Do you see concerts as a means to an end, a promotion of product, and a means to earn a living, or will you always see it as akin to performance art, cabaret, something that should retain the power of Karen Finley, rock ’n’ roll, and Marlene Dietrich?
Hah! I am most myself when I am performing, and it has been pointed out to me that indeed it is the time when I seem most actualized, alive, in the moment. So, I have to say the latter description is closest to my heart.
What draws you back to the song “Love Will Tear Us Apart” (Joy Division) as part of your repertoire—fan expectation or deep fondness for the song?
Both. I will always remember the time I sang it in a Swans concert in Manchester, England, to a large audience and they all sang along with me. Amazing. Like a huge choir of believers. Also, the lyrics hit home again and again. They describe my own experience with my relationships and when I sing that song, it is truth. Recently, a man told me that romantic love was merely a “fairy tale” and not for someone like him. I keep coming back to that assessment myself. “Love” has been an ideal impossible for me to sustain. That is not to say that, as a romantic, I don’t keep trying!
You are featured in Catamania, the women’s studies/cultural theory book by Creation. Have you looked at the book? How do you feel, knowing you are featured alongside Nina Simone and Kate Bush?
Yes, I have read the book. There is also an inside photo of me nude in my garden [laughs]. Seriously, Adele Olivia Gladwell did extensive research for this project and it is written from a “cultural theory” point of view, definitely. I think she chose vocalists from diverse backgrounds that have a specific vocabulary that is uniquely their own. To have been included in this study with Nina Simone is an honor, of course.
Your approach to life is cerebral (Zen Buddhism) as it is actively physical (lifting weights, kick-boxing, and mountain climbing). Is this balance and focus part of the reason you have become so incredibly productive these last few years? If not, what are the factors that have kept you pushing yourself?
Oh, YES. As far as an analysis of “Jarboe” is concerned, that is a damn good question. Challenge and pushing myself to the point of exhaustion (and beyond) is right at the crux of every decision I have probably made in my entire life. When I moved to New York to join Swans in the early 1980s, a close friend in Georgia described it by saying, “you NEED the challenge.” I can’t ascribe it to the study of Zen and athletic pursuit because it is how I have been since my earliest memory. It is more like something I have inherited, a family trait. Genetics and conditioning. I was pushed to be an achiever as a child, and the expectations were for me always to excel and make my mark somewhere. Being this way results in spurts of superhuman productivity, but it comes in fever washes and is not necessarily a carefully planned crucible.
Also, you are never satisfied with your output and your standards are so high and particular that you keep pushing and reaching and pushing and reaching again and again and again. An effort to attain the impossible? You don’t see it that way. You keep believing it is possible. You are not kind to yourself. You utilize “mind over matter” as your mantra. One of the dangers of this mentality is that predators (and in a woman’s case, these are usually men) come along, see your endurance, and mistake it for weakness, and move in for the kill.
Are you full of more fighting spirit now than ever?
Yeah, the “fighting spirit” is always there, but my grip on the reins is erratic. I get thrown down on my ass a lot. I should have been dead by now with my leap-before-you-look trajectory.
You’ve stayed in the Middle East, behind the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem in the Arab Quarter. Do you feel the whole conflict in that region is often misrepresented?
I feel it is horrific. I don’t think it is misrepresented.
Why did you choose to record in Israel?
I had never been to the Middle East, and yet I loved the music from that part of the world. I wanted to see Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Ramallah and Tel Aviv—and work with local musicians. I have no regrets about my six weeks in Israel. Jerusalem is an amazing place, and if it had actually been safe to live there, I would have returned for a much longer stay of at least a year.
As it was, car bombs and occupation by rifle-ready soldiers on rooftops, beatings and riots, and tear gas and tanks . . . were a daily occurrence. I didn’t escape the direct violence and found myself trying to flee for my life from the midst of a huge outbreak of fighting amongst Israeli and Palestinian men on one of my last nights in Jerusalem. The Israeli Army showed up with their tanks. Men were carried away on stretchers. Blood was everywhere.
You told an interviewer, who asked you to give advice to a young woman trying to get into the music business, to avoid “naysayers and persons who are all talk no action.” You also stressed the personal mantra “You are not your emotions.” What did you mean?
Naysayers and persons who are all talk and no action are prevalent in the music world. . . . Emotions are chemical and hormonal changes that are always in flux. You can observe them coming into you and watch them as they leave. You are not your happiness, sadness, or anger. They are mere shifts of chemical compositions. They are not you.
In your online journal, you quote Tenzin Palmo: “It’s not based on sentiment. It’s not based on feedback and how good it makes you feel. That is not real love at all.”
Real love is unconditional and expects nothing in return.
Do you feel that men are still unwilling to accept the power, knowledge, and intuition of women that have repeatedly proven themselves?
Some men, yes. This has been my experience, yes. The controlling. The power play . . . yes, yes, yes. The alpha dog syndrome. The competition. The resentment. The war.
Do you feel closer in spirit to designers like Jean Paul Gaultier (who made you a dress featuring swans, Indian maidens, skulls, and roses) or to musicians in a bar downtown right now?
A-HAH! I love it. Both are me, baby . . . both are me.
Could you illustrate your methods, like inviting elements of chaos and confusion for the sake of insight?
Step into the fire. Shake it up and get down. Y’know? Find what it is you can use to inform you. Don’t remain static or rely on what is tried and true. Leave your comfort zone.
You once said, “The only way to live with loss is to negate the existence of ‘reminders’ so that the emptiness and awareness of abandonment is not center stage. . . . You are ‘living in a graveyard.’ . . . You are not living at all. Rise from the dead.” Are you suggesting one should delete reminders and not have a living memory because one can’t heal and go forth?
If you are even remotely obsessive and analytical, then hell, yeah. For a time, yes. It’s exactly that—a graveyard. For a time, to move on and find closure with certain things in life, the best way to do it is remove tangible reminders of your field of vision. Say you lived with an artist for six years who dumped you and broke your heart? Take her paintings down from your wall and put them in storage for a while. Put that photograph of the two of you laughing together on a camping trip under lock and key into the attic trunk for a while. It works. I have gone to a different geographic locale to help me forget. To help me breathe and not be overcome with grief or panic. To help me get out of denial and let go.
You wrote, “No questions asked. No explanations accepted. No one leaves here alive” just hours after the 9/11 attacks. How did you respond initially to what happened?
My reaction was that a mother who had adopted me and taken me in had been wounded and was screaming out in pain. I also immediately thought of the repercussions and hate virus from those quick to judge that would wrongfully come towards all Muslims. I had gotten to know many people who are Muslims in Jerusalem and I knew that they would never support such violence.
When you look back at Swans, what are the things (memories, lessons, or attitudes) that you have carried into your career that most people would not easily recognize?
This is a topic
for an interview all its own. The discipline honed. The “sanction” to see the “random” element and seize it. By working with Michael Gira in Swans and World of Skin, these are two of the most important tools within my work as a musician. I knew from the beginning that we were going to do intense and valuable work together. Michael also saw my strengths and potential, and it is through our work together that I was born and began to find my voice.
He told me, “You’re an American. Sing like an American,” when I first sang for him in 1984 in my then-trained jazz vocal intonation. When I first met him, I called Swans “a project,” but he corrected me and said, “I think we are a rock band.” I told him I liked Europe. He replied he liked Americans. This was all unexpected.
He was not “arty.” . . . I found him refreshing. He was down to earth and he had a strong work ethic. We clicked. We had the same ideas about perseverance and lack of compromise. Michael and I were destined to meet and do those performances and make those recordings. He was my mentor, my peer, my husband, and my soul mate. Michael has said we were like magnets, drawn and repelled at the same time. I say we were also a powerful blast of mega-dynamite. Who held the fuse and who held the flame? I’ll let that be the visualization for tonight.
Richard Buckner and Alejandro Escovedo
Originally printed in Thirsty Ear, 2000.
The wet, bone-chilling wind, a Houston anomaly, sweeps across the roof of Rudyards as Alejandro Escovedo and Richard Buckner—on tour together—stir languidly in almost matching worn brown jackets. With easy-going poise, they put up with camera flashes that white out the wire and dead potted plants crammed near their feet. The photographer keeps them pinned in two rickety chairs adjacent to a partially crumbled wall, a rather dubious spot that reveals the raw neon loam over the empty street below. “Do you think the interview went well?” Escovedo asks in his low and elusive voice, eyes serene as a rock ’n’ roll Buddha. This forty-eight-year-old legend’s style is still very much in the punk vein, and he is honest, uncompromising, and hopeful, with an air of inscrutable coolness. I begin rambling like a giddy, suburban boy at a baseball card convention, “It was really great.” Buckner looks amused, almost. Living up north has made him tougher. Tonight he’s a bit edgy, not to mention enigmatic, partly because he’s trying to suck down a whole bowl of salad between barking about music labels, answering my questions when it’s obvious he doesn’t like interviews, and looking on in horror as LeAnn Rimes duets with Merle Haggard on a TNT special.
Richard, critics have said that you write lyrics that confuse obscurity with meaning and are in part in love with your own alienation.
Buckner: I feel weird that he has figured out my little secret. Now it’s out in the open and people know what my real deal is. That’s too bad.
Escovedo: Rock critics don’t matter anyway. [Pause] Rock writers do. I used to really read a lot of reviews. But I hardly ever do anymore.
Lester Bangs, was he a writer or critic?
Escovedo: Writer.
Robert Christgau [of the Village Voice]?
Escovedo: Critic.
Buckner: Christgau? Fuck him. I hate Robert Christgau. I sent him a personal letter once.
Your songs remind me of miniature Raymond Carver stories. They are all about people who are kind of helpless, kind of confused, trying to find a space in which to live, and falling down as they try.
Buckner: That’s everybody, man. What else would the songs be about?
But they often feel like vignettes.
Buckner: All it comes down to is I get really stoned and I write, then I put it together, then get high again and try to mix the music down, that’s all it is. It’s about completely letting yourself go and putting out whatever it is. And for some reason, even if you don’t know what you’re writing, you feel better afterwards.
But the songs on Since are different than the other two records: they’re a little more fragmented.
Buckner: I agree with that.
I’ve heard that the reason that the songs feel that way, like they don’t have beginnings and don’t have ends, is because they were written while you lived in your truck.
Buckner: I like to pull stuff back and keep them like that. I’m kind of a rough writer too. I like songs that get to the point. One of the things I hate most is a song that is too long, I just wanna say, “Fucking stop it, man.” Not that I’m a pro–short song guy, but make them however long the point takes to get. Five minutes, two minutes, it doesn’t matter. But it’s true. I was in my truck for almost three years, touring nonstop, so it did have something to do with the process. Things like that do get inside and change the process.
Both of you always tour with different people, and thus present the music in unexpected ways. Why?
Escovedo: I like change. I tour eight months a year. That’s my life. And I always want to give people something different.
Buckner: I love touring in various forms and changing the arrangements based on that form.
Alejandro, you have been singing songs for a long time, since the 1970s.
Escovedo: Before Richard was born! [Laughs.]
How do you sit down and write? Do the songs still just come to you?
Escovedo: Yes. That’s just what I do. I don’t make myself do it. I’m a songwriter. It’s just as simple as that, I’m sorry.
You were an original San Francisco punk. When I look back at old Search and Destroy magazines, if there’s one person who dominates the photos, well, besides Chip and Tony from the Dils, it’s you. But you’ve never re-grouped the Nuns, never run across the country and played all-ages clubs. Has it ever been a question for you?
Escovedo: It’s never interested me at all. Wouldn’t even consider it.
But you guys made a lot of firsts, like playing with Roxy Music and the Sex Pistols.
Escovedo: Yeah, people tell us we were the first band of our kind to really play bigger, arena-type places.
Richard, your music has been dubbed “poet rock” by a writer for the Bay Insider. It’s not just simple jingle-jangle material, but it has a literate quality that is different from that of other writers. Do you agree with that?
Buckner: I don’t know. It’s weird to see your album from the other side, so it’s hard to comment on it because you don’t know what the other side is.
You can’t step back?
Buckner: All I know is that I record the song.
Alejandro, you once held a singer-songwriter workshop for young kids, and that really spoke to me beyond the performance. Was that a one-off event?
Escovedo: It was part of a program. But I do a lot because I have kids who go to the elementary school where I did it. I try to give as much as I can back to the community because I love the kids and I love the people. It’s a great neighborhood. Marcia Ball, Charlie Sexton, and a lot of other musicians live there.
It’s interesting that between the Zeros, the Plugz, the Offs, Weirdos, and other punk bands in late-1970s San Francisco there was a blend between the Anglo and Chicano rockers.
Escovedo: People are always amazed that there is this rock cross-cultural thing that happens, but in places like California, or even Austin, Chicanos play with white guys, who play with Asian guys. It seems pretty natural to me.
But because there is still so much weirdness and hostility between races, rock ’n’ roll seems a special place where people come together and get along.
Escovedo: But it’s always been like that—look at the whole roots of rock and blues. I really don’t get any of that shit from anybody inside music, but I do from people outside of it. I mean, we go through shit when we tour, like down in the South.
Buckner: Like last night in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
Escovedo: Yeah, it was like a police state there. Personally I do have a sense of fear, and I don’t feel comfortable.
Does rock ’n’ roll keep you from understanding those kinds of people and shield you from the world? People on the outside may feel that what you are doing
by playing together is something unique, but people like yourselves feel that it is perfectly normal.
Buckner: I don’t think it’s odd at all.
Escovedo: What Richard does and what I do are two very different things, but we share something in terms of the music. The places where the music comes from are completely different because my music does come from a more traditional rock place. I can do a Roxy Music song, a John Cale song, a Stooges song. Then I can do a song like “Broken Bottle” and a song about an arrhythmic castanets player, but Richard’s music is different. What I love about Richard is that his lyrics are really beautiful, and his voice is very rich and deep. And that is a place where you wanna go, and that’s where people rarely take you.
Is that where we can locate the power—in the voice? If we took away the guitar and everything else?
Escovedo: You’ll still have a great song. I know he could still entertain and capture us much better than a guy with a bunch of synthesizers, so that’s where the beauty of it is. I personally think that a song is in the voice.
Richard, what do you hear in Alejandro’s songs?
Buckner: The stories, and the range of the songs, especially since the live versions and recorded versions are so different. And they have amazing arrangements that are full of emotion.
Chapter 4
Mavericks of Sound Page 17