Mavericks of Sound

by Ensminger, David

  I think absolutely. The impetus for that was the solidification of abstract sound, concrete sound, of the analog synthesizer into mainstream music that was going on. That was the major development that was going on in the early seventies. That was what everybody was working on. I don’t know how old you are or even if you remember back then, but every major single group in one way or another was working—and by major I don’t necessarily mean commercial, I mean groups that shaped things—was working on establishing the poetic voice of sound, the sound of musical activity as opposed to. . . . Well, the sound of the musical activity becoming a distinctly different thing than the musical activity itself. If you think about the groups that were influential back then, Can, some of the Germanic groups, Eno’s early stuff, Roxy Music’s early stuff, Cale, clearly what Rocket was engaged in and later Pere Ubu, the Residents, all that early pre-1975 stuff, whatever, so much of it was based around the rise of the analog synthesizer.

  Well, on that note, I’d like to see if something you’ve said before applies to your new record, 18 Monkeys on a Dead Man’s Chest: “Rock music uses hieroglyphic forms and it is not naïve poetry bolted onto rhythm.” Is that an adequate view of your new record also?

  What, that I don’t do poetry? Yeah [laughs]. I always say that I don’t do poetry.

  But would you say that you are a storyteller?

  Of course, I am a storyteller. I mean, don’t you think that these things have stories to them? The work I’ve always done has stories. I think these are striking cinematic pieces, if I could blow my own horn. I think they are very effective as mini-stories. But what I do is not poetry, it’s using the form of rock music to what I think is its potentials, which is what you are supposed to do with it, which is to create a cinema of the imagination—tell stories that are perceived at fundamental levels of human consciousness as opposed to “I fell in love with my baby and my baby left me.” There’s room for that, but that’s sort of a simple way of telling a story. It could be done better.

  So what do you think of people like Patti Smith or Richard Hell, who seemingly try to blur the line between Apollinaire/Rimbaud and the rock lyric? Is that where you thought/think rock should not go?

  I don’t know if that’s where rock should go. Certainly, it was worth the time to try to do it. It’s not what I would do, and I think that there are some weaknesses to the approach—that you are trying to combine things that are of distinct methodologies, and you are trying to get a hybrid going, and I’m not sure that it can be totally successfully done; but on the other hand, I like their stuff. So I don’t know what kind of answer that is. It’s sort of between answers. It’s not what I would do, and I’ve always been, in some ways, very dogmatic or very puristic in my approach, because somebody’s got to do what I do. Not that people aren’t doing similar things, but approach things. . . . Well, I decide what I’m going to do and stick to it until I change, but I try not to. . . . I was always very sensitive to the idea of taking note of my own culture. I think everybody should work within the limits of their own culture, and by culture, and I don’t mean broadly, I mean where I came, I mean the little piece of land in Cleveland, Ohio, that I inhabit. I don’t mean necessarily American culture. Culture defines much more tightly and much more locally and regionally. I think it’s incumbent on you to mine that as thoroughly as you can and kind of avoid taking something from somebody else and being influenced by it particularly in a way that you might be influenced by French poetry and getting all sensitive about it.

  You’ve spoken before about the geography of sound that comes with the lyrics, but how important is actual geography, because when people talk about Pere Ubu, they talk about the flats of Cleveland. On the new record, you talk about New Orleans floods, Nebraska, the Brunswick parking lot; you have this very concrete sense of place. How does place serve as a trigger for lyrics?

  [Laughs] Geez, I don’t know. You are asking for a technical explanation for what happens. You know, because when you are driving through Nebraska in the early morning and you’ve taken your ephedrine-based trucker pills, you are into the groove and it’s foggy all around and you pass, I can’t remember the name of the town I passed, it’s in the bridge vocal. You pass this town and you look in the mirror and you see the lights of a truck in your mirror shimmering in the distance and so why do you come up with a song called “Nebraska Alcohol Abuse”? Gee, I don’t know. But the point is, that’s what most of my lyrics are concerned with—these moments of vision that everybody has. You know, where you are surrounded by a particular place, a particular geography, and that’s working with whatever mindset you are in and whatever you happened to be thinking about, and it yields a vision of a story or yields this powerful connection with signposts that you pass, or something.

  That’s one reason that you might notice that a lot of my stuff has to do with cars, movement, and traveling. Well, mostly that’s because when I want to write I get in the car and travel for weeks, two or three weeks, until some vision occurs to me. In a purely mechanistic or practical point of view, a car is really good for that because you get in a trance-like state and you are open to vision, seeing something and making a connection deep within you, and a story will flow from it and that story has something to do with what you want to say anyway, with what you have been thinking about. “Nebraska Alcohol Abuse,” like many of my songs, is about seeing a moment in time and wanting to stop there, or seeing that moment as a division, as a dividing point, a fork in the road, so if I went down that road, if I did this, if I did that, I’d end up somewhere else, or seeing something. I’m babbling, forget it.

  Robert Schneider: Tasting the Forbidden Pop Fruit

  Originally published in Left of the Dial.

  As Trouser Press posits, Apples in Stereo, the band led by Schneider, sounds “comfortable as figureheads of a genre that swirls Beatles / Pet Sounds distinctions into a ’70s Saturday morning cartoon confection.” Part and parcel of do-it-yourself punk traditions, he has become an elder of sorts for indie music revelers à la Jonathan Richman, in which playfulness is neither ironic nor stilted and forced. The band’s fuzzy aural soundscapes, genuine glee for pop rock, and generosity of spirit often set them apart in a crowd of high-minded hipsters.

  I’m not a huge fan of Wallace Stevens. To me, though, Williams’ imagist tradition is a precursor to the Beats, so I love that, and I love his longer poems like “Desert Music,” “Paterson,” and others.

  I really like his shorter stuff too. I just love the way he’s really unpretentious and his unstuffy tone. His imagery is real simple and stark, but at the same time he uses a lot of color words and stuff like that in an unusual way, so I think. . . . I don’t know what it is about him, but there’s a sweet . . . like you said, there’s a transcendent quality to his poetry. To me, it’s like Japanese poetry or Chinese poetry. It’s written in a style that is somewhat flat. It’s not very flat, but it’s somewhat flat. It’s not that flat, but he doesn’t give it a very flowery . . . I don’t know what the fuck I am talking about. I like his poetry because it’s not extremely flowery, but it’s very. . . . It’s got certain . . . I don’t know exactly how to describe it. But it’s that slap-in-the-face, Zen sort of. . . . You get to the end of the poem, and it’s like, whoa. I don’t know. I just love his poems.

  There’s a big sense of music in his work. Sometimes his poems seem flexible, and sometimes they seem very inflexible, because of the way he breaks his line and uses his meter, but at the same time there’s a certain Whitmanesque quality to it because he uses a colloquial language, that really common language like, “I’ll kick yer eye.”

  That’s what I like about him, exactly. Or even when he’s not going and using actual colloquial language, he’s not using academic language. He uses a very flat, speech-like language. He did that meter thing later on, when everything split into the three lines or whatever. Then it’s very strict. Hey, did you read that translation of the Duende Elegies where the guy translated in that style, i
n Williams’ kind of form of verse with the three lines? It’s just a really cool translation of that poem.

  I just flipped through a book of W.C.W.’s short stories, but I didn’t buy it. Now I regret it and think I may try to find it again. I’m sure they have the same condensed feeling to them.

  Yeah. Totally. That’s what I like about it. I hate T. S. Eliot. I mean I am not taking any stand and I don’t know shit about anything, I’ll let you know. I don’t in any way want to come off as a dilettante. I don’t like poems that just spill from page to page. To me, the ultimate poem is one word. I love stuff that is simple. It’s not that it’s concise. I don’t like it to be concise. I like ambiguity. I like the same thing with pop music—a short experience that takes a lot of time to unfold itself to you, like something that happens to you in life. The long experiences, waiting in line or something . . . well, I like the ones that carry the most meaning. I like the short experiences. In Japanese Buddhism, they call it satori. It’s that instantaneous kind of knowledge.

  “A sudden glimpse into ordinary existence” is how Jack Kerouac used to describe it, if I remember correctly.

  Yeah, totally. I like that, and I love Williams’ poetry because it has a lot of that. Wallace Stevens is almost the opposite of that, but I love his poetry, because I just love his words. Like James Joyce, sometimes you don’t know what the fuck you are reading about, but it’s just so beautifully worded. It’s the most beautiful use of language that it means so much. It’s like with Wallace Stevens he is trying to say something and often it’s a very heady concept trying to fit in there, but up and beyond that there’s this beautiful language he uses, I don’t know what, like the “foaming aqua leaves” or some shit. I just made that up, but he always describes things in a way that makes them seem radiant, bright, and colorful, and at the same time, it’s not really optimistic. I really like it. Williams’ stuff is kind of like that too. I like his work, too, because it has a faux naïve quality and is kind of sweet, and at the same time, it also seems very serious. I think it’s really cool.

  You make pop music, and I mean that in the best sense of the word. I don’t mean to denigrate the form, but I think the idea is: What makes the Beatles’ “Love Me Do” as transcendent for a lot of people as listening to Chopin?

  You know, it’s totally that quality like I said. It’s the quick experience that takes a long time after the fact to unfold. The pop songs come so quickly. The perfect pop song is not like “Stairway to Heaven,” where it’s this mini-epic, although there are good qualities to that too. To me, the perfect pop song. . . . The structure of the thing carries a lot of the meaning. The perfect pop song captures your attention and by the time you are really inside of it, it’s gone. It’s this fleeting experience. It’s almost bittersweet. Especially when you listen to the radio, though this stuff doesn’t happen anymore, but when I was a kid, you hear a great song on the radio and you don’t hear it again until the next time they play it on the radio and you don’t know what it is and maybe they didn’t say, and it’s like this—you may never hear it again. I still feel that way when I hear a great song on college radio, like there’s this band called Math and Science, and I heard this song by them on college radio a couple of months ago, and it took me a long time to track down their record, but the song was incredible. I just heard it once, and after that there was just this empty slot in my head where that song had been heard and I still had the feeling of how I felt, but I couldn’t remember the song at all.

  Like what’s transcendent about a pop song is . . . well, there are a few qualities. The first one is the fact that a pop song, unlike Chopin . . . well, Chopin is more pop than a lot of composers. It’s more simple in the way that I would consider pop music. Like, um, I don’t know what the fuck I am saying. Sorry, by the way, I am a terrible person to interview. I have a hard time keeping focus and I don’t mind at all if you slap me on the wrist and say, “Robert, we are talking about this.” I’d really appreciate it; otherwise, I’ll hang up the phone feeling embarrassed, like, ah, fuck.

  So your question was what makes the pop song transcendent? I would say that there are a few things about it. The first thing is the simplicity of the elements that make it up. Of course, when you are dealing with music there are only twelve tones total. There are only twelve-note octaves on the piano, including the black keys, so you have this sparse sort of elements and it’s like with science and math and stuff, the most beautiful set of interconnections. The most beautiful structure you can build is one that has the simplest independent components. It’s just like with a poem. You don’t want your poem to go on and on and on and go through all these different things, or maybe you do want it to do that, but to me, the poem that is most effective is the one that says much less. It states in words much less than what it really means. It states in words so little—Chinese poetry is like that. Especially with the characters and stuff, it doesn’t say much. It might just say that you are fishing and there’s something about wine, but it’s talking about your dead wife and talking about the flowers and the spring and the end of the spring. It’s talking about all this stuff, but it really just uses a couple simple pieces . . .

  It’s very condensed.

  Yes, it’s a very condensed experience. It’s wrapped up like a little present; you’ve got this simple presentation, but it unfolds into something that’s just as deep as a symphony, just not as complicated as a symphony. That’s what’s so great about “Love Me Do.” It’s got these elements. It’s got this interesting melody. Now “Love Me Do” is not the best example, maybe, because I’m sure that’s not the best Beatles song. It’s got the one element of a pop song that is different from an art song, which is that it’s not stuffy; it’s not about sitting down. It’s got this gypsy quality of people dancing around in a field or something, this wild kind of youthful quality that makes even older people feel young when they listen to it now. At the time, I’m sure it made older people feel alienated. But it’s like, well, on the one hand, there’s the pureness of youth and experience and rock ’n’ roll and stuff. It’s just not rock ’n’ roll. It’s jazz, folk music, and gypsy kind of music. In general, it’s people’s music. It’s the form. The form of pop music is a dance form. I mean, not now, but in general it has to do with people in a casual setting as opposed to people in a sort of formal setting. So that’s the one difference. Right away it kind of brings to mind this wild sort of setting. Even if you are just sitting in your living room, it sets up this really alive sort of situation just in the sort of format, the whatever you call it, the venue you would listen to it in.

  When you think about pop music, or the songs you like, is it the songs you remember or is it the albums?

  I know, I guess, I would say albums, but when I think about it, really it’s just a couple of songs on each album that really set up the whole album for you. Like I think about Pet Sounds, and when I think about Pet Sounds I think about “You Still Believe in Me.” That’s the song I love most from Pet Sounds. It’s just so beautiful. So I am thinking about Pet Sounds, but when I think about all the qualities I like about Pet Sounds, really it’s this one song I bring to mind, the little archetype or whatever pops into my head and it’s like “You Still Believe in Me” so I would like to say it’s the album, but when I really try and think about it honestly, on every album there’s really a song that pops up that kind of marks the whole album. It’s even like that with our album. When I look back over our albums, a whole album will be tainted by just one song. Not tainted, necessarily, although sometimes that’s the case, but you know when I look back over our albums, like our last album, I tried to let the album have no feel, so that every song was so different from the last song that any song could have come off of any number of albums. It was kind of the idea for the last album, The Discovery of a World Inside the Moone, the last Apples album . . . I didn’t mean to be obscure. My idea for that record was for it to have no feel throughout it. It wouldn’t feel like you were listening
to an album, it would feel like you were listening to the radio or just a bunch of songs, but then when I think back on the album it has a feel, and when I really think about it, that feel is set up by one song or two songs.

  One of the feelings you used to try for was to be “spiritual and at the same time down to earth. It’s soulful and tone-oriented.” Is that something you are still trying to do?

  Yeah, totally. Basically, the new record is a lot different than our other records. It’s not totally different, but we’re going for a different sort of feel. Very quickly back to the pop song and what makes it transcendent. I think what makes it transcendent the most is using simple elements that are familiar, perhaps the same scale as a nursery rhyme or a lullaby. You are using a simple melody, totally simple chord progression, because you are not throwing too many chords in there and stuff, and then there’s also this naïveté, or youthful wildness, and things like that. The reason I am referring back to that is because on our new record we wanted to do something that was anti-sophisticated. You know, I had spent so much time producing other people’s records and our albums kind of pursuing Pet Sounds. Kind of pursuing this multilayered, textural sort of. . . . Well, I looked at it like painting in a lot of ways, and there’s a certain depth in the production that I have found attractive and it kind of hit me in a depressing sort of way sometime about a year or two ago, that even though I am doing this and I am somewhat accomplished at it, I like all these beautiful arrangements and large sections of horns and harmony and stuff, and I like this counterpoint, and everything moving against each other and there’s this tension.

  There are all these composer kind of qualities that I like about production, but at the same time I didn’t feel that I was ever going to do something great, which I have a vain desire to do, but there’s no real reason to want to do something great, so it’s just vanity. You want to do something great because you feel like you can and if you can, maybe you should. I’ve always felt this desire to make something great, really great in the way that other records hit me as being great. We might have. I think we made a lot of great records, but if I really want to make something like Pet Sounds it occurred to me that that thing is not going to sound like Pet Sounds. Pet Sounds was so great because it was so different. These records that I love were so great because they were so different from everything else. I kind of felt that if I was always referencing these other works. . . . It’s just really hard to do something great once removed from greatness already. It’s just like that with literature. You see that all the time. It’s not that it comes off as bad. It’s great when people refer to other stuff a lot, it’s just that it’s slightly obscure, and it comes off as a little bit insincere. I’m not saying that our music does, it’s just that I am afraid. . . . I just wanted to do something that relied on our songs and relied on the way our band has always sounded.