Download: Michael Nhat “I Love Bread” Mixtape

Rapper Michael Nhat’s new self-titled album releases Tuesday, Oct. 27, on How To Be A Microwave and his record release show is this Saturday at the House of Vermont. He presents L.A. RECORD with a mixtape—which he titled I Love Bread—and a story to go with every song.

Mozart “Fantasy In F Minor”
One of my girlfriends in 1997 played it live at her school and it made me really appreciate classical music because I didn’t before.

Sonic Youth “Panty Lies”
This song influenced me to start rapping. I had been doing it for fun but this one encouraged me to rap professionally. When people ask me one of my greatest influences, I refer to this—Kim Gordon and Sonic Youth.

Wu-Tang Clan “Can It Be It Was All So Simple”
This is what I was listening to in 1993. I bought my first 4-track and was making music for fun. I played this a lot. The beats and the music inspired me because it was at a time when rap had just finished its MC Hammer era and they were dividing themselves on East and West Coast. And I was East Coast.

Wayne Newton “Danke Schoen”
When I was a kid I heard it in the Ferris Bueller’s Day Off movie. I didn’t know who sang it. But this song started my obsession with hunting down songs I would hear places. This was before the Internet.

Etta James “Trust In Me”
This came on in Chicago at a party on the Southside, and it was my first time encountering her. I immediately liked it. I wish I could sound like Etta James.

PJ Harvey “Is That All There Is?”
I heard it when it first came out in 1996 and maybe a little after that my dad died. This is the first song I played after that so it takes me back there.

Radiohead “Fitter Happier”
The writing of this song is probably the deepest influence in how I write my songs. It changed how I see the writing process. I didn’t get it at first. I just liked it for music’s sake. But as I started paying attention—I would say I emulate this style, as opposed to what everyone else confuses me with. People think I am influenced by Anticon and Busdriver. I am not. I’d never even heard of these people until I moved out here.

Johnny Mathis “It’s Not For Me To Say”
This was when I decided to quit making music as a hobby in 1997. I wanted to be normal and go to school and get a job. I had a daughter and this makes me think of her. I was going to school for film and I made a short and put this song in for her.

Otis Redding “I’ve Got Dreams”
This reminds me of the last time I robbed a house. We were looking up obituaries and found someone who had just died and went to his place. We tried to get as much as we could, but ended up just with his guns and sold them. This was something I’d been doing since I was 16. Also at that time, I got in trouble for storing crack for a friend. My dad found it and flushed it down the toilet. My friends thought I sold it or smoked it.

Sesame Street Kid “Sesame Street”
In Iowa at the parties, DJs would play songs like this at the end of their set. It opened my ears to this type of funny happy song. I started collecting songs like that. Eventually this began to influence my music, which is why my songs are so poppy.

MICHAEL NHAT WITH VOICE ON TAPE, HALLOWEEN SWIM TEAM, NARWHAL PARTY, REDEMER, BLUE TAPE RED TAPE AND LUNA IS HONEY ON SAT., OCT. 24, AT THE RELEASE PARTY FOR MICHAEL NHAT’S SELF-TITLED ALBUM AT THE HOUSE OF VERMONT, 1515 S. VERMONT AVE., LOS ANGELES. 9 PM / DONATIONS / ALL AGES. HOWTOBEAMICROWAVE.COM. MICHAEL NHAT’S SELF-TITLED ALBUM RELEASES TUE., OCT. 27, ON HOW TO BE A MICROWAVE. VISIT MICHAEL NHAT AT MICHAELNHAT.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/MICHAELNHAT.

Download: The Monks “Love Came Tumblin’ Down” (demo)

(from The Early Years 1964-1965 out now on Light In The Attic)

The Monks were one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll bands ever. They came from nowhere—five G.I.s stationed in Germany about to muster out of the U.S. Army when Vietnam and the Beatles were both heating up—and they sounded like nobody else on their single album Black Monk Time and they faded away after only a few years, so shell-shocked that they had to struggle to remember how to be Americans again. Light In The Attic has just reissued Black Monk Time (with vital outtakes like “Pretty Suzanne”) and the pre-Monk Time demos. Founders Eddie Shaw and Gary Burger (who reveals the location of the lost last Monks session!) speak now about the Monk times. These interviews by Chris Ziegler. Read Part Two of the interview (with Monks singer Gary Burger) here.

Eddie Shaw (bass): I was a musician when I was 15 years old and I played in a casino in Carson City, Nevada, and Wayne Newton was 12 years old—he was on the front stage, and I was 15 and I was on the back stage. So, you know, I come from a musical family. My aunt Sue almost married Will Wills, who’s Bob Wills’ brother. I was a musician all my life and actually I was assigned to the 6th Army band when I went in the Army. They were gonna station me in San Francisco. I had a plush job and I went and screwed it up and said, ‘Well, I’m gonna be so close to home—can I see some place else?’ and they said sure and sent me to Germany. When I got to Germany all of a sudden I was in an artillery outfit.
Do you feel like you’ve always chosen the path of most resistance?
Well, yeah—I did. My new book is about birds hitting windows and this trumpet player keeps hitting windows and I’ve spent my life hitting windows but that’s the thing. I don’t like playing or doing the conventional sort of stuff. Usually its about discovery for me, and that’s what the Monks was. It was about discovery.
What did you discover through the Monks?
The minimalist thing. The idea of tension.
Do you still feel what you wrote in your book Black Monk Time—that all Monks songs are love songs?
They are in a sense. If you listen to ‘I Hate You, But Call Me,’ how many of us hate the person that we love at any given minute because we’re so frustrated and so in love? The very heart of love in some ways, right?
Did you ever feel that you were turning into your own songs?
We got tired at the end. I don’t know if you saw that Monks documentary Transatlantic Feedback—the documentary was about a list and really there was no list. In the documentary it sounded like we broke up or we didn’t make it because we didn’t follow the list. It’s a myth—just like the Lunachicks in New York City were the first to play Monk music in the states. They had an interview in People magazine and they said, ‘Where’d you get those songs?’ and they said, ‘Well, we discovered this old obscure recording.’ They said it was a bunch of GIs in Germany who went AWOL and the police were looking for them and they showed up on German TV singing ‘I Hate You, But Call Me’ and the police closed in on them and they disappeared and nobody’s seen them since. I’ve always liked that story the best—I wish that one was true. But getting back to whether we were that thing—when you wear that image everyday, people treat you differently and you get used to it and you get the feeling of how it must feel to be a monk. Or a figure of religious authority, so to speak. Until you say, ‘fuck you’ and you have a shot of whiskey and ogle the girls standing over there and they figure it out—‘Wait a minute!’
In the book, you say everybody’s personality was defined by the instrument they play. So who were the Monks?
Gary was a country-western player. I think his roots were probably in folk music. [Banjo player] Dave [Day] played three chords. [Organist] Larry [Clark] took piano lessons and he played Chopin and he also got a $90 organ and could play ‘Green Onions.’ [Drummer] Roger [Johnston] was from Texas and he played Texas swing. He might have been influenced by the Bob Wills swing group. I never discussed my musical past with them. We were all from different environments—for the most part, that’s what made the Monks. The music is a hybrid of sort of a conversation between all of us to get rid of what all of us had that the other ones couldn’t work with. I come from Miles Davis and Chet Baker and all that. My music culture has nothing to do with the Monk music culture and I know that Gary’s music culture has nothing to do with the Monk music culture. Neither do any of them. Basically what the Monk music culture became was what we could do that would work together that nobody else had ever done.
You guys said in the book how you wanted to be truthful as a band and just communicate the simple truth. Is that why people thought Monk music was so ugly?
I don’t think people like to be hit in the head with the straight-on idea that everybody lies. I tell everybody that I lie three times a day and I try to do them as early in the morning as possible so I get them out of the way. So you know—‘Shut up, be a liar.’ We still have that today. Just look at politicians. I’m not a political person. I didn’t really like the political content that we were doing because I don’t really like that. To me it dates the songs. ‘Monk Time’ is dated because of the reference to Vietnam. If it wouldn’t have been the reference to Vietnam, it could have been like ‘Shut up, don’t cry!’—it could be good now. But there is a way to talk about politics in a song that doesn’t date it and we had a big argument about that one. I was against it. But I compromised. If it’s our kid then I’ll do it. But when you use a song to attack the headlines, you are basically dating yourself. It’s not that you shouldn’t have the honor or the courage to say, ‘I’ll speak my mind.’ Because I will. But if you’re going to make a piece of art you want the message to last. I don’t want it to die as soon as the problem died.
I read about someone who’d seen you play in Germany and said, ‘What the hell were you guys doing? I didn’t understand what it was but I got pissed off as soon as I heard it.’ Does that count as success?
Yes, it does. I was in a bar five years ago and I was sitting there drinking a beer and this guy about my age was sitting there we were talking and he said, ‘I was in Vietnam.’ I told him I was in Germany and he said, ‘Yeah, I went to Germany from Vietnam and I had a girlfriend and went to Hamburg and saw this group playing and I hated them—I wanted to kill ‘em.’ I drank my beer and I didn’t say anything but after a while I said, ‘I was in that group.’ He says, ‘I absolutely hate you.’ He said it, but we were drinking a beer real friendly and I say, ‘What did you hate about it?’ He said, ‘That whole bullshit about Vietnam and crap—I just got back from Vietnam.’ I said, ‘Yeah I didn’t like that myself. But as you turn around and look at it thirty years later when Robert McNamara came on TV and apologized about it—I felt then at least maybe we weren’t wrong. Not that that’s the important thing—the sad thing is that 58,000 American kids died along with all the Vietnamese kids.’ And he says, ‘I know that and I thought about it and you’re absolutely right.’ ‘After all these years,’ he says, ‘you’re right. But I still hate you.’ So I said, ‘OK.’
You seemed so shell-shocked coming out of the Monks experience. What did the Monks do to you?
You get conditioned to knowing that you’re going to piss people off. When I went home—my mother is a hell of a piano player, and when I played the Monks stuff for her, she didn’t say anything against it but she just ignored it and went on to something else. But normally before, when I played drums and trumpet, all the jazz stuff—she’d say, ‘Great! Do that again!’ My uncle who also played just turned it off—‘God, you used to be a better musician than that! Why are you doing that?’ So you just lock it away and say, ‘Well, that didn’t work.’ After I wrote the book, these two guys showed up at my house and asked if I was Eddie the Monk and I about fell over. I called Gary Burger in Minnesota just because he would like to know that and I said, ‘You wouldn’t believe this but two guys showed up at my door and wanted to do an article because they’d read the book and they loved our music—the Monks have people who like them.’ And Gary said, ‘fuck you,’ and he hung up.
Was that an affectionate fuck you?
No—it was a pissed-off fuck you. He thought I was fucking with his head. It’s the idea that if you go out and you’re going to be an artist and if you’re just up there to please everybody and you want everybody to love you, you’re really wasting your time. Dave always sought love—I’m not using that against him but people want to be loved and Dave was one of those. You never test the limits of anybody—you just want to please them. If you want to be an artist you need to feel the ripples of tension throughout the audience. I want to see if something is causing a little pushback, because if I get a little pushback then I know that there might lie a key to some hidden truth right there.
The path of most resistance?
You get the pushback and it says you’re raising a reaction. If you’re getting a reaction, then you’re doing something.
Isn’t this basic chemistry? A reaction producing results?
Yeah—that’s it right there! Holy Christ, we are gonna talk about the universe here shortly. Holy Christ, this telephone is getting hot!
So what discoveries do you have that you need to share?
I don’t have any discoveries. I think the idea is the idea of living to discover or learn something. I can’t imagine the idea of retiring and then sitting in my RV in an RV park to watch the sun go down and say, ‘Oh, this is a great life—I don’t have to go to work.’ I enjoy my work, so I live for my work because my work is the process of discovery.
What are the biggest revelations you’ve had in your life?
The idea of being in love is a revelation because you become more than just yourself. The idea of one person standing alone against the world is totally non-existent.
Isn’t that supposed to be the whole romantic rock n’ roll rebel thing?
Well, that’s the outlaw. We all want the outlaws. We all wanna die in a hail of bullets.
But that’s not a realistic expectation.
I don’t think so. If it is, go join the Army.
So the Monks really were all about love then?
In a sense, don’t we all strive for love? If you discover something, isn’t that illumination sort of freeing? It’s like—yeah, this feels good.
Why do you guys think you got so many letters from East Germany? What were they responding to?
One of the things I think was the idea that we would speak our mind—to say, ‘I’m an American, I have free speech, I can say what I wanna say whether you like it or not.’ They go, ‘You can’t say that—you can tell me that in private but don’t say it out loud like that!’ That is what the East Germans picked up on. These Americans are saying this stuff and it doesn’t even sound like they’re supporting their country but the thing is we are. We’re proving that in our country we’re free.
Who were the Monks fans?
What kind of people? I would say people who are more free-thinking. That could be anybody from a stripteaser to a painter or a jazz musician who doesn’t like rock. One of my friends used to hang out and he liked Monk music because he said it doesn’t sound like all that other crap. And it was always amazing that this Monk music was being played by guys who, much of the time, didn’t know more than three or four chords.
Do you feel like that laid the groundwork for punk?
I don’t think it laid the ground but I think that there’s an evolution going on all the time and we’re just part of it. We were the first ones that got the little fins that we crawled out of the water two inches.
Do you still feel like you failed?
No, I don’t. It takes a while to see that the idea of failure is good—if you have no failures then you’ve never tried anything. My grandmother wanted me to be a preacher. I didn’t dare tell her what kind of Monk I was. She said, ‘Are you with the Lord, Eddie?’ I said, ‘I think so.’

Read Chris Ziegler’s interview with Monks singer Gary Burger here.

Download: The Monks “Love Came Tumblin’ Down” (demo)

(from The Early Years 1964-1965 out now on Light In The Attic)

The Monks were one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll bands ever. They came from nowhere—five G.I.s stationed in Germany about to muster out of the U.S. Army when Vietnam and the Beatles were both heating up—and they sounded like nobody else on their single album Black Monk Time and they faded away after only a few years, so shell-shocked that they had to struggle to remember how to be Americans again. Light In The Attic has just reissued Black Monk Time (with vital outtakes like “Pretty Suzanne”) and the pre-Monk Time demos. Founders Eddie Shaw and Gary Burger (who reveals the location of the lost last Monks session!) speak now about the Monk times. These interviews by Chris Ziegler. Read Part One of the interview (with Monks bassist Eddie Shaw) here.

Are you still the mayor of your town?
Gary Burger (vocals/guitar): I’m the mayor. I’ve been the mayor fifteen years in this fine little city of Turtle River and I originally ran on the ‘no progress’ platform and that’s still sucking ‘em in. No change at all. We don’t want new people moving in—we don’t want progress.
Do people call you up? ‘Gary, come over and fix my pipes!’
No, the mayor don’t do that kind of work. I’ve got a recording studio. I’m about to bring some boys in—I got a great drummer Len Curio from L.A. I got a terrific bassist from Minneapolis and a local keyboard player and myself and we’re gonna produce a Gary Burger album. Some of them are protest songs. Some are damn near a love song. It’s sort of eclectic and it worries me because I’m going to be yelling at money mongers and bankers. I wrote that damn song ten years ago!
Are you still yelling like you used to? Do you still have the voice?
Oh, man, that’s all I can do. I’ve always thought, ‘Hey, I should be a crooner,’ but no—that’s a mistake. I need to yell, I guess, before people will listen to me. And sometimes they turn me off even then. It’s a good way to get your frustrations out. Just go yell in a recording studio where nobody is hearing you but yourself—at least that day. And later on they can listen if they want. But I’m pretty excited about this new recording I’ve got 18 songs that are all original. I’m playing guitar on it too. 18 wont make the cut but we’ll see what happens. I’ve got my players here for five days. We don’t believe in taking two years or six months to do an album. It’s basically set the band up, get good sound and let ‘er rip.
Your German managers wanted you to be the hardest band in the world—do you think that actually came true?
At that time? Yeah. The audiences didn’t appreciate it very much and the bar owners hated it. They used to say, ‘What happened to my nice little band the Torquays? Now you guys are playing this crap and you’re running my customers out of the place. I loved you before and I hate you now.’ Pretty strong stuff for a band that’s counting on these businesses to make our living. We managed it for quite a while and it eventually petered out.
What kind of people were really connecting with you guys?
We had some people who would actually shave their heads and wear black. There were a few of those. They were dedicated and became our friends—they just saw something in the music and in us that struck a chord with them. We were probably the only band on the continent at the time that would shout, ‘Why’d you kill all those kids over there in Vietnam?’ I don’t think the English groups were doing that and the German groups certainly were not and there were people in the States that were doing it with the anti-war movement growing in the states. Dylan had some pretty damn pointed songs about it all. And Barry McGuire.
How much did your Army training influence the Monks?
The band was a pretty loose show. The Army didn’t have much to do with that, and as far as the look, it was the manager’s creation. It was still a rock ‘n roll band. People say what kind of music is it—punk? Naw, hell—I thought it was rock ‘n roll. Punk? What was that in ’66? If you called somebody punk that meant they were a shithead or a young dummy or something.
Do you feel like you laid the groundwork for the punk music that would happen later?
I don’t want to go that far, my friend. There’s a lot of people out there in the history of music who have made little steps in this direction or that direction and the Monks were just another step. I think what we did with our anti-war songs—we were one of the first ones, in Europe for sure, to do that. I’m very proud of that. When we went out to play or when we regrouped for these reunion concerts in the last few years, I couldn’t bring myself to sing or yell, ‘Why’d you kill all those kids over there in Vietnam?’ That’s ancient history. So I put in words like, ‘Why’d you kill all those kids in Iraq?’ Or Afghanistan? That makes sense. There’s always going to be a war—it just pisses me off that there’s always going to be a war. If there’s not one going on, just wait a week.
I know there’s a little tension about those lyrics.
Who said that? I don’t think I was ever uncomfortable with it—I think Eddie was. I always felt good about it. Even though I was an Army guy and I had connections with friends who were in the Army after we became the Monks, they didn’t want to go to Vietnam. They heard the stories. The Army is one big rumor pipeline inside it. You hear the stories of people who have been there and they didn’t want to go. But on the other hand I can relate to Eddie’s spookiness about doing those songs—he never did want to do that sort of thing. But I was pleased about it. I think it’s what the Monks had to do. If the Monks were truly going to have any impact in 1966, we better be saying something about the Vietnam War. When we go out now, we don’t do that. I’m talking about new wars and that still makes Eddie uncomfortable. Eddie is just not comfortable with any of this protest stuff. I guess I’m not afraid of repercussions. I’m not spooked by what the world might say about me. I’m an individual. I’m a leader, not a follower.
Eddie said in the book all the Monks songs were love songs—what do you think? Were the protest songs love songs?
Not the protest songs. But we get asked about ‘I Hate You’ which happens to be one of my favorites—I love to sing that song today. That’s a love song—‘I hate you but call me?’ Come on. How many relationships have we had in our lives where we’re like, ‘I don’t know if I like this person but I’d sure like to hear from them’?
What was the most romantic Monks moment?
That’s almost X-rated! Eddie said something that I always liked, and I don’t like too much of what he says, but I liked this—he said that when we were the Torquays we got the nice girls and after we became the Monks we got the bad girls.
Is that a step in the right direction?
Well, it was for the Monks—at least we were still getting girls!
What do you think the Monks’ message was?
I think if anything, songs like ‘Complication’ and ‘Monk Time’ raise the awareness to stand up and say something about the inequities going on in the world. War is number one. There’s so many areas—it would be about impossible to cover all the bases. Starvation, poverty—it just goes on and on. I think putting that message out with the original Monks was a good thing to do. And I think I’ve said it twice that I’m very proud of the Monks for having those two particular cuts on our albums these days. Without those two cuts, I think the Monks would have been a bubblegum punk band. ‘Shut Up,’ too—that’s another possible anti-war song. ‘The world is worried, the world is always worried’—let’s find a damn world where we’re not so damn worried about everything and we can just live our lives in peace and accomplish our personal goals. Not whether you do or not but at least have the chance to accomplish your personal goals.
Was it true that you guys got bags of fan mail?
Yeah, we would get fan mail. ‘Hey, we love you and we’re coming to see you and my name is Brigitte.’
What do you think the Monks experience did to you as a person?
I went in enthusiastic and came out sobered. I didn’t want to hear any more about the Monks after I came back to the States. I didn’t feel like an American. I missed Europe and I missed my friends and I missed the life. It took me years to really settle down again and become an American again. We weren’t German, we weren’t French, we weren’t Italian, we weren’t Swedish, we were Americans that became something else and we became something else because we lived there, spoke the language, ate that food, heard their newscasts—didn’t hear CNN, didn’t hear NBC, didn’t hear CBS news. We eventually lost a good share of our American identity because we were relating to people who were non-American. I don’t want to say we became German because that isn’t so. We just became more international in attitude. When I got back to the States I didn’t like it here. I got back here in ‘68 and around 1974 I sold everything that I had and I was single again and I did it to finance a trip to Germany and I went over that with the idea that I might stay here—but Germany had marched on without me for four or five years and it was already too late. It was a sobering experience but I came back and eventually ended up where I am now and built a new life, new career, new happiness and what’s kept me interested and excited during these times is to continue writing songs. I haven’t pressed anybody to try to shop them or go that direction but I’m about to change that that. I’m gonna move that next little album around, assuming it comes out good.
I found a quote where you’re talking about how in some ways you feel there is no place for people in the world who wanna be different and so they just get crushed. Do you still feel that way?
Sometimes, yeah. People who want to be different—well, who are different, who speak out or do things that are not part of the normal grain can be penalized. I’m not saying I am—I don’t believe that any more from my point of view. And I do believe that anybody who wants to make a statement through music or however—who are we to penalize anybody? We should be encouraging people to have discussion and have new ideas and be allowed to experiment and try them.
Is there any Monks music you’d like to still see come out? Any unreleased recordings?
There’s a couple more recordings that haven’t been released and probably never will be. We recorded them in the Top Ten Club in Hamburg. They’re sitting here on a shelf about ten feet away from me.
Are you kidding? Everybody is going to come after you for those!
Tell them I’ve got three big dogs and they’re all mean! I think the Monks have mutually agreed that it will just stay where it is—the world doesn’t need it. They’ll stay there.
Do you feel a sense of vindication now with these reissues?
Amazement was the first reaction—the second was that this was okay. The third is some satisfaction that the Monks still leave a wake and that’s pretty damn cool. There’s been thousands of groups that have worked just as hard as the Monks did or harder and haven’t managed to have that wake behind them. And the ship’s still moving. It is still satisfying, I’m just hoping to hell nobody wants to shoot me for being a Monk! The only time that I felt physically at potential risk was once in south Germany, a fella jumped on stage and started to choke the life out of me for being a Monk. But that was kind of a Nazi zone down there at the time and that was the only time.
What pushed him over the edge?
I don’t have a clue. It was just the way we looked, just the way we sounded. I don’t think he even understood what we were singing.
He was just inspired to engage with you?
Yes, he was. I hit him in the side of the face with my guitar neckpiece with all those little strings sticking out and he let go right quick and security got to him right quick. I was glad to be done with that show though—I can remember that!

Read Chris Ziegler’s interview with Monks bassist Eddie Shaw here.