You’ll dig this episode of Lil’ BUB’s Big SHOW, in which Lil’ Bug produces a new Kelley Deal track.
Category Archives: interview
Art: Village Voice Lands Banksy Interview: “It doesn’t take much to be a successful artist—all you need to do is dedicate your entire life to it.”
Following the first week of Banksy’s New York “Better Out Than In” street art show, the mysterious British artist has granted an email interview with the Village Voice.
“There is absolutely no reason for doing this show at all,” Banksy told the Voice. “I know street art can feel increasingly like the marketing wing of an art career, so I wanted to make some art without the price tag attached. There’s no gallery show or book or film. It’s pointless. Which hopefully means something.”
The artist says he is currently living in New York.
“The plan is to live here, react to things, see the sights—and paint on them,” he wrote. “Some of it will be pretty elaborate, and some will just be a scrawl on a toilet wall.”
Is Banksy defacing his own art? No, he says.
“I’m not defacing my own pictures, no,” he told the Voice. “I used to think other graffiti writers hated me because I used stencils, but they just hate me.”
And what about those audio clips that mock museum audio guides?
“The audio guide started as a cheap joke, and to be honest that’s how it’s continued, but I’m starting to see more potential in it now,” Banksy told the Voice. “I like how it controls the time you spend looking at an image. I read that researchers at a big museum in London found the average person looked at a painting for eight seconds. So if you put your art at a stoplight you’re already getting better numbers than Rembrandt.”
Most interesting is Banksy’s comments about maintaining credibility as a street artist. He said he made a “mistake” when, for his last New York show, he didn’t create the artwork himself.
“I totally overlooked how important it was to do it myself,” he wrote. “Graffiti is an art form where the gesture is at least as important as the result, if not more so. I read how a critic described Jackson Pollock as a performance artist who happened to use paint, and the same could be said for graffiti writers—performance artists who happen to use paint. And trespass.”
And more:
“I started painting on the street because it was the only venue that would give me a show,” he wrote. “Now I have to keep painting on the street to prove to myself it wasn’t a cynical plan. Plus it saves money on having to buy canvases.
“But there’s no way round it—commercial success is a mark of failure for a graffiti artist,” he continued. “We’re not supposed to be embraced in that way. When you look at how society rewards so many of the wrong people, it’s hard not to view financial reimbursement as a badge of self-serving mediocrity.”
My favorite part of the interview are these comments about surviving as an artist — and success.
“Obviously people need to get paid—otherwise you’d only get vandalism made by part-timers and trust-fund kids,” Banksy wrote. “But it’s complicated, it feels like as soon as you profit from an image you’ve put on the street, it magically transforms that piece into advertising. When graffiti isn’t criminal, it loses most of its innocence.
“It seems to me the best way to make money out of art is not to even try,” he wrote. “It doesn’t take much to be a successful artist—all you need to do is dedicate your entire life to it. The thing people most admired about Picasso wasn’t his work/life balance.”
For the whole story, go to the Voice.
Listen: Nirvana Interviews From Early ’90s
James Sherry interviewed Nirvana a number of times between 1990 and 1992 for Metal Hammer magazine.
From Sherry’s new introduction to the interviews:
“It’s hard to express quite how important Nirvana were to my life and the direction it took. In the late eighties I started my first job as office junior at Metal Hammer magazine. I had my own fanzine ‘Phobia’ and I was over-flowing with enthusiasm and eager for every bit of nasty noise that came my way; ‘you used to like everything….everything’s great,’ an old work college reminded me recently. And he’s right, I loved it all.
In one of my first weeks in the office I happened upon a package of records that had been sent to the then reviews editor John Duke. He had recently left the magazine and I was charged with the job of sorting through the pile of records for review. One of the packages really caught my eye. It was from Anton at Bad Moon Publicity and had three records inside; ‘Superfuzz Bigmuff’ by Mudhoney, ‘Bleach’ by Nirvana and a Tad record which I now forget. I snuck the records home and suffice to say, they tore my little teenage mind apart.”
Read more here.
Read what James Sherry has to say about his experiences with Nirvana here.
Watch: Full Pearl Jam Video Interviews
If you’ve been frequenting Days of the Crazy-Wild, than you’ve seen the Carrie Brownstein/ Pearl Jam interview.
Now you can see the other interviews that were excerpted in Pearl Jam’s Lightning Bolt mini-documentary.
Watch Judd Apatow, champion surfer Mark Richards and former NFL player Steve Gleason interview the band.
Apatow:
Richards:
Gleason:
Unreleased Clash Album?
Mick Jones, once the guitarist, songwriter and occasional singer in The Clash, said in an interview that he wrote a batch of songs with his Clash partner, Joe Strummer, that have never been released.
“We did write some more songs together and he was going to do them with The Mescaleros [Strummer’s final group],” Jones said during an interview with BBC 6Music.
“We wrote a batch – we didn’t used to write one, we used to write a batch at a time – like gumbo,” Jones said. “The idea was he was going to go into the studio with The Mescaleros during the day and then send them all home. I’d come in all night and we’d all work all night.”
The NME, which reported the story, says it’s possible the songs did get recorded as an unreleased Clash album.
“That didn’t come to nothing because that wasn’t going to work, we knew that but it was a nice idea,” Jones said in the interview. “Later on, a few months later we were at some opening or something and I said, ‘What happened to those songs?!’ If you didn’t do them straight away and get them back straight away, it was like, ‘What’s wrong with them?!’ So, I went, ‘What happened to the songs?!’ He went, ‘Oh man, they’re the next Clash album’.”
Krist Novoselic Talks About Kurt’s Creativity
In an interview Krist Novoselic did for a story Rolling Stone is running about In Utero, the bass player speaks about the group’s creative process.
“There were songs that Kurt would woodshed,” Novoselic said. “He would come in with it, and we would work it out, build it up. There were songs that were made up on the spot, coming out of jams, which took a few rehearsals to come together. But they would find form. That was another thing with Kurt – he could have a riff, but then he was so good at vocal phrasing. He would usually write the lyrics at the last minute. But he was so good at vocal phrasing [in rehearsals]. And voilà – you have a song.
“Once we settled on an arrangement, we never changed anything,” Novoselic continued. “You can see that in different versions of songs we recorded [live] over the years. We never changed the arrangement. Once it was done, it was done: ‘Let’s play it.'”
Read more at Rolling Stone.
Watch: Pearl Jam Talk About “Lightning Bolt”
In this documentary style video by Danny Clinch, the members of Pearl Jam talk about their upcoming album, Lightning Bolt, with Portlandia’s Carrie Brownstein and Judd Apatow and others. The album is due out October 15. In addition to the talking, there’s music. It’s pretty good. If you dig Pearl Jam, or are curious about the state of making music with them in 2013, check it out.
Grateful Dead Lyricist Robert Hunter To Hit The Road
Robert Hunter, the lyricist who wrote the lyrics for many of the Grateful Dead’s best songs will be touring for the first time in years (starting later this week in New York), according to Rolling Stone.
Hunter collaborated with Jerry Garcia beginning in the ’60s and the two of them wrote such Dead classics as “Dark Star,” St. Stephen” and “Box of Rain.”
Hunter says he’s touring to pay off hospital bills.
“When I was in my sixties, it seemed like a good time to retire, and I didn’t have a financial reason,” Hunter told David Browne. “But I’ve got medical bills to pay, so I’m a working man again. Last year I managed to have a nice hospitalization that should have been fatal. I had a spinal abscess. It was a honey. They had me on morphine for about a month. I had never had the distinction of being involved with that [drug] before. It was the strangest world. I couldn’t tell delusions from reality. I was calling my mom in the middle of the night saying they were going to execute me.”
To read an interview with Hunter, head to Rolling Stone.
Film: Michael Bloomfield Documentary Finally To See The Light
A years in the making documentary on the great blues guitarist Michael Bloomfield, “Sweet Blues: A Film About Michael Bloomfield,” will be premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival in Mill Valley, CA, on October 11. Filmmaker Bob Sarles spent 25 years working on the documentary.
A taste of Bloomfield’s inimitable playing:
Bloomfield first came to national attention as a member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a favorite of the counter-culture rock crowd
in the late ’60s. As a session guitarist he played on Bob Dylan’s album, Highway 61 Revisited, including Dylan’s Top 40 hit, “Like A Rolling Stone,” and was the lead guitarist in the band Dylan used at his infamous Newport Folk Festival performance, which was the first rock ‘n’ roll performance of Dylan’s professional career.
To introduce Bloomfield on November 15, 1980, when the guitarist joined Dylan for a performance of “Like A Rolling Stone” at the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, Dylan talked about meeting Bloomfield for the first time: “I was playing in a club in Chicago, I guess it was about 1956, or nineteen-sixty. And I was sittin’ there, I was sittin’ in a restaurant, I think it was, probably across the street, or maybe it was even part of the club, I’m not sure — but a guy came down and said that he played guitar. So he had his guitar with him, and he begin to play, I said, ‘Well what can you play?’ and he played all kinds of things, I don’t know if you’ve heard of a man, does Big Bill Broonzy ring a bell? Or, ah, Sonny Boy Williamson, that type of thing? He just played circles, around anything I could play, and I always remembered that.” (Thank you Greil Marcus, for including Dylan’s introduction in your book, “Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan At The Crossroads”.)
So Dylan hired a great blues guitarist for the Highway 61 Revisited sessions, but he was intent on making his first full-bore rock album, so Dylan gave Bloomfield cryptic instructions before the sessions began.
“I went to his house first to hear the tunes,” Bloomfield said in a June 1968 interview for Hit Parader. “The first thing I heard was ‘Like a Rolling Stone.’ He wanted me to get the concept of it, how to play it. I figured he wanted blues, string bending, because that’s what I do. He said, ‘Hey, man, I don’t want any of that B. B. King stuff.’ So, OK, I really fell apart. What the heck does he want? We messed around with the song. I played the way that he dug and he said it was groovy.
“Then we went to the session,” Bloomfield continued. “Bob told me, ‘You talk to the musicians, man, I don’t want to tell them anything.’ So we get to the session. I didn’t know anything about it. All these studio cats are standing around. I come in like a dumb punk with my guitar over my back, no case, and I’m telling people about this and that, and this is the arrangement, and do this on the bridge. These are like the heaviest studio musicians in New York. They looked at me like I was crazy.”
Bloomfield and his band, The Electric Flag, at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967:
Bloomfield’s biggest success came with the release of Super Session, a jam with Steven Stills and Al Kooper that reached #12 on the Billboard Top 200 in 1968, the year of its release.
Bloomfield is considered one rock’s greatest guitar players; he was ranked #22 in Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest Guitarists Of All TIme.”
Bloomfield became addicted to heroin, and in the early ’70s, maintained a low profile, spending much of his time at his house in Mill Valley, CA. As a teenager, a friend and I knocked on Bloomfield’s front door one afternoon. He opened the door, and when we told him we were big fans, he invited us in. That day he spoke to us freely about the blues, as well as his sessions with Dylan. The following year when my friend and I were putting on dance concerts at Tam High in Mill Valley, Bloomfield agreed to play, and with a pickup band headlined the show at the high school auditorium and delivered what I remember as a knock-out performance.
For the rest of his life, Bloomfield played occasional club dates around the Bay Area, sometimes with the exceptional blues pianist Sunnyland Slim, including a terrific set I caught at the Opal Cliffs Inn in Santa Cruz. He was found dead of a drug overdose on February 15, 1981. He was 37 years old.
In the documentary, Sarles includes interviews with numerous people who knew Bloomfield including guitarist Carlos Santana, harmonica ace Charlie Musslewhite, singer/songwriter Country Joe McDonald, guitarist Elvin Bishop, B.B King, Al Kooper and many more.
Bluesman Charlie Musslewhite talks about Bloomfield in the film:
Concert promoter Bill Graham on Bloomfield:
Interview: ‘Modern Farmer’ Talks Goats With John Darnielle
So Modern Farmer magazine gets John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats on the phone to talk about — goats. I mean the entire interview — goats! At one point the interviewer asked John why no songs about goats on any of The Mountain Goats’ albums.
“No, no. I mean — it’s just the band name,” Darnielle said. “And it’s kinda interesting to me, that we’re talking about the animal. I don’t think people ask Deerhoof all the time about deer or about their hooves. They get off scot-free. From the minute I named this band, everyone was like, ‘Mountain Goats? Oh my God!’ And animal names in rock bands are so common. I mean, the Beatles.”
There is some music talk, but in the context of — goats!
Darnielle is something of a metal, and death metal, expert. He wrote an entire book (OK, it wasn’t that long, but still) about Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality. At one point Darnielle is asked why he thinks “goats get featured so often in both metal and Satanic imagery?”
“Heavy metal takes that tradition from Satanist and I wanna say, maybe, Kabbalistic traditions,” Darnielle said. “The goat in mythology, initially, is sacrificed. You have the old Biblical sacrifice. The community murders a goat in expiation for some wrong or another. So if you’re going up against that ideology, than you would champion the thing that got killed for no reason, which is why Satanism and anti-Christian people — which a lot of heavy metal is anti-Christian — would say, ‘Hey, we’re pro-goat.’ And I side with the metal people, [who say] animal sacrifice is nonsense.”
For more of the interview, head over to Modern Farmer.