“How does it happen,” asks a scraggly Scandinavian in stumbling English, “that you have so much energy in your hands?”
“How does it not happen that no one else does?” replies Keith with his imp’s smile. A few moments later he abruptly turns aside another blushing devotee’s jittery inquiry, saying, “I can’t take people who are as serious and philosophical as you.” In near tears, the kid turns and leaves.
The next morning, Keith and I hook up again in a limousine en route to the Los Angeles Airport, where Keith and manager Brian Carr are to catch a flight to Hawaii. Jarrett’s cheeks and chin are marked by lines of exhaustion, pinching his face into a tight pucker. Grudgingly he acknowledges the transaction of an interview. That morning in the bustling airport bar we have a brief conversation:
“Several of the people backstage last night seemed to be trying to tell you that they find something beyond music in your concerts—some action or discipline that may be tied to a spiritual or philosophical level,” I venture.
“I don’t know what the words philosophical and spiritual mean. I know that what goes on while I’m playing could be translated into philosophy by anyone who wants to eliminate a lot of their being in the process, by converting it into a system of thought or discipline. I don’t have the privilege of doing that. If I did, it would limit the music.”
“Do you think your music conveys emotions to the audience?”
“Conveying an emotion would be music at its most gross use. Conveying the clarity of energy is music at its highest. Emotions are already so colored. . . . For example, the music might convey an emotion if I heard somebody click a camera. I’d then have a momentary feeling; I would have to explode. Now that wouldn’t necessarily create music, but it would be an enema of sorts, you know, to rid myself of the moment that had just defiled what was happening.
“I’d like to say something here without you asking a question. I came to realize recently that I can’t let go of the essence of what’s happening to me, moment to moment, just for the sake of etiquette. That means I’m as committed to spontaneity now as I would be playing the piano onstage. Spontaneity tells me what should be happening at this exact second. So if your questions don’t fit into that, it’s an impossible subject to deal with. In a way, the concerts preserve my life outside of the music, and vice versa. And if I let either of them down, I’m sinning.
“The music is the reason I’m known at all. It created the interest in doing an interview with me. But because it was music that did, it means that I should adhere to the laws of music. I understand the process that you need to deal with, but I can no more help you with it than if no one was sitting in this chair. To me, you want to talk about subjects in which I have absolutely no concern.”
“You have no concern if people choose to categorize your music as jazz?”
“Well, you’re helping that. What I mean is, a lot of people won’t read this because it’s an article on jazz, and you’re helping to reinforce that architecture. Now you’re trying to reduce things that are of no concern into interesting questions and answers. I hope my music can’t be understood within the context of your article. Why do you think it’s so easy to forget what I play? Because what I do isn’t about music. It’s about an experience beyond sound.”
“You also once said that your purpose is ’blowing people’s conceptions of what music means.’ ”
“That was me in the role of an ego. I’m growing now, and making less of those doctrinaire statements.”
“Does that mean that your feelings about electronic music might change in time, too?”
“No, because those aren’t feelings, they’re physiological facts. Just being in the same room with it is harmful, like smoking cigarettes. . . . But what you’re doing is what the Western world would love to have continue forever, which is picking apart a world that doesn’t deserve to be picked apart. If there’s going to be a profile of me in your magazine, it’s a profile you’re drawing from yourself, and you’re getting answers from me because I’m not being myself enough to jump in the air, turn a cartwheel, and leave this room—which is what I feel like doing.”
With that, Jarrett excuses himself to make a call to his wife in New Jersey before catching his flight. Our interview, I gather, is over.
“Look,” says Brian Carr, who’s been sitting by attentively the whole time, “you should come over to Hawaii for a couple of days. There, he’ll have a chance to relax and talk with more ease. After all, you two should have more contact than this.”
THREE DAYS LATER, standing in an open-air hotel lobby in rainy Lahaina, Maui, I tell myself that more contact with Keith Jarrett is the last thing I should have. I have been in the hotel for about an hour, trying to reach Brian Carr with no luck, so I decide instead to ring Jarrett’s room and say hello. It’s a mistake. Maybe I have interrupted some kind of cosmic process, but whatever, Jarrett is fit to be tied.
“I don’t have a machine to protect me,” he snaps. “I only have one person to act as a buffer between me and everyone else, and I don’t feel like I should have to be disturbed by someone calling me instead of Brian. You’re proving more and more that there’s nothing to talk about—and that there’s no meaning to the things that we talk about.”
Does this mean, I ask myself, that I am unknowledgeable? Unenlightened? Then fine. I’ve followed this prima donna from New York to Hawaii and have only been able to get an hour’s worth of conversation with him. I feel like packing my hopelessly limited Western point of view into my overnight bag, turning a cartwheel, and leaving this island, because that seems to be what the moment dictates. In fact, I’m about ready to do just that when I get a call in the hotel lobby from Carr, asking me to meet him in a bar in downtown Lahaina.
Carr has been something of a counselor to me in my dealings with Jarrett, and the combination of his suasion and two mai tais cools down my indignation considerably. I agree to stay and wait for the spirit of spontaneity to move Jarrett to a more colloquial frame of mind. Finally, as luck would have it, in the middle of Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park, I get a call that Keith will see me now.
Jarrett, clad in a black Avedis Zildjian Cymbals T-shirt and jeans, greets me at the door of his penthouse with the same distracted air that he uses to greet his audiences. Without a word, he strolls over to the balcony, slides the glass partition open, then settles into an apricot-and-lime-tinted sofa. The moist air, washing in off the ocean waves a few yards away, seems to ease some of the tension in the room. Perched forward on the edge of his seat, Jarrett studies his thick, muscular fingers as they clinch one another in a vise grip.
“This interview has been hard for me,” he says in a subdued tone, “because I don’t feel like I’m able to shake the foundation of what words are supposed to do, which is the only way it could be my interview. I’m shaking foundations with music, so it only makes sense that I should be able to do that in other areas, too. The thing is, how can I express that there’s no more to say—that all interviews are bullshit—and still allow you to do your job?”
He sinks back into the folds of the sofa, hooking his arms over its back like a bird in roost and occasionally fluttering a hand to underscore a point. “The solo thing I’m doing is growing more sensitive, and also more subject to destruction, so it has to be protected. There are things now that I can’t be asked to do that maybe five years ago I would, not because I’m getting more eccentric or arrogant, but because the process requires more consciousness, more tuning. Everything gets fussier and purer. . . . You know, it’s funny, but death hovers around quite a bit at a solo concert.”
“Death?”
“Yes, the possibility that I might not live through a concert because of how vulnerable I am to anything that happens. It’s like my ego isn’t strong enough to protect me at those moments. Sometimes I feel as if I’m putting my finger on an electric line and leaving it there.”
I recall something Brian Carr had said when we first met: “It’s quit
e an ordeal Keith goes through to do these solo concerts. There’s always the possibility in some people’s minds that this just might be the night he can’t play, the night he remains blank. I think that possibility seems just as real to him as anyone else.”
Maybe, but I have a hunch that Keith’s ego is a whole lot tougher—and more cunning—than he may admit. It probably shapes and informs his music to a greater, more artful degree than any trancelike communion with higher forces ever could. The detractive part of that ego is its haughty manner with the real world and its capacity for indulgence. But that’s probably okay. Certainly there’s no correlation between an artist’s talent or vision and his temperament, because a lot of real bastards have made some damn transcendent art.
I don’t have to live with Jarrett’s bullying, insolent manner, but I’m more than happy to live with his music. As distasteful and pretentious as he can be, he has created a vital and durable body of recordings that is going to serve as consummate documents of solo improvisation for generations.
After a few minutes the conversation turns to the Sun Bear Concerts. Keith is interested in my reactions to the set and whether I think it can find an audience. “If there’s anything I wish would sell for the right reason,” he says, “it’s that set. I was involved in a very searching period of time when we recorded that, and the music itself was almost a release for the search. I’ve been thinking—Sun Bear is the only thing I’ve recorded that runs the gamut of human emotion. I think that if you got to know it well enough, you’d find it all in there someplace.”
“Just where did the name Sun Bear come from, anyway?”
For the first time in our conversations, Keith looks genuinely shy, almost humble. “It’s a very light-hearted reason,” he replies. “While we were on that tour I went to a zoo, where I saw a Sun Bear, a small bear that looks real gentle, like a house pet, and doesn’t exist anywhere but in Japan. The next day I had lunch with one of the Japanese recording engineers, and I asked him about the bear because I remembered its face—a real friendly little face. And he said, ’Yeah, it’s a beautiful bear, but if you get close enough, it knocks you about three blocks down the street.’
“I just liked that whole idea of an animal that looked like it would be nice to get close to, but if you did, it would shock your very conception of life.”
It’s my guess that if it ever came to blows between Keith Jarrett and a Sun Bear, that little bear might have to reexamine a few conceptions of its own.
life & death in the u.k.: the sex pistols, public image ltd., joy division, new order, and the jesus and mary chain
Johnny Rotten was one of the few terrific anti-heroes rock & roll has ever produced: a violent-voiced bantam of a boy who tried to make sense of popular culture by making that culture suffer the world outside—its moral horror, its self-impelled violation, its social homicide. His brief, rampaging tenure with the Sex Pistols—the definitional punk band of the late 1970s—had the effect of disrupting rock & roll’s sound, style, and meaning, unlike any pop force before or since. Even seeing the band only once, as I did at San Francisco’s Winterland in January 1978, brought home their consequence with an indelible jolt. That night, Rotten danced—waded, actually—through a mounting pile of debris: everything from shoes, coins, books, and umbrellas, all heaved his way by a tense, adulatory crowd. Draped in a veil of smoke and sweat, the scene resembled nothing so much as a rehearsal for Armageddon, and Rotten rummaged through it all like some misplaced jester. But when he sang—railing at the crowd, jeering the line, “There’s no future, no future, no future for YOU!”—he was predatory and awesome. It was the most impressive moment in rock & roll I have ever witnessed.
The morning after the show, the other Sex Pistols and their manager, Malcolm McLaren, fired Rotten. McLaren, who conceived the group and purportedly engineered its rise and fall, charged that Warner Bros. (the Pistols’ American label) had purposefully driven a wedge between Rotten and the rest of the band, and that Rotten himself—who had influenced punk ethos more than any other single figure—had turned into a glory-basking rock star. “What really happened,” Rotten will tell me more than two years after the band’s end, “is that the other Pistols [guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook] wouldn’t speak to me anymore. Malcolm flew them around in airplanes, while Sid [Vicious] and I traveled across America with roadies. You come here to see the fuckin’ country, not fly over it.” It is nearly 1 A.M., and as we talk we are seated in the bar at a Los Angeles Sunset Strip hotel, drinking rum and Cokes.
“If you really want to know, I think the Sex Pistols failed . . . miserably, Rotten says, spouting the last word with a thespian flourish. “Actually, it was a bit embarrassing. The other people in the band never understood what I was singing about.”
IN CONTRAST TO Johnny Rotten, John Lydon—who rose from the ashes of Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols to form the experimentalist postpunk band Public Image Ltd.—impresses some erstwhile followers as just a plain antagonist: a tedious, ill-affected artiste who deserted his own dread visions for fear they might destroy him. In a way, that may be true. By dealing exclusively in abstract images and accidental sounds, Lydon no longer has to run the risk of caring—which means he no longer needs to run the risk of meaning. (Director Julien Temple—who made the Sex Pistols feature The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, and would later film Absolute Beginners—once told me: “What John understands is that if people love you, they have control over you, because they can always say they don’t love you and destroy you. But if they hate you, and you hate them in return, then you’re freer.”)
It’s also true that Lydon rankles critics and punk diehards alike because he’s repudiated his past. By his own admission, the music he has made with PiL aims to devastate classicist rock & roll—including punk rock—by blackening its themes and confounding its forms. It’s as if, after distancing himself from the merciless primitivism of the Sex Pistols, Lydon found a fatal flaw in rock & roll itself—namely, that it imparted the illusion of order and transcendence—and decided to remake the genre. In creating PiL, Lydon announced that he wanted to form a group that was “anti-music of any kind. I’m tired of melody.” To help him realize this end, Lydon recruited two friends—classically trained guitarist and pianist Keith Levene, who’d been a founding member of the Clash, and Jah Wobble, a novice bassist and reggae enthusiast. Lydon also saw all this new musical change as a chance to debunk the myth of Johnny Rotten. (Actually, he delights in interchanging the surnames: on PiL’s album jackets he lists himself as John Lydon, though in conversation he generally refers to himself as Johnny Rotten.) “Malcolm and the press had a lot to do with fostering that Rotten image,” Lydon says. “I chose to walk away from it because otherwise you have all these people out there waiting for you to kill yourself on their behalf.
“I mean, look what happened to Sid,” he adds, referring to bassist Sid Vicious’ arrest for the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, and his subsequent 1979 death by heroin overdose. A plaintive look crosses Lydon’s face, and he stares into his drink for a long moment. “Poor Sid. The only way he could live up to what he wanted everyone to believe about him was to die. That was tragic, but more for Sid than anyone else. He really bought his public image.”
It is fitting then, that Lydon named his new group Public Image Ltd. (“The name,” he says, “means just that: Our image is limited”), and that their debut single, “Public Image,” was an indictment of the Pistols and McLaren. But the real focal point of the song, as well as the subsequent album, Public Image, was the musical content: amorphous structures and unbroken rhythms, paired with minimal melodies and Lydon’s hoodoo vocals. The concept had its roots in the drone and modal experimentalism of the Velvet Underground, Brian Eno, avant-garde composer La Monte Young and the German group Can, while the actual sound mix resembled the prominent bass and deep-echo characteristic of reggae dub production. In actual effect, Lydon and PiL simply rerouted the Pistols’ much vaunted anarchism,
applying it to song structure, and in the process, authored the first major attempt to transmogrify rock parlance since Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica.
The rock press, though, lambasted Public Image. Rolling Stone termed it “postnasal drip monotony,” while England’s New Musical Express dismissed it as a “Zen lesson in idolatry.” (Warner Bros. declined to release the album in America, even though PiL rerecorded and remixed parts of it.) Basically, PiL agreed with the critics: “They all slagged it,” says Keith Levene, “because it was self-indulgent, nonsimplistic, and non-rock & roll. Those are all good points. But that’s the kind of music we intend to make. We don’t want to be another Clash, making old-fashioned, twelve-bar rock & roll.”
But in 1980, critical perspectives on PiL start to shift. In part, that’s because the group has come to be seen as progenitors of the English postpunk movement, which at the time includes electronic, theorizing, doleful bands like Cabaret Voltaire, Joy Division, and many others. It’s also because PiL’s own music matured measurably. With Second Edition (originally released in November 1979 in Britain by Virgin Records, in limited edition as Metal Box—a set of three 12-inch forty-fives packaged in a film canister), Levene fashioned a mesmerizing, orchestral guitar and synthesizer mesh that embroiders and enwraps the dance beat-oriented rhythm section, while Lydon wrote some of his most forceful lyrics (particularly those to “Poptones,” a deathly account of rape told from the victim’s point of view, and “Swan Lake,” a song about his mother’s death).
“Now all the critics love us,” Lydon says with a scornful smile. At 2 A.M. the waitress calls for last rounds. Lydon orders a double (I can’t help but copy him), then he continues: “I don’t trust all these people who praise us now. They’re the same ones who waited until the Pistols were over before they accepted them. And I’m not sure the press appreciates at all that Public Image is more than just a band I’m in.”
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