Page 1, 2, 3, 4
I was curious though, I've noticed in past interviews, you've mentioned that your lyric writing and sort of your musical side kind of comes up from a darker, more painful place.
Yeah, most of the time it does.
When you go into work with people like George Clinton or - I remember you telling a story at one of your spoken word shows about working with RuPaul on a cover of "Funkytown" - I was wondering if their upbeat, kind of "funky good times" vibe clashes at all with you touching on your dark places, and if so, how do you adjust to that?
No. I mean, I kind of can adapt to things around me. A lot of times, lyrically, stuff I do is a bit intense just because that's where I go with music, you know, when something hurts. For me it's the blues. No matter what it comes out sounding like, I'm always in that genre. I always consider myself a blues man. But that doesn't mean you can't be funny or have good times too. It's just that it's been harder for me to articulate that in song over the years, and when I do it comes across OK. Like that song "Liar." It's got a nice mix of tongue-in-cheek and kind of a nastiness to it that gives it a nice edge. But with George, it was his basic lyric. He wrote the verses, I wrote the chorus and the outro. So basically I was going off his vibe, and it came off well. I just sang on [Black Sabbath guitarist] Tony Iommi's solo record and that was a lyric idea I'd had for a while. But Tony gave me a tape of, like, twelve instrumentals and I picked the song I wanted to do, and that lyric idea really fit the riff. So I hammered it out and sang it. It's a way darker thing, because the riff is way more, you know, kind of…head crushing.
The songs are like a journal, you know? Woman leaves, well, you gotta write about that. Good times, bad times, they all kind of filter their way into the songs. Come In and Burn, lyrically, was pretty dark, but at that time I was pretty bummed out, living in Manhattan. All those songs - the lyrics were all written walking around Manhattan. Literally, just walking around with a notebook, sitting down in places, writing, coming up with ideas and just walking endlessly for miles all over Mahattan night to night.
Did living in Manhattan ultimately bum you out? Not to say that it wasn't a valuable experience, but…
Oh, I think it's really fun, but I could never live there full time. It's just too many people, not enough room. To get some trees, you have to get on a bus and go see some wildlife. It's fun though. I lived there for nine months as a full-time New Yorker and I had a blast. And I'll be there next week, or week after next or whatever, for a show and a day off that I'll be in the studio working on somebody else's record. It's fun, you know, but I could never be a New York resident. Not unless I had, like, Martin Scorcese's money and I could live like fifty floors up…
Yeah, overlooking Central Park or something.
Yeah, I mean, Upper West Side? Uptown, like around 75th and West End? I could definitely deal with that. That's nice up there, but it's pricey and there's just so much concrete. I mean, I'm not a big fan of L.A., but at least I've got access to water and parks and trails and hummingbirds, you know?
Yeah, you can hop in your car and pretty much within two hours you're in a completely different environment.
Oh! Thirty minutes and you're in Malibu and it's just like, intense. It looks like the moon or something it's so different. And that's cool. I was raised in D.C., amongst many deciduous trees. I really miss that. I miss the smell of them and the crickets and all that. But I have frogs out here, so it's kind of cool.
That is cool. I've noticed, just down in San Diego, I go running through a park right by my house and there's kinds of wildlife that I haven't seen, you know, having lived up in Davis for five years and D.C. for a couple of months. And you come down here, and next to your house there's all kinds of squirrels and rabbits and all kinds of stuff.
Oh yeah.
And that's a kick. Kind of back to some of the lyrical inspiration, really quick, and on "being a blues man." I've noticed a lot of your fans, myself included, tend to listen to your music to pick them up, say, after the demise of a relationship or in their low moments. The End of Silence has really pulled me and some of my friends out of some really dark places.
That's a heavy record.
Yeah, it is. Do you intend for the music to have that effect on your audience as well as yourself?
I can't predict how you're going to take in that information. I hope that it's a positive and uplifting experience for you. I mean, I hope it's a record you can put on as a shield and just go, "OK, things are bad, but I've got this record and, fuck … I'm getting through this." That's why I put on records. That's why I put Al Green or whatever, is to get you through something or get you up for something. That's why music is so great: because it gets you through. James Brown saves you. Iggy Pop saves you. Raw Power will get you through pretty much any situation, because it just forties you, you know?
I write those lyrics for myself to ease my own pain. In that, I think it might have an effect like that on other people in that I'm just a guy, and so I think the reaction I'm gonna have might be, well, not exactly universal by any means if you look at my record sales, but it would definitely appeal to some people who would maybe be on the same wave length.
Are you ever surprised by any of the reactions you get to some of your music or your performances?
I'm surprised I get anybody showing up at all. It's all a surprise to me. I mean, every night I go and there's anybody there? It's like, "No way! They showed up again!" I mean, I sound like I'm being all "aw, shucks," but you'd be surprised how many people are like that. Ozzy is like that. He can't believe anyone shows up. It's like, "Dude, it's 16,000 people. It's sold out." "Really?" Well what did you think?
After all this time he's still shocked by it.
Yeah, but you know what? I hear that from a lot of really established musicians. They're like, incredibly amazed that anyone gives a fuck. You know, like, huge musicians, and they're like, "Yeah…it's weird. Hope it never stops, but I don't know why." I've never understood why.
I would imagine too that people aren't too shocked to find out that you're a big Black Sabbath fan. Some of your music has some similarities …
Overtones. Wait until you hear a song called "Brother Interior" on the new album. It could have been on Master of Reality, definitely.
Are people sometimes surprised to find out about some of your other tastes, like Coltrane and Sinatra and Johnny Cash, and stuff like that?
Oh yeah. Well, if you saw the record collection that I'm sitting in front of here at the office, there's stuff in there that would surprise you a lot more than Frank Sinatra. I mean, I'm a big fan of people like Umm Kalthoum, you know the Lebenese diva, and Hamza El Din, the Nubian oud player - I like every record he's ever done.
It's so weird that you mentioned Umm Kalthoum, because I just saw a whole string of stuff about her on the Diamanda Galas mailing list. A whole bunch of people are getting into that stuff.
Yeah, well, it's potent shit man! I just found this Kalthoum record in Finland last week that I've never seen before called The Light of the Desert or The Light of Egypt … where is it around here [sound of Rollins rummaging through cd's]. Yeah, I listen to all kinds of different stuff. I have every Noh Theatre music -- you know, the Japanese stuff -- I have every one of those records I've ever seen. Lots of stuff from … Pygmy music. I dunno. Twenty, twenty-five Astor Piazzola records. Anything from Java. I have, I dunno, fifteen, twenty Javanese gamelan music cd's, all kinds of stuff from Bali.
Balinese music is very cool.
Oh yeah. Yeah. I wanted to go to Java this year and go to Yogyakarta or Surakarta to hear the Court Gamelan Players, but they're having some political upheaval there and they just hacked up some Australian surfer. So I was advised not to go, so I've got to wait until it cools out. I listen to a lot of different doo-wop. I've got a lot of doo-wop records, and of course the blues, jazz, rock'n'roll and R&B genres are thoroughly blitzed. And I've collected a lot of records too, rare tapes, for years. I've got a wall of rare cassettes of just, you know, whatever it is I'm interested in.
Do you find that people - fans, or maybe people outside the music business - expect you or other musicians to take a more jaded view of your peers and their work? And what exactly is it that pulls you toward or repels you away from a particular band or recording or style of music? Is there anything in common between, say, the Balinese gamelans and the John Coltrane and the Noh music?
Oh, absolutely, and that's the thing that makes me interested in all of it, it's only one thing: they've got soul. Johnny Cash, Bob Marley, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix - that's one genre of music to me. That's Soul Music. And that thing transcends musical genre. That's why there's great country/western. There's great Polka music. You've just got to look. Everyone says, "Oh, there's no good music anymore." Well, you're an asshole. There's great music being played every day. You can go to Bakersfield and every single week they're playing music there. We just saw Merle Haggard play the other night. That was cool.
Yeah, did you mention something about that in your newsletter?
Yeah, where we were taping the show and the drummer's kid grabbed the mic and said "This is boring!" He didn't like it. There's all kinds of music going on, all the time, and the good stuff…there's good avant. There's good noise music, good techno, and then, unfortunately, there's the pretenders to the throne. Not the band [The Pretenders], but the act, and that's what repels me. On a lot of current records I hear pitched vocals, quantized drums, pitch corrected, beat corrected music that was kind of made in the studio by a producer for a band of guys or girls with nice cheek bones. And the music is trite, and it's not really music. Music is Al Green. What a lot of these people are putting across are sounds on a hard drive, but it is not music to me.
Sort of like your Mutt Lange school of music production.
Well, Mutt Lange did some stuff that really rocks. Look at AC/DC. I'm talking about someone who comes in with a look rather than substance, and they go, "Well she looks great for MTV." Well she doesn't have a band. "Oh don't worry we can take care of that." Well she doesn't have any talent. "Well we can take care of that. But she looks great and we're gonna go to the bank." And I think there's a lot of music, to me, these days, that's very … it's like the May Fly. It's gonna be around for two days and then it spawns and dies. It sells millions of copies, but the proof is in the pudding. A band will sell, like, 3 million of a record and then the next time they come around they sell half a million, and then the next time they come around they can't even play the clubs. I mean, they are so over with. And I think that's a lot of people hearing it and going, "You know what? This doesn't hold me. This isn't sticking to my ribs like a good bowl of oatmeal." And then you put on a Creedence Clearwater Revival record and you go "God DAMN!" You know? The simplicity, and the beauty and the timelessness of it. Or like Zeppelin. Or Lynyrd Skynyrd. That's a band that, at least they can play. I still play that stuff. It gets better with age. You know, you hear what's on the radio now and, to me it's so utterly trite and then you put on something like "Sweet Home Alabama," and you're like, "Well, you know? Those are some brawlin' motherfuckers with soul." They know how to play. Surprise.
That kind of answers my questions about how we can determine good music from bad music. I read a quote from you that "Mediocre music is worse than bad music."
Yeah, bad music is fun! I have, in my record collection, a bad music section. Just for fun. Let's see. Who's in this? [More sounds of Rollins rummaging through his CD collection] I've got the Afghan Wigs…what's that one with the space man on the cover? I've got Bullet Boys … Candlebox…Enuff Z'Nuff … the new Hole record … Nitro … Men Without Hats, (the underrated Pop Goes the World, the second album) … Princess Pang … the new Offspring record … the last Soul Asylum record … new Van Halen … all the Vanilla Ice records … all the Warrant records. That's my bad music collection, and those records rock! Because they're so bad!
I had a friend who hosted a radio show up in Davis on KDVS that was called "The Worst" and all he would play was…he would go through the stacks and find the absolute worst record in there and play that. You know, like, Fred Schnieder from the B-52's solo record, him singing about Boonga the caveman from New Jersey or whatever. He would just play it until he couldn't stand it any more, and people loved it.
Yeah, well, you wanna hear my version of the worst, just go to MTV's Top 10, and that's my version of it right there.
|
| 
