Enough Said

"You know what you should have done...you just didn't do it." Nicole H. is more sympathetic and humble to modern men, then she is to her female protagonists. (From a story standpoint, Catherine Keener needed one more scene. The movie was a bit loose.)

And James Gandolfini's final three movies -- Killing Them Softly, Not Fade Away, and Enough Said. He has the finest moments in all three. He was Tony Soprano. Then returned to being an actor. I miss him now more after seeing these three films.

If a Record Takes More Than a Week to Make, Somebody's Fucking Up

Steve Albini's call-to-arms letter to Nirvana back in 1993 before the making of In Utero.

Kurt, Dave and Chris:

First let me apologize for taking a couple of days to put this outline together. When I spoke to Kurt I was in the middle of making a Fugazi album, but I thought I would have a day or so between records to sort everything out. My schedule changed unexpectedly, and this is the first moment I've had to go through it all. Apology apology.

I think the very best thing you could do at this point is exactly what you are talking about doing: bang a record out in a couple of days, with high quality but minimal "production" and no interference from the front office bulletheads. If that is indeed what you want to do, I would love to be involved.

If, instead, you might find yourselves in the position of being temporarily indulged by the record company, only to have them yank the chain at some point (hassling you to rework songs/sequences/production, calling-in hired guns to "sweeten" your record, turning the whole thing over to some remix jockey, whatever...) then you're in for a bummer and I want no part of it.

I'm only interested in working on records that legitimately reflect the band's own perception of their music and existance. If you will commit yourselves to that as a tenet of the recording methodology, then I will bust my ass for you. I'll work circles around you. I'll rap your head with a ratchet...

I have worked on hundreds of records (some great, some good, some horrible, a lot in the courtyard), and I have seen a direct correlation between the quality of the end result and the mood of the band throughout the process. If the record takes a long time, and everyone gets bummed and scrutinizes every step, then the recordings bear little resemblance to the live band, and the end result is seldom flattering. Making punk records is definitely a case where more "work" does notimply a better end result. Clearly you have learned this yourselves and appreciate the logic.

About my methodology and philosophy:

#1: Most contemporary engineers and producers see a record as a "project," and the band as only one element of the project. Further, they consider the recordings to be a controlled layering of specific sounds, each of which is under complete control from the moment the note is conceived through the final six. If the band gets pushed around in the process of making a record, so be it; as long as the "project" meets with the approval of the fellow in control.

My approach is exactly the opposite.

I consider the band the most important thing, as the creative entity that spawned both the band's personality and style and as the social entity that exists 24 hours out of each day. I do not consider it my place to tell you what to do or how to play. I'm quite willing to let my opinions be heard (if I think the band is making beautiful progress or a heaving mistake, I consider it part of my job to tell them) but if the band decides to pursue something, I'll see that it gets done.

I like to leave room for accidents or chaos. Making a seamless record, where every note and syllable is in place and every bass drum is identical, is no trick. Any idiot with the patience and the budget to allow such foolishness can do it. I prefer to work on records that aspire to greater things, like originality, personality and enthusiasm. If every element of the music and dynamics of a band is controlled by click tracks, computers, automated mixes, gates, samplers and sequencers, then the record may not be incompetent, but it certainly won't be exceptional. It will also bear very little relationship to the live band, which is what all this hooey is supposed to be about.

#2: I do not consider recording and mixing to be unrelated tasks which can be performed by specialists with no continuous involvement. 99 percent of the sound of a record should be established while the basic take is recorded. Your experiences are specific to your records; but in my experience, remixing has never solved any problems that actually existed, only imaginary ones. I do not like remixing other engineer's recordings, and I do not like recording things for somebody else to remix. I have never been satisfied with either version of that methodology. Remixing is for talentless pussies who don't know how to tune a drum or point a microphone.

#3: I do not have a fixed gospel of stock sounds and recording techniques that I apply blindly to every band in every situation. You are a different band from any other band and deserve at least the respect of having your own tastes and concerns addressed. For example, I love the sound of a boomy drum kit (say a Gretach or Camco) wide open in a big room, especially with a Bonhammy double-headed bass drum and a really painful snare drum. I also love the puke-inducing low end that comes off an old Fender Bassman or Ampeg guitar amp and the totally blown sound of an SVT with broken-in tubes. I also know that those sounds are inappropriate for some songs, and trying to force them is a waste of time. Predicating the recordings on my tastes is as stupid as designing a car around the upholstery. You guys need to decide and then articulate to me what you want to sound like so we don't come at the record from different directions.

#4: Where we record the record is not as important as how it is recorded. If you have a studio you'd like to use, no hag. Otherwise, I can make suggestions. I have a nice 24-track studio in my house (Fugazi were just there, you can ask them how they rate it), and I'm familiar with most of the studios in the Midwest, the East coast and a dozen or so in the UK.

I would be a little concerned about having you at my house for the duration of the whole recording and mixing process if only because you're celebrities, and I wouldn't want word getting out in the neighborhood and you guys having to put up with a lot of fan-style bullshit; it would be a fine place to mix the record though, and you can't beat the vitties.

If you want to leave the details of studio selection, lodgings, etc. up to me, I'm quite happy to sort all that stuff out. If you guys want to sort it out, just lay down the law.

My first choice for an outside recording studio would be a place called Pachyderm in Cannon Falls, Minnesota. It's a great facility with outstanding acoustics and a totally comfy architect's wet dream mansion where the band lives during the recordings. This makes everything more efficient. Since everybody is there, things get done and decisions get made a lot faster than if people are out and about in a city someplace. There's also all the posh shit like a sauna and swimming pool and fireplaces and trout stream and 50 acres and like that. I've made a bunch of records there and I've always enjoyed the place. It's also quite inexpensive, considering how great a facility it is.

The only bummer about Pachyderm is that the owners and manager are not technicians, and they don't have a tech on call. I've worked there enough that I can fix just about anything that can go wrong, short of a serious electronic collapse, but I've got a guy that I work with a lot (Bob Weston) who's real good with electronics (circuit design, trouble shooting and building shit on the spot), so if we choose to do it there, he'll probably come along in my payroll, since he'd be cheap insurance if a power supply blows up or a serious failure occurs in the dead of winter 50 miles from the closest tech. He's a recording engineer also, so he can be doing some of the more mundane stuff (cataloging tapes, packing stuff up, fetching supplies) while we're chopping away at the record proper.

Some day I'm going to talk the Jesus Lizard into going up there and we'll have us a real time. Oh yeah, and it's the same Neve console the AC/DC album Back in Black was recorded and mixed on, so you know its just got to have the rock.

#5: Dough. I explained this to Kurt but I thought I'd better reiterate it here. I do not want and will not take a royalty on any record I record. No points. Period. I think paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible. The band write the songs. The band play the music. It's the band's fans who buy the records. The band is responsible for whether it's a great record or a horrible record. Royalties belong to the band.

I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it's worth. The record company will expect me to ask for a point or a point and a half. If we assume three million sales, that works out to 400,000 dollars or so. There's no fucking way I would ever take that much money. I wouldn't be able to sleep.

I have to be comfortable with the amount of money you pay me, but it's your money, and I insist that you be comfortable with it as well. Kurt suggested paying me a chunk which I would consider full payment, and then if you really thought I deserved more, paying me another chunk after you'd had a chance to live with the album for a while. That would be fine, but probably more organizational trouble than it's worth.

Whatever. I trust you guys to be fair to me and I know you must be familiar with what a regular industry goon would want. I will let you make the final decision about what I'm going to be paid. How much you choose to pay me will not affect my enthusiasm for the record.

Some people in my position would expect an increase in business after being associated with your band. I, however, already have more work than I can handle, and frankly, the kind of people such superficialities will attract are not people I want to work with. Please don't consider that an issue.

That's it.

Please call me to go over any of this if it's unclear.

(Signed)

If a record takes more than a week to make, somebody's fucking up. Oi!

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction

To my Joan Didion.

INTERVIEWER

You have said that writing is a hostile act; I have always wanted to ask you why.

JOAN DIDION

It's hostile in that you're trying to make somebody see something the way you see it, trying to impose your idea, your picture. It's hostile to try to wrench around someone else's mind that way. Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.

INTERVIEWER

Are you conscious of the reader as you write? Do you write listening to the reader listening to you?

DIDION

Obviously I listen to a reader, but the only reader I hear is me. I am always writing to myself. So very possibly I'm committing an aggressive and hostile act toward myself.

Highland Park

Paul Brickman, the director of Risky Business, is interviewed. He became a recluse from Hollywood after his debut film at the age of 34.

You filmed in some favored Chicago movie locations, like Lake Shore Drive and the John Hancock Center, but also some suburban spots that seem to have personal significance.

I shot a lot of scenes in Highland Park, so there are a lot of personal spots. The exterior of Joel’s house is three minutes from the house where I grew up. Shelton’s Ravinia Grill, where Joel and his friends talk about their futures, is where I used to hang out after walking home from school in the eighth grade. We’d go there and throw French fries at each other. Part of the car chase sequence with Guido, the killer pimp, goes by the Highland Park Movie Theater where I saw movies as a kid. I remember for the “love on a real train” scene, I was stuck on how to make that work. So John Avnet and I went to an Italian restaurant in Chicago one night that had the worst service I’ve ever had in my life. We were there for about three and a half hours. And we came up with this concept that the train car would come off the tracks and fly over the Chicago skyline. [Laughs] We shot it, but failed to execute it. It came across as pornographic.

Thomas Pynchon Loves Tacos

And Beer. I don' know why I felt the desire to post this. Maybe I like the idea of him eating at a local SoCal taco stand in a red-hunting jacket, more than his actual inaccessible books.

Snake and Jake's Christmas Lounge

Nestled on a shady street uptown. Invisible. I remember that some of the time this place wouldn't even get going 'til after 2am. Go there on a late Sunday night to find other derelicts and dreamers. More like an opium den for drunks.

Nightcap. Bloody Mary. And drifting onto the sidewalk in the morning haze.

William Tyler / Out West (A Tour Diary)

I’m sitting in a hotel bar in Cincinnati, listening to the menacing and comfortably familiar electric sitar of Dave Stewart on Tom Petty’s “Don’t Come Around Here No More”. It’s a little hard to fathom that I was on these same highways a month ago, driving from Nashville to Columbus to begin my three-week cross-country trek. As I type this, my computer auto corrects ” cross” to “crisis “. Nice.

When I returned the rental car this Monday, the odometer read 13000 miles. It had been 5000 when my dad and I rented it. It was a gray Camry, new car smell, satellite radio, proud and clean and anonymous and hardly aware of the intense trans continental journey I was about to subject it to.

The continental divide is the latitudinal point that decides where the rivers’ paths are guided: to the Atlantic or to the Pacific. I would cross this twice on the tour. Fuck man, 8000 miles on a rental? That’s more than most people drive in a year. My carbon footprint is like Godzilla. The only way to neutralize it is to walk everywhere and just eat parsley out of my backyard for the rest of the year.

I spent a year daydreaming about the end of oil, the sprawl of America, the lure of the sleeping seemingly dead places off the interstate and hidden on the ‘blue highways’. Ghost towns of old or towns that were fast becoming ghost towns. James Kunstler and Richard Heinberg and Mike Davis were my mental tour guides and all of them would be horrified at how environmentally unsustainable my trek was. But hey, I’m a working musician. We’re not quite dinosaurs yet but we are still fighting for relevance just as much in this insane world, still having to justify our existence. Those big old town cars that Detroit used to crank out back when we had cheap gas are just like the rock stars of thirty (shit, twenty!) years ago who figured the party would never end and people would still want to pay for “art” forever. Anyway I saw my trip as a cross between Lewis and Clark, National Lampoon’s Vacation, and Two Lane Blacktop.

People ask me all the time how I reckon with the magnitude of this country.  I always compare the size and scope and population to our relevant colleagues and peers: China, Russia, India, Brazil…It’s useless to try to compare the USA to anything but those guys. We’ve got too much land and too many people. We are a country of illusions/ delusions. Never gonna run out of land, never gonna run out of sky, never gonna run out of soil, never gonna run out of trees, never gonna run out of people. Ever since World War 2 ended the people here have craved some sort of unifying edifice to keep the linear thinking going: the interstate, the sprawl of fast food chains, billboards, rest-stops.

True Fact: Anywhere in America right now, you can turn on your radio and find Rush Limbaugh or the Eagles playing. I’ve been testing this thesis for almost a year.

I was on a three-week tour that would take me through the two most populated states in the country, California and Texas, and the least populated, Wyoming. Someone in Salt Lake City told me that there were only two escalators in the entire state of Wyoming. That was really comforting to me for some reason.

My tour was beginning two days after Mercury came out of retrograde. I am convinced that before I had awareness of the existence of Mercury in Retrograde, it had no effect on the events in my life. I learned about Mercury in Retrograde in the middle of a similar cross-continental tour five years ago and as soon as we were made aware of it everything started breaking: flat tires, frayed nerves. I don’t agree that ignorance is bliss but it’s a lot less complicated.

You get west of Kansas City and everything begins to open up from the sky to the possibilities of space to the distances between towns. This is the part of the West that people used to just pass through on their way to California or Oregon until the government got savvy in the 1860s and started essentially giving the land away to prospective settlers. Wind, wheat, corn, time to reflect are all in abundance. There is the tyranny of big spaces out here, you can imagine how humbling and terrifying it would have been to the covered wagon rovers but in a car with satellite radio and the promise of gas stations every few miles it is possible to zone out in way that is calm and deliberate.

I’ve tried listening to the news. Too cerebral, never anything uplifting, and being informed on tour is kind of like holding an unlit cigarette in your hand for an 8-hour plane flight. No use. A lot of the oldies stations, too familiar. Getting stuck on the “Deep Tracks” station and lots of country oldies. Listened to a rodeo on scratchy AM radio driving across Nebraska. That was a nice surprise.

My dad on driving through Wyoming: “Now I understand Dick Cheney.”  Does Cheney own both escalators in Wyoming?
Salt Lake City reminds me of the towns you would build in the computer game Sim City, where you could just arbitrarily lump buildings next to each other. It’s clean but ersatz, almost like North Korea on a blind date with Reader’s Digest. It’s tucked into the dip of the mountains with a skyline that cries with beauty. You understand pretty quickly how Brigham Young and company must have been stoked to find this place and basically said, “Fuck it, we aren’t going any further, this place is nice.”

My gig in Salt Lake City coincided with Pioneer Day, essentially the Mormon Fourth of July. It commemorates the day that Brigham Young and his first band of settlers got to the spot the city now inhabits. Not the best night for a solo guitar gig. All was going well even with the sparse crowd but I mistook the fireworks show going off downtown for my amp breaking. Which it did anyway later in the show.

As the sun set over Boise, warming the ground level stare with something almost tragic, I was talking with one of the locals about the ‘anxiety of congestion’. He had grown up on the East coast and the endless stretch of populated places was the main thing he had wanted to get away from when he found his way out west. I could understand this. Out here it’s eight hours between cities and there is something very calming about that. The isolation doesn’t seem that lonely, although playing a show to one person in the crowd that night did. words/ william tyler /

In Utero

It's the 20th anniversary release. Here's an interview with Krist Novolesic and Dave Grohl talking about it.

In the suburbs,  Nirvana Unplugged was the album for a year. Every household on a Friday night. It was played much more than In Utero straight. Nobody ever complained.

Though I would drive down Sheridan Road late listening to "Black."

And now this album isn't so much nostalgia. But a wake-up call. A reminder. 

Can't wait to hear it fresh.

Tuesday Night

U.S.A beats Mexico handily to qualify for the World Cup. Watch the game at Big Wangs. Is it me or has happy hour become kind of gross? Maybe all these places are gross.  Rather than just lowering prices on their 'A' food, I think a lot of these places just bring out 'C' quality plates of what they normally serve. As always my problem in Los Angeles, I just need a neighborhood bar. And a porch.

A Moscow Mule is the victory drink. Towing not included.

Ukulele Songs

I never really paid Eddie Vedder's ukulele album much mind. But I saw that the song "Sleeping By Myself" is gonna be on the new Pearl Jam album. So I'm giving it a Sunday night quiet listen. And I've changed by not changing at all.

Middle-Aged Contentedness

What the fuck. The band I love would've stared down the photographer for suggesting such a staged pose. Stone is the coolest guy in the band.

NFL KICKOFF -- Week 1 -- Bears vs. Bengals

It's good to have Sunday's back. The Bengals are a good, solid NFL team. They looked better than the Bears, yet the Bears pulled off the victory 24-21. The Cutler/Marshall connection. And two interceptions by Tillman.

I think there are quite a few solid teams right now. 10-6 teams like the Bears and Bengals. Good and solid. But the 49ers have a dynamism that separates themselves from the pack. Aaron Rodgers put up a helluva fight. It's a testament to him that the Pack lost by 3. GB might be able to beat them at Lambeau.

I don't see how most teams the Niners play will be able to stay with them right now. They are certainly a 13-3 team. They will go 14-2, if not better, if they want.