wanted to—sort of that necessity.
BM: And now you see the value of it, probably. It really means people look forward to 7”s—they look forward to releases because the label is a brand and it’s a thing where they know what to expect. Or at least they know that it’s being vetted properly.
RR: Is that something you’re still involved in?
BM: Labels? Not so much. That would be a stretch right now. It’s a full-time gig and people are dependent on you. I’d like to do something like that but not another label specifically.
RR: I love the story of the making of the Warehouse cover.
BM: Yeah, we built that set in the big live room in the recording studio in Minneapolis and it was going out and gathering all the debris and stuff and setting up that—staging it like that, painting things in Day-Glo, and going in and using a multi-minute exposure but we were walking through this staged area with black lights and painting stuff with light by hand and moving so we didn’t show up in the shot.
RR: We talked with Todd Trainer from Shellac and he was going on about Minneapolis and Mats versus the Du and what was really happening. But the idea of a scene or a city being built around a band—how did that feel? Because we sometimes get that like, ‘You’re the L.A. band.’ It’s a big city but I’m proud of where we’re from. Was it your purpose?
BM: We were just trying to be the best band in the world—that’s pretty much it. I think the difference between the Replacements and Hüsker Dü is the Replacements never started a label to help out the other bands. So let’s boil it down to what it is—the Replacements were good at being the Replacements, but we saw the value of giving back. So there’s your difference. No disrespect to them but they were about the Replacements and we were about making a scene.
RR: What about Prince?
BM: Northside, southside. It was like Detroit in the ‘60s—Motown and MC5 and Stooges. It was not a racially divided town but you know—Prince and Terry and Jimmy, that was northside Minneapolis. Hüskers, Replacements and Soul Asylum was in south Minneapolis and everybody played at First Avenue, which was right in the middle of town. It was the old Greyhound Bus depot.
RR: So you would see them play?
BM: Yeah, I’ve seen Prince plenty of times.
DS: But you guys wouldn’t play together?
BM: No, not a terrible amount. I mean, you’d see people in the studio, like the Jets would be working in the front room of our place—but does that count?
DS: Here’s a funny story. The last Wives tour, we played First Avenue. We played Seventh Street Entry. We played and then after the show we were looking out and Prince came in. He walked in with one big bodyguard and two little women. We’re like, ‘Dude, Prince just came in!’ We were like, ‘Gimme a CD, gimme a CD!’ ‘Hello, Mr. Prince, we want to give you a CD.’ And the bodyguard takes it and just goes, ‘Mmm-hmm.’
BM: Yeah, you don’t get to him.
RR: But it was nice. We were literally there but he wasn’t talking to us. He didn’t acknowledge our existence. But it was just rad that he even came to the show or came to the place. Does he own it?
BM: No, no, he has a little private area on the side.
DS: Right next to your private area?
BM: Not so much. I can do pretty much what I want there but not like Prince. But, yeah I mean it was a great time and there was a lot of stuff happening—it was a great music town. There were a lot of people there that had to do with it. It’s like building things. Seriously, with the Replacements, that’s really the difference. They’re great guys, and they were a great band, sometimes—like one in ten they were brilliant, and the other nine it was Faces covers or whatever. You never knew what you were gonna get because they drank so much. Those shows when they were on, it was the best thing in the world—but all the rest it was like if Paul gave up halfway with the set, then it was just like, ‘Fuck, not another one of these.’
DS: Did you guys play together quite a bit?
BM: We played enough together. We took them out of town on their first shows. We took them to Chicago to play punk rock shows. But yeah—it would be so frustrating.

BOB MOULD’S LIFE AND TIMES IS OUT NOW ON ANTI-. VISIT BOB MOULD AT MODULATE.BLOGSPOT.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/BOBMOULD. VISIT NO AGE AT NOAGELA.BLOGSPOT.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/NONOAGE.COM.

(from Suite For Ma Dukes on Mochilla)

Suite For Ma Dukes is an original orchestral work inspired by the music of J Dilla, written by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson with conceptual contributions and guidance by Carlos Niño. It will be performed in full for the first time with a 40-piece orchestra as part of ArtDontSleep/Mochilla/VTech’s Timeless series on Sunday, Feb. 22, and the Suite for Ma Dukes EP will be released on the same day. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

Do the orchestral players you work with know who Dilla is?
Miguel Atwood-Ferguson: In my experience, I’ve met three people out of maybe three hundred that actually know Dilla’s music. Probably more have heard it without knowing it’s Dilla. But my main point is saying that Dilla is transcending hip-hop music. The people I hired for February 22 I have a long history with. I sent them emails with links to Dilla. The main point is Dilla conjures up a lot of Debussy and Ravel—two famous impressionist composers. I had a great conversation with Karriem Riggins about this concert—did he have any general suggestions? And he said something really profound to me. Not verbatim, but—‘Just make sure not to feel you have to recreate what Dilla did. Dilla was all about the feeling.’ Besides the impressionism—the really colorful creative thing he had through his music, even the rough-edged beats he did—there is this feeling through most of his music. And to me it’s love. He talks about women in a kind of misogynistic way I don’t admire—there’s that lower side of love, but the other thing I feel is more transcending and it’s what people connect to. It’s very universal. It feels good but it’s more than something just meant to feel good.
What’s it like writing music to Dilla this way? A conversation? A continuation?
Carlos Niño: I’m not writing, so I can’t answer from writing anything. But in spirit, I’d say the philosophy is best described by Miguel when he said he felt like we were continuing a conversation. Rather than covering the ground Dilla already covered, we’re sort of recognizing his spirit and trying to progress further. We’re gonna take all of this wonderful inspiration and energy he put out there and continue talking to him and all the people in the music community and the whole world that are listening that might have the ability to hear this—to really feel this!
M: In a jazz context, a lot of people admire someone like Charlie Parker or John Coltrane. When Charlie Parker was creating the music later called be-bop, he was just being really honest. In his enthusiasm of life, he was creating that music. That’s what we try and do—not recreate, but celebrate. It’s definitely something that happened in the past. But we’re in the moment now—looking toward the future. We have our own thing to say. We’re not trying to hide behind Dilla. We’re actually infusing this with courage and spiritual qualities that are not necessarily easy. But it’s a joy. And people respond to joy. And love. That’s what we’re doing.
What does an orchestral arrangement draw out of Dilla’s music?
M: Life is infinite—infinite spheres within each other—and an orchestra can get into all these spheres. All these pockets of different dynamic and color and texture. And some of the productions Dilla did really invoke a lot of infinite feelings. They’re not just one-dimensional. There’s a lot there. Something subtle can really intimate something else. With an orchestra, we can really get into different worlds within worlds. You think of all the people in the world—it’s so rich and so diverse, and nature is so diverse. That’s what we’re trying to do. I wanna just imitate nature—in infinite wonder—but celebrate it.
How is this different than writing with someone who is right there with you?
M: It’s funny—I work on my Mac and I have all these screensavers. I don’t know how many pictures of Dilla—it changes every fifteen seconds, and I’ll be in some deep moment doing an arrangement, and then his picture comes up! I don’t think there’s such a thing as a coincidence. To me the timing is so profound. It’s like he’s talking to me! No joke whatsoever! And almost every picture he’s smiling and saying something reassuring—it’s amazing.
Carlos, you met Dilla—how does that affect where you feel the music should go?
C: We weren’t close at all. I met him maybe ten times, maybe talked on the phone. In general, I was a big big fan. I wouldn’t say we were close friends or that we hung out a lot. But it was brief and really nice to feel that someone you admired so much musically was a good person. I always got a good vibe from him. Not always in lyrics—that side I don’t always connect with. But a lot of people got into him probably because they related to the content, and then the music. I feel he was very musical as a vocalist and rapper. But for me—I’m a serious instrumentals collector from day one. My radio show is notorious for playing unreleased and hard-to-find instrumental hip-hop alongside music from all over the world.
M: I have a question for you, Carlos—when you spoke to Dilla, was there something unique you noticed in him that touched you?
C: Just a real willingness—he was—in a way—like Madlib is, where he’s a man of few words but very enthusiastic. And his enthusiasm comes out in his gestures and his smile. I definitely appreciate that. Every time we hung out, it was a good vibe. The first time I got him to be at a Build An Ark concert, after I got off the stage, Dilla was like, ‘Yo, man—yo, that was incredible! Anything you need, let’s do something!’ For me, that sort of willingness and openness—some people, no matter how talented, can be caught in their attitude, or their ideas about things makes it hard for them to open up. I felt he was very sweet.
What’s going to be on the eventual Suite for Ma Dukes album?
M: Stevie Wonder and Prince are going to play all the instruments.
C: I’ll remind you that’s where we get in trouble in interviews! Our well-intentioned sense of humor. That’s off the record, or to be mentioned as a very humorous projection! But that is his lineage to me—Stevie Wonder and maybe Herbie Hancock, but Stevie Wonder to me is the quintessential artist in this realm. He did it all—played all the instruments, did the sampling and looping—he was in front and in back of everything. He’s really the guy! The only other person besides I’d say most directly influenced all that was Herbie Hancock. Dude put it down in the ‘60s and ‘70s and ‘80s and continues—his influence is massive in hip-hop, but especially to people like Dilla. So we’re trying to reach out to a lot of wonderful musicians to be part of it. I’d love at least a song or two to be performed by a full orchestra in a live setting—in a real orchestral recording studio, where we do it like a film score. Our vision is vast!
M: One thing that’s important to this is diversity. The music Dilla put into motion is really connected to something profound. We want to celebrate that in as many ways as possible. On the EP—which we’re really happy about!—that’s its own thing. All kind of the same realm. On the full-length, we’re gonna get a lot more diverse. Maybe tracks with some percussionists, maybe some Balkan music to try and re-interpret things—maybe a vocal choir!
How did you decide what songs to start with?
M: Carlos is the one who hipped me to Dilla in the first place. He gave me Dilla mixes and I started massing this library, and I started to understand his language and his vernacular. I don’t know how many hundreds of hours I spent composing! Probably thousands now. Orchestrating this stuff—it’s beautiful but painful also. It’s immense! So it’s me picking tracks I want to spend that much time with. Another influence—on tracks where he takes a sample, I use a lot of those original tracks. On the 22nd, I’m orchestrating some of those original tracks. There’s a Herbie Hancock song—‘Come Running To Me’—that Dilla sampled, and I’m orchestrating Herbie’s version. To give the concert more diversity.
C: I related it the other day to a master chess player who gets to play another master for a year versus a master chess player in the park on a time clock. He’s given a challenge to pull something off on the level he wants in the amount of time it has to be done in! It’s pretty exciting for me to see Miguel wholeheartedly dive into it. It’s a wonderful opportunity but there’s quite a lot of danger there. That’s what I relate to expressing it as a river of creativity—as an ocean! Not only literally about the work or the work he samples—but maybe if we did get Herbie Hancock, we might record something completely brand-new in the spirit of the project that pays tribute to Dilla! In a way, this whole thing can be alive. So often covers are stagnant—why would someone want to redo something that was already done perfect? But it’s because they love it! The reason people cover things is they feel really drawn to it. In the purest sense, we cover songs because they’re great songs. With Dilla, every artist I’ve heard that tried to do what he did did not do it—even the people closest to him. He had his own thing, but he encouraged people to tap into their own thing. That’s really what’s happening here—Miguel is tapping into his own thing! I help with the conceptual and actual facets of it, and the writing is really coming from Miguel’s life.
M: That’s what Karriem said when he said don’t feel like you have to recreate. Like Charlie Parker—people identify with the magic of celebrating that moment, and looking to the future with optimism and courage. It’s not like, ‘Ok, let’s play those exact notes.’ Then you can be sure the magic won’t be there. On the album and the EP and at the concert are full sections where it’s just my original music. I’m consciously trying to create new music to continue what he did and also magnify a certain vibe or sentence Dilla might have said. Carlos talked about Herbie Hancock as an example of maybe coming in the studio to make something new. I want entire pieces to be original compositions dedicated to Dilla! To the whole community we have—to the future also.
What does it say about Dilla’s work that you’ve made this new project?
C: In a word—how soulful he was. When Miguel says he transcended hip-hop—I don’t consider him a hip-hop producer as much as a soul musician. He was doing what I feel like the Motown cats before him did. People like Quincy Jones. Not in a literal sense soulful—not that he sounded like Motown. But it was just—really soulful!
M: When I think of soul musicians, I think Dilla falls in the that category. But when I think of other soul musicians whose work I’d like to interpret—it’s not as cosmic as Dilla’s. To another degree, that’s what answers your question. It’s not just humanity. Yes, he has this soul—it’s really really heartfelt. But it’s something kind of cosmic. When something is so pure and undeniable that it just transcends time—that’s what I think Dilla was doing. Dilla is a new definition to soul music.

ARTDONTSLEEP, MOCHILLA AND VTECH PRESENT CARLOS NIÑO AND MIGUEL ATWOOD-FERGUSON’S SUITE FOR MA DUKES WITH 40-PIECE ORCHESTRA PLUS DJ HOUSESHOES AND GUESTS ON SUN., FEB. 22, AT THE LUCKMAN FINE ARTS COMPLEX AT CAL STATE LOS ANGELES, 5151 STATE UNIVERSITY DR., LOS ANGELES. 7 PM / $22.50 / ALL AGES. FURTHER INFORMATION AND COMPLETE SCHEDULE AT VTECHPHONES.COM/TIMELESS. THE SUITE FOR MA DUKES EP RELEASES SUN., FEB. 22, ON MOCHILLA. MOCHILLA.COM.