Lyrics

[So, I've got all sorts of questions for you
Andrew, alright
You've been doing this for a long time.
Yes.
Since the early'70s.
Since the late'60s.
Since the late'60s.
And I'm curious what
There wasn't a name for what you were doing when it started, right?
Except "Copying the Velvet Underground." That would have been the name I would have called it.
Yeah, yeah. But then it became known as, you know, early proto-punk.
Not to us, back in the States at that time, us and the Ramones too and all those bands, we all just thought we were rock bands. No one had heard of that stuff.
There were a few words in the paper, some you'd hear like there were these rock magazines.
And guys would throw around these words
But there was no, what you call,'punk'
And if there was, no one was flattered by the term
You know, it was a—
That's what I was wondering, I didn't—
No, a punk was a guy in a street gang who took a cheap shot, you know?
A punk was not Muhammad Ali, a punk was some little coward in the back of a gang who kicked you when you were down
But since then there's like, there's a whole scholarly
Yeah, I think that's the problem. They're scholarly too much and not playing music enough.
Right, but they're talking about like punk was dismantling the western civilization and all the institutions and all this stuff.
Great, all they had to do was learn how to tune that silly guitar and they'd have been in business.
But then how do you... okay, so you're not even thinking about that?
No, and I didn't at the time either. At the time it was just a strange category that I noticed when first time over in Europe, I just noticed these categories that we didn't have in the States and
I really cared.
Sort of more selfishly than that, I just wanted to express myself in front of the audience and like that
And I wanted to have a, you know, rock music happen, you know?
Yeah, so I mean, but I guess it's the idea of like, if you've got a good idea
Just book yourself a show, get some posters and just make that idea happen whether you have the
You know, formal training or not, or, you know, just like, if you've got something to express, just figure out a way to do it.
There, I think you said it the second time. When you said something to express, even more important than the idea, I think something, an emotion, a feeling to express.
Which is what, that was my reason for doing it. I needed the audience. I cried on their shoulder. That was my point. I mean, I didn't even think of myself in any, I thought of myself as, wow, I get a chance.
You know, here are these places I get to play, and then I put a group together, so it would be four of us doing it.
But the idea was, I wanted to sort of, I was lonely and sad about stuff, and I wanted to sort of tell the world how I felt.
And I also felt beauty in things.
The Velvet Underground inspired me that way, so did other people like The Loving Spoonful
All this beauty I heard in this music, I wanted to try and create a feeling like that in a room
But yeah, so there was... and other than that I was really just copying people like the Stooges, the Kinks, the Velvet Underground, people, all kinds of people
But you're a classic romantic
I thought so at the time, I don't know how I feel now
I don't even, I'm starting to, I had a clearer sense of what that word was
Then, then I do now
It seems like you're just as excited about art as ever
Yes, yes, that is true
That, if anything possibly even more so in some way
Yes, but yes, that's true
And you, the first thing we talked about on the phone when we were talking about doing this was a mutual, I don't know if you heard it in my music or where you got the Ravel tip?
That was funny. I just as a brainstorm before I did hear it, I did not hear Ravel in the first CDs you sent us.
I didn't hear Ravel's influence.
I just had a hunch, "Okay, Jonathan, what are you going to do on Andrew's show?"
Exactly. And I just figured, because I'd already talked to you about
Improvising some stuff and maybe backing you up on a song that you intentionally didn't tell me,
And me having you back me up on something which I didn't tell you.
I said, "It might be nice to give the audience something that you folks both know," you know?
And so I said,
I was working on this Ravel piece and I just figured maybe Andrew likes him
Just, I didn't know, so it was a guess
And when you said this, he was a big deal to Ian, I was like, alright, I had no idea
Yeah, he's been huge and I've quoted him in my music a lot
And then when you sent us other stuff that I hadn't heard before
The useless creatures collection
Like then I go, okay, we heard that
But you suggested this piece, which I didn't know that well, of Ravel's, this Pavane pour l'enfant défunt, Pavane for a Dead.
Yeah, but I don't think it literally means that. I don't think it's a sad... back then, guys like Eric Satie had already started to set the standard for playing with words and sarcasm
and being all sardonic and stuff and ironic and everything.
So, I don't think it literally means elegy to a dead child. I think it means... I think, in fact, I remember reading somewhere that it was a...
A play on words of some other title, you know, I'm not sure, but anyway, yeah, I don't think it literally is that, you know, anyway.
Well, it's a beautiful piece and it's like, I spent the last two weeks immersing myself in it and learning it just by ear and we've been playing it the last hour or so, but we're going to play it.
Hope it turns out good.
You know, it's going to be, like we said, it's going to be approximate, it's not, we're not practitioners, but uh.]

[[Instrumental]]

[All right.
He made it. (laughs)
Yeah, that was cool.
It's such a,
I mean, the pieces of Ravel that I've loved
Are like the second movement of the string quartet,
Which is one of the most rocking.
A lot of his pieces, they don't kind of,
They have this momentum to them
That a lot of classical music doesn't have.
There's a polyrhythm going on.
Those guys were so wild.
I'm really excited to be on this show.]

[Partly because I love your music, anyway it's mutual incidentally, so if you're a fan of mine, I'm also really an admirer of what you do and I want also,
once I heard that you were a fan of Ravel, that made me really excited about this because I love to talk about that whole era of music.
You talked about how their music, like Ravel's music was different from other classical music of the time, how it pulsated differently.
These guys, them, these guys, Eric Satie, him, Debussy, also from Spain there was a guy, part of this group called Manuel de Falla. Have you heard of him? Okay.
These people, the sort of route from Barcelona through Perpignan train station up there over to Paris, this whole network of artists that were happening at that time
There was something, they were so dead serious, it was so life and death for them
That I think their work did stuff that others didn't.
I mean they listened to everything.
Debussy listened to Chinese music, listened to Polynesian music.
Well yeah, they were apparently all there, Ravel and Debussy, at the Paris World Fair 1889
And heard this gamelan music.
Yes!
And all that pentatonic stuff, and it makes total sense. It's kind of early for the jazz stuff that you hear in it, but when you hear that played on piano, it sounds like Bill Evans. What's that chord?
Yeah, those are 7 /9 chords, which also appear in James Brown. It's way early jazz that way. And occasionally you hear these voicings too.
You know, which I heard were also unusual for that time. In fact Manuel Defaya in his tribute to Debussy when Debussy died, they asked Manuel Defaya, the composer from Spain for a tribute and he wrote him a piece.
And in it, he put this chord in, and I asked the guitar teacher who was helping me decipher what was going on in such a piece,
And I said, "What's a chord like that doing? Isn't that unusual for classical?" He says, "Yeah, but these guys were a different breed at that time."
And Debussy, by the time he died in 1918, was already starting to get into the voicings of the United States.
And Manuel de Falla might have put that in as a musical in-joke tribute to that.
So yes, these guys were wild, and I mean that in the sense of it was life and death for them. They really wanted to make music.
Yeah, yeah. And there's that string quartet piece.]

[There's also, in Weather Systems there's this
Right? Very reminiscent of
Very much so, yes, those kind of forces. And all these kinds of...
And it sounds, they're described as impressionistic and it makes some sense because there's sort of a smearing of the chords and like a sort of washed out,
it's less triads and more like fourths and you know, and it creates this kind of dreamy thing and the time is a little elastic and it kind of flows, ebbs and flows.
But then you really listen to a piece like Pavon and learn it, and you realize how meticulous it was, and how slowly Ravel composed over his lifetime. It was very, very meticulous.
Yeah, I'd heard that from others. In fact, what some other classical players loved about Ravel was that each piece was designed very, very—like every note was there for the support of the piece and for nothing else.
It's really cool to meet you here at Ravel, like coming from different, like you said earlier, I've always been coming from a conservatory,
a trained world that I never quite fully embraced, but nonetheless I came out of school playing complicated fancy music and then I suddenly was in the clubs meeting
People who could hardly tune their guitars but had
Which, of which, I was a member of that club for many years.
Right, and I've found over the last 20 years I meet a lot of people going the other direction.
They've started off self-taught and raw and then they get turned on by different things they didn't know about and then they
Throw themselves into it. Exactly. They are romantic. Exactly my case. In fact, it was simply that. Untrained for many years,
and I was first just looking for tone colors to play against my usual... I was just hearing, I was introduced, take a score like Hello Dolly, you know like...
Like there'd be majors and minors against each other in a certain way, and then diminished.
And I was thinking, wow, a diminished chord every once in a while really sets up the usual C, A minor, F and G stuff that I've been doing, it makes all these colors.
So what I got into, I'm trying to, before we came here today, I was trying to think of how I got into Ravel and Debussy exactly.
And I think I got into Debussy because Oscar Levant made an album about, oh, back in the'50s
That we found at a yard sale, we being me and my certain someone.
Like we were just passing through a yard sale, and for a dollar, Oscar Levant plays his classical favorites on grand piano.
And one of them was.]

[Yeah, Prelude.
Girl, Maiden with the Flaxen Hair by Debussy.
And I flipped.
It was so evocative.
And I had to hear more.
And so I started buying more things.
And then since my ear isn't good enough to understand all the complicated things that a guy like Debussy or Ravel is doing,
That's why I've been teaching myself to read music these last 10 years.
Exactly because I'm turned on by it, to me it's beautiful, and I can't do it.
So since my ear isn't good enough to just go, "Oh, he's playing the C natural against the C sharp there, and he's got a B pedal on the bottom,"
My ear can't hear that quick, so I have to see. But if I see it on paper and can go real slow and go, "Oh, I see,"
And then I have to say, "Am I really playing that right?" and show it to a classical teacher and say, "Look, should my finger really be there?"
Then I can understand, yes, they did mean that and here's why, but it takes me a long time
And that's how I got into it
And then Ravel, I forget exactly
Oh yeah, it was because I started buying classical
Once I started getting into teaching myself stuff and getting into classical stuff
I wanted to hear it played on guitar
So I would buy Christopher Park and eat this
Sure enough, he's also playing Ravel
And he played that Pavan that we just played
He did a version of it. Then I heard another fabulous version by another guitar player, Julian Breem, with such feeling, such soul.
And I went, "This stuff really has a lot that I want to learn." And yes, that's exactly how I got into it. Later in life, I went, "Where has this stuff been?"
I wasn't sorry that I didn't learn it earlier, I wasn't ready for it
But then I heard how it applied to my own music, which is still simple
But occasionally borrowing tone colors from people like that
I can express myself better]

[Yeah, it's cool that you learn what you need to do to get the job done that you're hearing.
That's my approach, because I'm not trying to convert into a classical musician.
But what I am trying to do is, wow, this whole world of music had such...
You know, and it's so varied too
Some classical music, I just plain can't stand
Because it just sounds like some royalty said, "Here, here Stooge, you know, for 50,000 pounds
Compose this for my coming, you know, parade"
You know, and a lot of it just sounds like that
Okay, he's going to want all kinds of gingerbread here
He's going to want fancy stuff
But this Debussy was dead serious
It doesn't sound like he's pandering to anybody
And so, him and Ravel neither, it just sounds... Manuel de Falla too, you know?
These kind of chords...
All these mystery chords, and uh...
I sometimes like to play just a series of fourths, like...
Yes!
Yeah, just throw that in there. I don't know exactly what I'm doing, but I like it.
I've never, even though I went to music school, I don't know the name. I don't say, oh, that's a nine tier or whatever.
I can figure that stuff out. But it's not really that interesting to me how it works as long as it does.
Have you gotten into the chords that the flamenco players use like things like this?
You know, those types of things. Yeah.
I just think of it in terms of like open and closed or more closed.
Open in the sense of McCoy Tyner playing with John Coltrane, those open and...
Some of that, yeah, gets into like the modal...
Taking out the major, taking out the third
I was going to say McCoy-Tyner went in relation to the Ravel and Debussy stuff, yeah
Then I understand you, yes, open in that sense
But I start playing a loop like this
And that's still a little bit closed
Then I start playing]