If you’re reading this, you probably know (I hope!) that my third book, Band People: Life & Work in Popular Music, is coming in September. It’s based on dozens of interviews with a wide variety of musicians, several of which I was tempted to include, Studs Terkel style, in their edited entirety. I couldn’t, of course, for reasons of word count; luckily, email newsletters know no word limit. Thus, here, my discussion with guitarist Nels Cline, conducted in 2016.
Nels Cline is tall and rangy, with wide-set eyes in a craggy face. A long-time fixture in the worlds of avant-jazz, art-rock, and improvised music, he joined the alt-country band Wilco in 2004. He speaks in measured and complete, if sometimes run-on, sentences.
My name is Nels Cline; I’m sixty years old. I’m best known for playing guitar.
Music is my only source of income, though not that long, since 1998, ‘99. I worked in broken record stores for eighteen years, and also record distributors way back in the day. I kept trying to quit, you know, you have jobs that don’t pay much and have no responsibilities so you can do little non-lucrative tours, meaning like a week or two with Vinnie Golia’s free jazz group or something. Or I was able to go out with the Geraldine Fibbers or Mike Watt in the mid-’90s and still come back to the day job.
I was originally a philosophy major in college, but that’s because I was told it was too late for me to begin music studies. My ideal future was to play all the time and primarily do my own music. In this regard, I was initially inspired by particularly Jimi Hendrix, rock and roll, and psychedelic and blues-rock in general. And later, by the music of progressive rock bands and John Coltrane and Miles Davis and the like, to learn music and become a better musician. But the goal still remained the same, which was to try to play original music and improvised music and have that be the only thing that I ever do.
I haven’t done as much of my own music professionally every day as I’d imagined. Certainly it became not only, I guess, required in order to try to survive, to play other people’s music, but it also became a fun challenge and interesting to try to do what I call “making other songwriters or composers’ dreams come true.” And I also never had a whole lot of self-confidence in terms of pushing through to play my own music all the time, in various guises, as many of my friends who are fantastic musician/composers—people like my friend Bill Frisell come to mind—who have many different ensembles playing their own music all the time. I’m not sure I want to hear my music all the time! Or maybe if I did it would get better or something.
But I’ve certainly spent a lot of time since—even starting in the ‘80s when I was playing with Charlie Haden’s west coast version of the Liberation Music Orchestra; I was playing with Julius Hemphill, a woodwind player and composer; and playing in a rock band in Los Angeles for eight years called BLOC; and a group called Quartet Music with my brother Alex, a man named Eric von Essen, a man named Jeff Gauthier—violinist. We made some records and did our own music, but I was really playing a lot of other people’s music then.
It wasn’t until 1989 that I started a group that was to play only my own music, which was called the Nels Cline Trio. And so that’s pretty late to start playing one’s own compositions, but it came out of a feeling of absolute crisis, of pure frustration of not being able to reconcile what I felt were dichotomies that needed to be resolved between jazz and rock, and acoustic and electric, and so-called noise and so-called traditional beauty in music. And I almost quit playing because of these perceived conflicts and paradoxes. So rather than do that—since I realized my first impulse was to start playing upright bass instead of guitar, which I’m glad I didn’t do—the only impulse was to quit music. Then I realized that were I to quit music, I would only do something like write or do visual art, which would be a solitary way to not make a living and be frustrated and potentially psychotically unhappy. So I started my own band—to follow the endless harangue from Mike Watt at the end of every show, ‘start your own band.’ I did it. Which was very helpful. And people really liked the music and I made some records. But I never toured extensively playing my own music, and I think one of the reasons is that I didn’t feel—no one came forward to suggest that I do it, and help me, and I’m a terrible business person. My way of dealing with business is to not deal with it; I have no hustle. But somehow I was able to keep playing, and play with other people, as well as do my own music, and that’s taken over a fair amount of my life now that I’m in this band Wilco, which I did not see coming, and which has changed my life, certainly. And it’s made my life a lot easier, and I have a lot of fun and people know who I am, which is pretty trippy.
I’m not sure that a lot of Wilco fans are listening to my records. It’s probably a few that [we] sell at the merch table once in a while. The best thing is that they come out my shows, some of them, to support me no matter what I’m doing. So my audience in certain—let’s say, in cities where I appear only sparsely, as opposed to New York City, where I live, where I’m playing all the time. I have no real audience here other than about twenty people, ‘cause I’m always playing with somebody here. But if I go to, say. Indianapolis with my own thing, I probably would maybe get fifty people before Wilco, and post-Wilco I would get like a hundred. And there’s a huge difference between 50 and 100 when you’re in a little jazz club or someplace. So that’s a big difference. What they expect is probably some expressive or even innovative guitar work. I’m not sure they’re paying all that much attention to my composition, and I actually—I guess I have a certain degree of suspicion of the whole idea of the guitar solo, in some regards. I do it because I like playing the guitar, but I guess I’m not a shredder, nor am I just a what we might call a ‘primitive noise god.’ But there may be elements of that at some point in the course of the evening. What I try to do at all times is what I like, which is present a balanced program of all of the different things that I like to do, not just because I like to do them, but also because I think it takes the listener somewhere that’s not just one place—you can go to a bunch of different places and feel a bunch of different feelings and hear bunch of different sounds. That’s what I like to do. If they haven’t heard my music, they’re probably just expecting me to play a bunch of groovy guitar and do some looping and stuff.
I have to say, and I’ve said it before, music is not easy for me, okay? So I always struggle to play difficult music. I’m not somebody who was trained well. I have my own feelings of insecurity about approaching people’s music and playing it the way I think they want to hear it, but that’s my desire. My desire is to expand my own consciousness at the same time as I make these composers’, songwriters’ dreams come true as music, not something that makes me feel like I did something that makes me look hot. So I feel that in so doing, I may actually discover for example as I have as I’ve gotten older the beauty of the triad. I think that I resisted for years playing music, and even listening to too much music after a while, that was really triadic, and not fanciful in the harmonic department, or a drone, or something. So if I play music that’s very straightforward and triadic but that has some kind of a signature point of view or a sound or something like that, that I think has seeped into my own music and I’m able to embrace—I’ve done two records now that strangely depend on major triads, not minor chords, or some sort of enigmatic sound or something like that, and I’ve never done that before. I think this came from playing with Wilco. It came from listening to people I’ve always listened to, like Neil Young for example, or Low—who I love dearly—and being able to let that sort of sit in my own music somehow. I never really set out to imitate, you know, things just sort of—I’m playing, and I hear something I like, I might just work on that and then find out later that “Oh yeah, this sounds like a Deerhoof riff” or something: “No wonder I like it.” Always looking for a hot riff, you know what I mean? I love a beautiful, compelling, repetitive, dramatic, building, riff. Or two. And that’s pretty un-jazz of me. And I think I’m always happy when I feel like I’ve come across a good one. And everything else is maybe a little more coming out of so-called free jazz or Impressionist music, you know, the music of the French Impressionists as that was maybe interpreted or extrapolated by improvisor-composers like Ralph Towner or John Abercrombie or Keith Jarrett or people like that.
I think that I was always questioning my own stamp. For example, there are certain kinds of music where I just know what to do, so I don’t think about the stamp. If I’m improvising—for example, when I started improvising on and off with Medeski Martin & Wood, the first time I played with them was onstage at the Blue Note here in New York City, and it was just one of those things where I knew exactly what to do. I was on my own planet for a change, you know? And every vision feels natural and you’re just happy to go where the music’s taking you. On the other hand, playing certain kinds of Wilco songs where in my mind I’m going to a classicist kind of approach…and [bandleader] Jeff [Tweedy] will say something like “Please don’t be so reverent, ‘cause I want you to maybe go against the grain on this.” That will be hard for me ‘cause I feel like then what I’m doing is putting my own so-called stamp on it before I’ve even really learned the song inside out. I don’t want to start destroying the song before I’ve caressed the song.
I don’t know if I have a style, to be honest. I think really what I do is try to play what the music wants, and there have been opportunities to do that were a combination of challenge and of my natural instincts and abilities, earlier. One example would be a Mike Watt record called Contemplating the Engine Room, where we spent two weeks, me and Watt and Steven Hodges doing Watt’s first so-called rock opera—which I think was a brilliant conceptual work in which we came up with all our own parts, but with a lot of direction, both musical and metaphorical, and I guess you could say even plot-narrative-wise, story, from Watt himself—which demanded a certain kind of creativity, but also a certain kind of classic degree of musicality. So we had to really write the parts ourselves, and arrange this music, and make it coherent, and make it like he wanted. So this was a combination for me of following my own instincts and having them work out well and be honored, and also trying to make Watt’s vision manifest. And that at times was him saying or yelling, “Bicycle wheels, propellors,” and all this kind of stuff. And you’re trying to come up with sounds that will reflect his imagery. That’s a really fun challenge, and I feel has nothing to do with my stamp. It has to do with a combination of my own creative ability sound-wise on the guitar, and then sometimes just playing really really straightforward guitar.
The same went for, maybe to a different extent, playing in the Geraldine Fibbers and playing with Carla Bozulich. She would often, much like Watt, have a sound in her head that she wanted in the track that was, let’s say, in some cases not professional-sounding. I started realizing that a lot of people didn’t want finesse. A lot of songwriters don’t want finesse in their music. And even some improvisos I suppose. They’re looking for something raw, something immediate, something that stands out, that’s a signature sound on a piece rather than a bunch of fancy note-blurs, flurries of notes. And that can be a challenge for me—not conceptually so much, but to actually do that so somebody with that sensibility is convinced by it. Otherwise I’m putting on a little hat and pretending. So it has to be convincing. And I’m not married to the idea of sounding like I know what I’m doing, so at least I have that going for me. Carla had an idea on a song called “Trashman In Furs” that she wanted the guitar solo to sound like an earnest 14-year-old boy sitting in his bedroom on his bed trying to play a lead guitar solo, but not well, he’s not good. And I tried, and I don’t think I got it, quite, on the record. I think I could do a better job of that now. I was in no way resistant to the idea, but that was not me putting my stamp on the song, that was me trying to honor her vision. Which to be honest is absolutely pleasurable, because of my deep respect for her and for Mike Watt and Jeff Tweedy. Whatever these people want to do, I’m happy to try and do, because I believe in their artistry.
There were times in my earlier life when I did things as favors, for friends, which I might still do. I’ve played on some demos, even in the last few years, for friends, or friends of friends, which I’ll just do for free if I have a moment. Or something comes my way, people I know are on it, I’ll do it, and it may not exactly light my fire. I mean, I did one of those last year which has not emerged, which was kind of a jazz record, and I was overdubbing on it, and I just—there was one track where I just couldn’t make it come to life for myself, I felt the track was so dead. But it wasn’t a bad song. I did a couple of things, or four or five or six or fifty or whatever in the ‘80s that were just friends of friends of friends, but these were really horrible records. But it was just me, usually, going to somebody’s apartment or home studio and just laying down a guitar solo and leaving. It wasn’t like I had to go on tour and play that music. And I usually made either no money or fifty bucks.
The first time I even ever saw a porn film, I was playing on one, and certainly wasn’t playing any music on that film that I would wanna listen to. But it wasn’t horrible, it was just like fifties rock and Twin Peaks. That’s what they wanted. So that’s why I was there, I could do twangy guitar. But those things can also be somehow enlightening, as well, in some strange way, and I always learn something about music or something about myself from these kinds of experiences. Certainly in the last ten to twenty years, I seem to just be collaborating with people that I actually have really deep respect for, or whom I’m just maybe getting to know by improvising with them. ‘Cause I enjoy free improvisation, and certainly had many beloved collaborators in Los Angeles—where I’m from—and the Bay Area where I spent an incredible amount of time in the ‘90s and early 2000s. Now that I’m in New York, and have a lot of friends here, and I keep meeting more and more people that play with my friends...I just keep meeting more and more people I could potentially improvise with, and I get to know people by doing that. And these are amazing individuals. It’s an embarrassment of riches at this point.
Other than with Wilco, I don’t think I’ve ever been offered [songwriting credits]. And the Geraldine Fibbers, Carla was really generous with that. That’s about it. Most of the time, in the old days, if you arranged a song for somebody, and came up with a signature riff, you’d get some kind of—it was incumbent upon them, I think legally, that the artist would give you some kind of credit. But no, that never happened. Except Jeff and Carla.
I’ve never been able to talk about money with anybody. I’m kind of a hippie. I wanted to be a hippie when I was 12, and I have all these bad hippie tendencies, and one of them is this kind of disdain for money in general, and talking about it. Which has actually really hurt me in my life, in that I’ve been unable to wheel and deal and survive as usually somebody who can deal with it could. I know a lot of musicians I’m in awe of who are very much independent thinkers, mavericks, punks of their own sort of stripe, and who can really do some business and take care of themselves and further their music and their art. I am not one of those people. I’m not an iconoclast either, you know, I really feel like I just kinda go with the flow and have a fairly passive pattern of behavior, modus operandi.
I basically made it known from the beginning, made myself available to Wilco, and that’s part of the deal. There is a small retainer, nothing super dramatic, but I would say that Glenn Kotche, our drummer, and I are maybe the busiest people outside of Wilco—at least originally when I joined. Maybe now that Jeff Tweedy’s doing his Tweedy project and Pat Sansone is doing more production with various artists, he’s pretty busy as well. But I’m always doing something, so I supplant whatever those down times are with a little bit of income at least and do my own stuff, or go out and play with Jenny Scheinman or Ben Goldberg or various other things that I do with my band the Nels Cline Singers. But it’s pretty much agreed upon, and I’m absolutely fine with, the fact that Wilco is my first concern, my priority.
The only thing that makes that difficult, in terms of doing non-Wilco activity, is that the rock-and-roll world seems to book things far closer to the actual engagement date than the improvised music and so-called jazz and so-called legit world. Those things seem to get booked really, really far in advance. And so quite often if somebody has asked me to do something, say, at a jazz festival in Europe months and months and months or maybe a year from now, the Wilco world can’t always sign off on it, because we aren’t sure exactly whether or not we’re on tour, or what we’re doing, and that person will wait for me until he or she can’t stand it any more and then they usually get somebody else to play those gigs. That’s pretty much the only drawback. I just can’t be everywhere at once.
The first thing that you have to know going into a bandleader dynamic is how this person is, really, rather than just the music. So by this I mean, is this person going to, once he or she gets on the road, start drinking, do crazy things; is this person gonna have radical mood swings and be disrespectful to the people around them; is this person going to not just treat you well, but treat the staff at the club or venue with respect—and if those things are important to you, you should know those things before going into it. Then you have incumbent upon you to do things that make the tour run smoothly, or that make the recording session run smoothly, like be on time and be prepared and all those kinds of professional things.
But things certainly can come up that one doesn’t expect with artists. And then the qeustion is how tolerant can you be, and I’ve been really lucky. I’ve hardly worked with any junkies. I only have had a few dangerous run-ins with drinking bandleaders that insist on driving kind of scenarios, which pushed me over the edge, and really minimal—other than this group I toured in with Mike Watt in ’95, I’ve had pretty minimal band drama in my life. Certainly things would get frayed. When you find out a band broke up you know that there were months or years that led up that were unpleasant—otherwise they wouldn’t break up, right, they would just keep going. The last few months of the Geraldine Fibbers were pretty unpleasant, because I think the band was working so hard, and getting nowhere. We were touring like crazy, and you’re stuck together in a van, and things weren’t growing, and I think that wore everybody down more than they were aware of. So a couple of the band members became very—their fuses became very short, one in particular—and it made it really unpleasant when people would act out and have hissy fits and do all kinds of passive aggressive stuff.
Some people that get into band scenarios, that’s all they’ve ever experienced, so they have a dread of bands, they have a dread of having to get along with other musicians. I don’t have this, because generally I’ve been pretty lucky. In my first trio, it became really difficult after a while—the chemistry, and also because I was starting to tour a lot with Mike Watt and the Geraldine Fibbers and I was away from the band. Not that my own band was touring much—we did these kind of failure West Coast runs or a failure run to Colorado or Arizona or something—but it was really more perceived abandonment. And then generally, because I’m somebody who tends to want to avoid conflict, it would usually become some kind of feud between other members of the band besides me that would derail things. And in the case of my first trio I just—right around the time I was getting a divorce, and I was kind of on the verge of a nervous breakdown—and I say that without drama, it was a fact—around 1998, I just sort of let my trio dissolve by not calling it together. I just stopped playing with it, and that was the end of that. I didn’t officially end the band, and that was pretty weak, I suppose, of me. But I just couldn’t deal with one of the people in the band, who was one of my oldest friends, and I just couldn’t confront him, and I couldn’t deal with what he was saying about me behind my back—that people were telling me was so hurtful—that I just let it go. I just never talked to this person again. Which was fine with him.
And I did a project called Destroy All Nels Cline, where I assembled some of my cherished colleagues and my twin brother Alex and made a record that was all about what I wanted, and very much a cathartic concept, and it’s still one of the only records of mine that I listen to with any regularity because it really came together for that purpose for me. ‘Cause of course I make records for people to listen to, and for my musical comrades to enjoy playing, and so their personalities can emerge, but I also make them for myself, primarily, I suppose. Without naming names, there are people I admire greatly, who I’ve played with, but I would never go on tour with again after certain experiences that I’ve had. And some people are very rigid, and live by a rigid code. Some people are in denial about their behavior, and they don’t see it as disrespectful or, let’s say, overtly challenging to other individuals. And I’m not a person who’s going to try to change those people, or confront them and say, like, “Look, you need to this and you need to that.” I just will try to maybe subtly move on, unless I feel it’s going to harm me directly in some way, like they’re going to crash the van or something. But I’m just kind of a wimp. I don’t confront people and I’m not trying to make them different people. I just have to say “Well, this person is too much for me.”
I really like a hierarchy. I played in democratic bands for most of my early years—one of them was this rock band I mentioned, BLOC, and the other one was this group Quartet Music that I did for over eleven years, this acoustic kind of chamber-jazz group, which were democratic bands for better or for worse. There are certain things about that construct that ultimately become very, very difficult. I think it’s the vagueness that’s difficult; it’s the vagueness and the inability to make fast decisions as a unit moving forward. You don’t always have to make fast decisions, but you have to make unified decisions. If you can’t make a unified decision, then you’re never going to make a quick decision. And sometimes you have to decide right at the moment, like “We need to do this, we have to take this gig,” or “No, we can’t do this song because it sounds like blah blah blah,” instead of endless discussion or unresolved energy that sometimes hangs over a democratic band because one person has a strong voice and other people tend to recede. For example, I’m the person who won’t take umbrage at what somebody says or does until I’ve let it go so long that I become a monster. So then when I finally speak up, it’s hideous, instead of being realistic and just saying “I don’t like that and here’s why” and then just talking about it. Sometimes I let it go until it just becomes this hideous energy, and then when it finally comes out people are really surprised and extremely upset about how hideously I suppressed myself. In a band like Wilco it’s extremely liberating that Jeff knows where he wants us to go, and he knows what he wants, and we all really respect that and get along. And it’s incredibly easy to be in Wilco, because everybody just knows what his role is, and everybody is respectful to each other, and now we’ve been doing it for twelve years and I don’t see any end in sight.
I think the hardest thing about Wilco is the hardest thing about music-making in general, if you can get it going, which is touring all the time. And I don’t have kids, so it’s easier for me, but it still takes a toll on one’s personal life to travel all the time. It’s just the way it is. You can pretend that it’s not the case; but especially as you get older, it’s a challenge if you want to have a personal life. And in the case of members of Wilco and other bands, they have kids! I don’t even know how they do it. Other than that, if there’s a leader, then the nice thing is that the whole band has to respect that person and be down with the fact that this person is their leader. And that was difficult in the Geraldine Fibbers, because Carla was the leader but I didn’t feel that everyone in the band really respected her to the degree that she should’ve been respected, and that made it difficult.
I’ve seen that again and again with female artists, that the guys tend to throw a lot more shade and a lot more attitude on women than they do on other guys. I’m just mentioning that because I’ve seen it way too many times, whether it’s a band playing out, or a recording studio situation with a female artist in charge. Musicians, but particularly recording engineers and club staff, can be extremely disrespectful to female artists without even knowing they are. I’m sitting there working for a female artist—let’s say its Carla, let’s say it’s my wife Yuka or somebody—and the recording engineer when I’m tracking will start asking me all the questions instead of her. “She’s the artist, ask her, she’s sitting right next to you in the fucking control room.” But they keep asking the guy! That shit’s unbelievable that it still happens, but it happens all the time. So in the Fibbers it became—I just think that guys can be not in reality sometimes about who the boss is, and they wanna be the boss, so they just start acting out in all kinds of weird ways. And some of that happened in the Geraldine Fibbers with Carla and the other guys and women or whatever. And then Carla, she used to say, would have to become “mean mommy.” And she hated becoming “mean mommy.”
Anyway, I like having a leader. When I did my own band finally, the first band, the trio…I started the band, and because I was very conscious of it being my first band, wherein I was going to write all the music and lead it aesthetically, I just said straight out, “This is what we’re going to do, and if you agree to that, then we have a band.” And they agreed. Eventually the bass player, Bob—who is a remarkable individual but wasn’t the original bass player—he did ask me at certain points, he says, like, “You know, I have a couple of tunes, and can we bring them in?” And I had to say no, you know? I said “This is my thing, and it’s the only thing I do that’s my thing, and that’s just the way it is, cause it’s my little voyage of discovery that you jumped on to.” And that was something that we all had to agree on. Whether it became eventually difficult for these guys, I think the difficulty was much more about personality and about the lack of money that was being made playing the music, rather than my songs or the aesthetics. I think that that’s their issue to deal with because I wasn’t going to change the structure of that band—the structure was that it was my band and my music. I would’ve found that as a side person really liberating. But eventually some people can find it limiting or frustrating, and that’s fine as long as they’re honest with themselves, and then it’ time to move on. That’s what the original bass player did early on. He said "wow, this music’s really demanding, and I’m not making shit,” and he asked if he could take a year off to take a break. And I said “No!” I said “You’re either in or you’re out.” So he quit. And I’ve hardly been in any bands where people quit and I’ve never been fired, so it’s weird, my life’s a little bit weird that way.
Of course, you know the jazz thing, right? The cliche is, you know you’re not in the band when you see an ad for the band playing and you haven’t been called. Nobody ever calls you and says, “Eh, it’s not working out, I’ve already gotten so-and-so.” They just stop calling, and that’s the way it goes. ‘Cause jazz bands are modular, for the most part. They aren’t like gangs, us against the world, so often. There are exceptions, like Medeski Martin & Wood, or the Pat Metheny Group, or bands that really have a solid identity and long track record of fairly solid personnel. But that’s a rarity. In fact, in Europe, most promoters, I think, look down on the idea of coming back again and again with the same unit. They want to see variation, so you’ll find most of the people here in New York are not necessarily going to convene the same band for years running. They’re going to switch things up so they can keep getting gigs in Europe that are not tiny. There are exceptions of course— like Jim Black has [had] this group called AlasNoAxis for about as long as I’ve been doing the Singers, which is like fifteen years or more. But that’s very rare.
I get tired of the instrument. It still happens. That’s really my own lack of training, and hitting a wall of my own limitations, that makes me feel that way. But I do love the guitar, and I love listening to the guitar. I think it’s just feeling like I’m not able to do what I should be able to do, and that my musicianship sucks, and things like that. Maybe the message is to myself that creates this feeling of frustration with the instrument. Because I love the instrument, and it’s not the instrument’s fault that I suck ass half the time.
There was a tour with Mike Watt and the Crew of the Flying Saucer where Watt decided that the best way to keep the two drummers on track playing together was to play the same set every night. The same sequence of songs. And when you do a Mike Watt tour, you do a lot of gigs in a short amount of time. His tours are brutal. And they’re actually harder—I see his tours now and they’re even harder than they were when I was playing with him. Those look like wimpy tours compared to what he does now. So that repetition of the same set sequence kinda wore me out. But also that band didn’t have great chemistry, so maybe that was a factor in my fatigue.
Many of my improvisor friends either ask me directly, or they ask other people who know me, how I can play in Wilco ‘cause “Don’t they play the same songs all the time?” Or “Don’t their songs have the same arrangements every night?” Anyone who knows me really well should know that this is not an issue for me. For one thing, Wilco doesn’t play the same songs every night. There are a handful of songs that usually get played, and then a bunch of other songs that could get played at any point. But yes, they have arrangements, and yes, I play those parts. The funny thing is, you find yourself, even with the smallest band when you’re playing rock and roll, something that’s kind of entertainment, on a certain level. Even looking at members of the band at the same point in the song every night, or moving a similar way to the amp, or to do this dumb move or whatever, without in any way thinking about it ahead of time or discussing it ever. So there’s something really odd about that, but I’m cool with all of it. Even as an improvisor, I am fine with playing the same part. Some songs that Wilco plays I have a lot more latitude; other songs I have really set parts. To me, that’s what music is. It’s just a combination of freedom and limitation or freedom and rigid structure. Whatever makes the music sound good is what I’m happy doing. So my improvisor friends, many of who are quite iconoclastic and innovative, I don’t think they could be happy doing it. But I’m not like that in that regard, and so I get to have my cake and eat it too. I have an amazing life where I get to play organized and rigid form in front of thousands of people with fancy lights flashing, and then go and play completely unstructured music like I did with my friend J.D. Parran the other night at the Greenwich House, and played for about twenty people. And it’s all the same to me as far as what kind of energy I put into it, and my level of commitment. It’s all the same.
But one Watt tour, it became a little bit harder. I never feel bored while I’m playing, but I think if I was honest, I was developing a certain degree of dread for the same sequence. I was thinking, like, “God, I sure would love to change this up tonight, just to keep it interesting or something.” But I didn’t say anything. When Watt gets an idea, he sticks to it.
If I were to be objective about myself, I’d have to say that I straddle those two worlds, of artist and craftsman, on some level, without ever thinking that I would. I don’t think I ever had it as a goal. But it’s something that I ponder to this day, whether there is some kind of real binary system at work there. But the only reason I ponder is because, as I said earlier, my goal starting out was to write and perform original music. And that’s just because that’s how I came up. It was the late ‘60s and early ‘70s—early ‘70s particularly—I was listening to so-called progressive rock, and then I got into so-called jazz-rock, which became better known later as fusion (which is a meaningless term for a lot of very creative music, for various groups who were forging a new path in music-making). And then later became aware of people like in Chicago: the AACM, Anthony Braxton, Leo Smith, and so-called loft jazz scene. Everybody was doing his own or her own thing, and his or her own label, and was doing all kinds of what we now call DIY stuff before punk rock, so-called. And then punk rock, certainly in the case of somebody like Watt—Watt has forays into “side-mouse,” which is what he calls being a sideman—which I guess would make one have to have some sort of degree of craftsmanship. But really he’s an artist. He’s someone who looks up to iconoclastic geniuses, like James Joyce, and has more respect for people who do their own thing and follow their own path than he does for craftsmen.
Even though we as artists, so-called, quite often have craftsmen envy. You look at these people with insane musical ability and wish we had it too. But conversely, or additionally, I had a really weird epiphany in the ‘80s playing in this band BLOC and realizing, from close work with certain kinds of other players, that there are people out there in the world who have insane musical ability skill-wise and can play any style, they can read anything, they have a really firm working knowledge of some of the most demanding disciplines that music can ever come up with or offer—yet they never do a single original thing. And they never write a piece of music, they never start their own group. I couldn’t believe this. I was stunned. Because I guess I spent so much time thinking that the whole point was to do your own thing—at least eventually—that I couldn’t believe that people could get that good at playing music without being so-called “original” or “artists,” so-called. And this is where the whole session musician and the craftsman thing comes up, and where people ponder it. I don’t even know that I would’ve given it [a thought], other than my own insecurities, and wishing that I could fit into this, or “Wow, gee, I’m hearing kind of a Clarence White thing on this Wilco song, if only I could play like Clarence White automatically”—well, you can’t, and be yourself, necessarily. Maybe somebody can, I can’t. But maybe the sound of me trying to sound like Clarence White is a cool sound. At least I hope so.
But I hadn’t pondered this at all until I was confronted by two of the members of this group I was in. They kind of cornered me, and the question became, “How come you and your friends, and your brother, think you’re good enough to put out your own records, when you’re obviously not as good as John Coltrane?” And I just was completely stunned by this. I said, “Wow, I mean the only reason we’re doing it—we’re not trying to stake a claim on genius, we’re just trying to get our own music out there so we can play it!” We were following in the footsteps of these loft-jazz, so-called, artists—what we might now call a boutique or indie label, doing music, releasing music that nobody else would release because it was too personal, or too weird, or too something. And this is what made punk rock punk rock in the days where everyone could just put out a 7” single of a band that had only existed for ten minutes, and nobody in the band had even played an instrument before, but they could do their own record. And I thought this was great! It’s because of my feeling about loft jazz, and this kind of independent self-determined action, that I thought well, this is what you do, and you put your music out there, for better or for worse, and hopefully people will hear it and then you get to play some more gigs and you play your own music. And then it was greeted with this degree of suspicion that I had never considered. I think maybe these people, these so-called craftsmen—if that’s indeed what we’re gonna call them—never did anything original maybe because number one, they don’t have any original ideas—even though they’re playing circles around people like me—but also perhaps because they have a high degree of suspicion for anybody who claims that their music is worth listening to, that’s not so-called genius. God, if I spent my life measuring myself against Jim Hall or John Scofield or Wes Montgomery or George Benson I’d probably never go out and play guitar! I’m not them, I’m just me, and I just want to play! I think that maybe there is a binary thing there, but that there are people like me who can kind of live in both worlds. And living in multiple worlds seems to be something that, without trying too hard, I’m able to do in my life. It’s what I need, actually, to feel whole, ‘cause I feel inspired by and at home in a lot of different spaces.
Please consider pre-ordering Band People from University of Texas Press, Amazon, Bookshop, or wherever you get books.