Mavericks of Sound

by Ensminger, David

  Your name comes from Odetta’s mom saying, “That Jack Elliott, he sure can ramble.”

  Also, Bobby Neuwirth claims to be the inventor of that name, although I think that Odetta’s mom did it earlier.

  But you learned the art of storytelling and talking from truck drivers who gave you rides?

  Well, yeah, just like Jack Kerouac, who would say when we’d walk down the street together, “I love the language of bums.” He was inspired by that, and I was too. I loved the way Woody Guthrie spoke. Woody had that potpourri of slang from all over the country.

  Kerouac read you the entire manuscript of On the Road in his Bleeker Street apartment?

  Yeah, he did.

  How did you feel about it?

  I think I related to it quite well. Some of it seemed like my own experiences, and there were a lot of things he described that I had never done before. And that was three years before the book was published.

  It was on one continuous roll.

  It was a roll of paper, the thing the Teletype machine used to use.

  You’ve said, “It’s been hard for me to sit down unless it’s on some kind of horse or truck.”

  [Laughs.] I just rode a horse in a rodeo parade in Colorado, a very frisky horse too, and this is with a brand new hip. I just got a total hip replacement on one side ten months ago. I was walking with crutches for a while, then I was walking with a cane, and then I finally put the cane away and have been going on hikes and doing pretty good.

  Are those American sensibilities of restless freedom and the need to be on the road dying with the Internet, couch-potato generations?

  It’s dying in me. I really don’t want to go on the road much anymore. I’m tired of airports. I can’t stand the way they treat you at airports and on airplanes. But if I had my own little truck, I could enjoy a few more years of going down the road and doing shows and stuff, but the world is getting so overcrowded with traffic on the roads and at airports, and with all this wartime stuff while traveling, it’s not really a lot of fun anymore.

  Gordon Gano: Violent Femmes

  Originally published in Thirsty Ear, 2000.

  You’ve been playing new material that ended up on Freak Magnet for a few years—trying it out on audiences?

  No, actually, on this record we weren’t doing a lot of the songs in concert. We were waiting until we got the record out and then doing a lot of them. We do six or seven new songs per concert. Some of them shift a little bit when we play them live, as they do anyway.

  What’s been the general response to the new material?

  The longer the record’s been out, the more people hear about it, the more they will respond to those songs. But it’s more of a minority. The majority of the people that come out to see us, going back for years, never have cared if we had a new record or not.

  It must be, in part, how Lou Reed feels when he pulls out the old Velvet Underground songs at the end of the night.

  We have never done it like that; we always mix in the older songs. I know a lot of people—well, when I think of Lou, I can think of a couple other people I’ve seen who do that. But with us, we’ve always mixed in the older stuff throughout the show.

  Even on Why Do the Birds Sing? the songs weren’t new. Some were ten years old, fan favorites.

  It’s all mixed up. There’s very little that’s chronologically pure. This new record, I think it really is the first record that doesn’t have a song on it that I wrote when I was fifteen. So, if somebody’s going to go, “Okay, the development, or lack of development. . . .” Songs on the records are from so many different years. I think the Freak Magnet songs, except for one, are all from within the last five or six years.

  In the reviews of every new record, at least one critic points out your “teenage angst.”

  I think that there’s a stretch of records where there was one song written when I was fifteen. It’s definitely one thing that people say about the first record, but all the songs on Hallowed Ground, the second record, were also written around the time I was a teenager. But the record isn’t thought of in that way.

  Why is the record 3 always given the backburner?

  I’ve got the beautiful answer for you. The band, you know, we don’t agree on things. Brian calls off the sets, and I think he does a brilliant job with it, so every night’s a little different. We don’t know what we’re going to play when we walk up on stage. He’ll call as it goes, which has been a great thing for us, in terms of that kind of spontaneity.

  You’ve never used a set list?

  Right, and that’s Brian’s least-favorite record. He really dislikes that record. I disagree. But it’s like, he’s flying the plane at that point.

  But it’s the one record where you mix gritty punk, impromptu free jazz, and very quiet ballads.

  I think the thing he doesn’t like about that record is something that I do like. He feels like it’s woefully underproduced, because it was so spontaneous and so created in the studio. Opportunities were missed to make the songs as good as they should have been. It’s just a different perspective on it. But, interestingly, a lot of people told me it was their favorite record, but they’re Europeans. I’ve almost never heard it from people in this country.

  “Nothing Worth Living For” is difficult to pull off live?

  When we went on tour for that record, we had to stop playing that song because they were so obviously bored. In the U.S., people were talking to each other, going to the bathroom, getting drinks, anything but being able to sit, listen, and pay attention to that song. In Europe, people would give incredible applause and ovations for that song. Sometimes, with certain songs, consistently and over a period of time at different venues and different places, one can really notice a difference in one country compared to another. It can be enormous. The differences in response to that song were incredible. I think it’s because that song is more a listening, intimate kind of song. The U.S. is different than anyplace. To many American audiences, we’re a party band.

  Do you ever feel lumped in with that eighties retro party nostalgia, like the Go-Go’s, the Psychedelic Furs, and the B-52’s?

  Are the people you know mostly teenagers?

  No, mid-twenties.

  But people who are teenagers now keep finding out about the group and keep getting into us. Those people don’t think of us in that way. They think of the Violent Femmes as something that’s a current thing, and not having anything to do with the eighties at all.

  You transcend nostalgia?

  In a sense, that’s a pretty wonderful thing. They wanted to do a VH1 Where Are They Now? on us, and we told them no because we’re more popular now than we have ever been. It doesn’t make any sense for them to keep putting us in that view. I tend not to like that, but it’s nice to be remembered and thought of in any context at all.

  How underground can you be when the first record sold over a million copies?

  Well, it’s about two million now. But it just went out of print. But we’ll have to look into that, because that’s absurd. Hopefully, that’s just a glitch.

  How much was the band shaped by Milwaukee?

  I know this question came up like, ten or twelve years ago, maybe more. At that time, I felt that it had nothing to do, I still do, nothing to do with that at all. It had to do with the people making the music. We were more influenced by national and international kinds of music, or what we listened to in our record collections and by people touring through town. That’s how I feel. But at that time, Victor DeLorenzo, our original drummer, and Brian felt that, no, it was really important that we were from Milwaukee. But I think that if we had hooked up in some other city, the music would sound the same.

  You’ve said for low-level celebrities like yourself that technology can be scary.

  I didn’t say low level, I said low life. [Laughs.] I’m kidding.

  But what does that mean?

  What’s low-level celebrity mean? Ask your daughter. [Laughs.]
/>   A lot of six-year-olds like you?

  [Laughs.] Uh-oh.

  Why are you scared of technology?

  Hey, did the red button on your cassette recorder just come on? Did it just shut off? It’s okay if it did. [Laughs.] Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.

  Brian has said that the band has often taken the path of least success. But you regularly play 1,200-seat venues like this one.

  Does that prove or disprove what you just said? [Laughs.] You know, we’re a little light on ticket sales tonight!

  Isn’t this a measure of success?

  I know people who have made worse choices as far as a career goes, definitely. But I’ve known people who have made better ones as far as related to popularity.

  At one point, you wanted to make a record a year and felt it was a struggle with Slash, your label, to make any record at all. Has that changed with the new label?

  Well, it has changed in that we have been able to get out a few records. But I have no idea now. We’re not in any long-term relationship. My guess would be, if it’s been difficult for this many years, then it means that’s how it always will be. There are no plans to make another record. But I really like this new record, I really do.

  But you have other interests, like the play you staged in New York.

  I staged two. There was another one that was done but officially wasn’t done because it’s not allowed to be done. Picasso wrote a few plays, and I ended up setting one to music. The Picasso estate years ago said, “You shall not.” That’s something I’d like to get back to.

  Wayne Kramer: MC5

  Your manager described your Wayne Kramer Presents Beyond Cyberpunk as a “thinking man’s punk record.” Would you describe it the same way?

  I suppose. I was just trying to broaden the definition of punk, show that it wasn’t all beats at 160 rpm and flashing guitar, that a mid-tempo ballad could actually be a punk song, or a twisted-up funk track could actually be punk, or swamp metal could be punk. I think it has much more to do with a sense of self-determination and self-efficacy than it does a musical style.

  You wrote “Sharkskin’s Suit” for Charles Bukowski, did a recording of a Poe poem, and early on were highly influenced by Allen Ginsberg. How do these writers shape your own art, not just music, but now your writing?

  It’s like how I wanted to learn and play guitar like Chuck Berry. In my literary efforts, it’s the same kind of thing. I’ve always admired writers and wanted to be a writer. William Burroughs, Ernest Hemingway, and great crime fiction writers like Elmore Leonard—I love what these guys can do with character and dialogue. I aspire to that, and in songwriting I have been blessed to have people in my life like Rob Tyner and John Sinclair, and I study Bob Dylan’s lyrics and Tom Waits’. These guys are gifted lyricists; even Jackson Browne is a truly gifted lyricist. These are people I admire, and I aspire to their level of competence and their level of vocabulary in the craft of songwriting. I guess I’m continuing to stretch that into my prose and the kinds of things I have been writing, like book reviews and memoirs. We’re working on a couple of scripts, so it’s just the continuing work in a creative lifetime. It’s not all that remarkable. It really is 90 percent perspiration, and 10 percent inspiration. You have to do the work. I can only go so long without writing a song and then I start to feel bad. I go, you know, Wayne, it’s time to write a song, you gotta go write a song. Otherwise you’re going to get in a crabby mood here. It’s the same with all of it.

  I came from Rockford, Illinois, and you’re from Detroit, both factory-belt towns, where people only had three real choices out of high school: the army, factory, or—if you were lucky—college. But we grew up with a Midwest work ethic—when work mattered, it was important, even a healthy part of our life.

  I have no doubt it’s my Detroit, blue-collar, factory upbringing. I was basically raised by my mother, and she put such a premium on work. She worked hard all her life. It’s just what you did. No one gave you nothing. If you wanted anything in this world, you had to work for it. There were no entitlements, you know. And that was reinforced in the neighborhood, in the city. Detroit is a city that is all about work. I found, as I got older, that there was honor in work. There was esteem in work. Even in the beginning of the MC5 we applied all these principles to how we ran our band.

  People don’t realize how much work is in rock ’n’ roll. When the MC5 began, you played clubs almost every night, though you might have been performing a lot of covers.

  It’s a job when you’re playing five sets a night, six nights a week [laughs]. Forty-five on, fifteen off.

  People always talk about the R&B and jazz influences on the MC5, but your mom’s boyfriend used to bring home Patsy Cline and Hank Williams records. Have people missed out on the fact that country music is also part of your musical roots?

  Well, it turns out it is. I kind of denied it for years, because I was such a staunch rock ’n’ roller, then I became an avant-gardist, but when I look over the complete path I have been down, those songs are important to me. Those artists and those Nashville guitar players. Talk about lyric construction—some of that stuff is fabulous, you know.

  “No Easy Way Out” could easily be a country song.

  You’re right. I haven’t thought of it that way, but that’s interesting.

  When a guy like Springsteen writes a song like “My Hometown,” then buys a million-dollar home, should it matter to us, or should only the song matter?

  It’s not up to me to say what matters for you. I just don’t have a problem with it. Art is very broad, and inclusive, not exclusive. I don’t think that it’s okay to write songs that are exactly true to your life and not okay to write a complete fabrication, and anything between. Let’s keep our feet on the ground. There’s real evil in the world. Whether Bruce lives in a mansion and writes about his poor upbringing is not part of it [laughs]. Who cares, really? If you write a good song, great. If you live in a nice house, good for you. How many great songs are there that Holland-Dozier-Holland wrote that didn’t have anything to do with anybody’s real life but that we all love and are important to us? Who was Bernadette anyway? Did she look over her shoulder or not? What was she looking at? What was she running from?

  You mentioned Hemingway earlier. You lived in Key West for a while. What was that like?

  I had been living in Manhattan for ten years and reached a point where I felt like I needed a change. I didn’t feel like I was any closer to being happy or being rich, or whatever. I didn’t know what I was doing, really. I was kind of in a rut. I thought, let me go down there. I met a woman who lived down there and she invited me down. We ended up getting married. It was a nice lifestyle for a couple years. But it’s a little teeny island at the end of the road, and I’m way too ambitious to have been able to stay there. I want to make movies. I have a lot of records to make, and a lot of songs to write, and a lot of bands to produce.

  Without that time you spent there, do you think you would have been as productive as you are now? Was it necessary as a way of getting your shit together?

  Yeah, I think everything we do fits part of a larger plan. If we’re growing at all, change can be a good thing. I know I was on some kind of a path, whether I knew it or not. Moving to Key West was part of it.

  To paraphrase Dostoyevsky, you are on the right path; the thing is not to leave it.

  Right. Exactly.

  Whether it’s Citizen Wayne or Dangerous Madness, you are making some of the most potent political music next to Rage against the Machine. Interestingly enough, it didn’t happen during the Reagan era but smack in the middle of the Clinton era, a time of false progressive politics.

  I think I’m interested in both. If the Bush election taught me anything, it was about the illusion of choice. That there is no real choice in the world, certainly in America, about anything that is important. Like health care, we don’t have any choice in that. Electricity, utilities, those kinds of things that are important. We don’t
have any choice in that. Media, we have no say in any of that. Is it a Republican or Democrat? Well, what’s the difference? They’re both corporate shills.

  The things we have choice in are like thirty-one flavors of ice cream, fifty kinds of bagels. You get ten different kinds of sneakers, but that stuff doesn’t matter. There are only five record companies. Choices on the important things are all narrowed down and controlled by gigantic multinational corporations. That’s the fact. We have no choice. We have the illusion of choice, like we all go vote. And believe me, I vote, and I’d vote every day if they’d let me. I don’t believe it’s going to make much difference. I haven’t seen where it makes much difference.

  Would you still describe yourself as a libertarian?

  I’ve kind of come to the point where I’m calling myself a radical democrat.

  You described the Citizen Wayne songs as auto-mythogized . . .

  Auto-mythological.

  Is that still your direction?

  Well, there was a lot of looking back on that record. I was trying to tell mythological versions of what my experiences have been, but I think if anything, I’m looking more in now. So that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to take a hard look at who I really am. What the hell am I doing? What am I really all about? What am I really interested in? What do I really care about? Can I be honest enough? Do I have enough courage to really look inside and say what I really see? I think that’s what I’m trying to do.