Today's Supernatural: PopMatters Interviews Animal Collective

Originally published by PopMatters on September 6, 2012

They’re supposed to be difficult, as impenetrable and stubborn as the music they’ve created together or separately or whatever. It turns out not to be true, of course; the four guys who make up Animal Collective are normal dudes. Immensely talented, urbane and intellectually complicated dudes, but still. Panda Bear recognizes the logo of the former Las Vegas minor league baseball team on the cap I’m wearing because he’s seen it in a video game.

In the tiny living room of a sweltering second-floor walkup on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, three members of Animal Collective – Noah Lennox, Brian Weitz and Josh Dibb - sit elbow to elbow on a small sofa, with the fourth – Dave Portner - on the other side of a coffee table perched on a chair. It’s early summer and they’re flipping through stacks of photographs. The intimacy of the room, the attention to detail, it all matters when talking about the Animal Collective story in 2012. But more on that in a minute.

Like a psilocybin Super Friends, the members of Animal Collective are known the world over by aliases: Panda Bear (Lennox), Geologist (Weitz), Deakin (Dibb) and Avey Tare (Portner), though since they referred to one another by their real names, that’s how it’s going to work here, too. But before I do, I just want to say how disappointed I was to find that there’s no Animal Collective name generator on the internet. Remember how much momentary fun it was to get your Wu-Tang name? Donald Glover certainly does. So get on that, random hipsters.

Animal Collective have long been critical touchstones, a recording history stretching back to the turn of the 21st century with a series of densely assembled releases with sounds buried deep in the mix and sudden harmonies and, fuck, is that some lost Beach Boys track I’m listening to? Such is how many music journalists, perhaps robbed of the ability to think straight after deep contemplation of songs like “Peacebone” or “Grass,” have described Animal Collective, and maybe there’s a kernel of truth there: The perceived obsessive attention to minute detail; deceptively simple melodies and rushes of sheer vocal beauty; a sandbox in the living room? But to constantly reference the Beach Boys is missing the point, and it’s also lazy, and while Animal Collective seems wary of tags, there are far worse things to be compared to.

“It has to be flattering,” said Weitz.

“Definitely not irritating,” added Lennox. 

“With the Beach Boys thing, from Sung Tongs on it’s been a band we’ve been associated with or a reference point,” said Portner. “And I think when it got down to making Strawberry Jam and people said, ‘Oh, it’s a Beach Boys thing again,’ and we were like, did you even listen to the record? I don’t get that in that at all. When it becomes this lightning rod to make people understand something, we’re not annoyed but we just don’t get it.”

There are degrees of perplexity with the reference, too.

“You can tell when it’s a product of lazy journalism,” said Weitz. “You can usually tell from the publication, like if we’re not the kind of band they usually cover, it’s like, ‘Did you really listen or did you get that from a Google search?’”

In early 2009, Animal Collective released Merriweather Post Pavilion, the album which made them as close to household names as they’re likely to ever get. The group’s most electronic-and-sample-based album, it was for many also its most approachable. Singles like “My Girls” and “Summertime Clothes” were all over college and internet radio stations, comparatively sparse and unabashedly lovely. The album was perhaps the year’s most critically-acclaimed, living up to the advance hype and somehow managing to transcend the buzz. It gained the group legions of new fans, which was something of a blessing and, if not a curse exactly then perhaps a new puzzle to solve.

“Dave and I were just in France doing some DJing, and the guy who promotes our French shows came out,” said Weitz. “And he was like, ‘Your last show in Paris, a reviewer was talking about how you’d only played two songs from your first album,’ and we were like, what do you mean our first album, and they meant Merriweather.”

The mistake almost feels unforgivable in the digital age, where a group’s entire history is merely a keystroke away. With Animal Collective, there’s not just a long history of complex musical exploration on record, but also on the stage. And as any fan of any band knows, some people want to hear their favorite songs exactly as they know them from the record. To paraphrase an apocryphal Beach Boys tale, when Brian Wilson abandoned the band’s girls/surf/cars themes in favor of comparably deeper intellectualism when creating Pet Sounds, the famously cantankerous Mike Love reportedly said, “Don’t fuck with the formula.” And if there’s one thing Animal Collective enjoys, it’s fucking with the formula.

“One comment I heard, or was talked about after we actually played at Merriweather Post Pavilion(in 2011), is even though it was three years after the record came out was how can these guys tour a record and not play and of the songs off that record” said Portner. “We weren’t touring the record, and for us it’s interesting to know that there are people that haven’t clued into that fact, because I feel like it’s pretty widely known.”

It is widely known, so much so that the group received a curious warning prior to playing the Maryland venue which bore the album’s name.

“Even the promoter sent our booking agent a semi-threatening e-mail saying he heard we weren’t going to play a lot of songs from Merriweather, and we’d better behave like professionals and play the songs people were coming to hear as we recorded it,” Lennox said.

And, let’s face it, that’s not something anyone should expect from Animal Collective. A festival set at Coachella last year was one such example, with countless people taking to the Twittersphere to call the set a disaster and just as many calling it a triumph.

“It’s intense to play Coachella or a venue that large where there’s people for all different reasons coming to see you,” said Portner. “And for us, we feel like we’re throwing enough old stuff in there people will respond to, but we rework songs to the point where people don’t even recognize them. It can be scary, especially at this point where, in environments like Coachella where you’re playing for 30,000 people or even at Merriweather where we played for 8,000 people.”

“It’s highlighted at festivals, because presumably you have a lot of people who are like, ‘I’ve heard of that band, let’s see what they’re about,’ and you don’t have that crush of people who say, ‘I know this song, it’s my jam,’” said Lennox. “You have tons of people who say, ‘I’ve never heard this before.’”

“There are some fans who are like that, who would only be satisfied if you played ‘My Girls,’ ‘Fireworks,’ ‘Banshee Beat,’ ‘Brother Sport,’ ‘Summertime Clothes,’” said Dibb. “If they heard that set, they’d be psyched, and otherwise they’re like, ‘What the fuck?’”

It’s enough to make even the famously adventurous Animal Collective admit to the odd bouts of second-guessing themselves, but only a bit.

“It affects me more in club shows,” said Portner. “To me, these are people who are Animal Collective fans, and to see someone with that bored kind of, ‘What are they doing?’ kind of look. That’s the most disheartening thing. The thing is, you can’t be like…if you’re going to get into a wormhole where you start thinking about that stuff it’s going to be no fun. And there are definitely some nights where I’m like, ‘Why do I do this anymore?’ Usually more because I didn’t think we sounded that good. But it’s too easy to get wrapped up into thinking, ‘Is this person enjoying it?’ ‘Is that person enjoying it?’ And the reality of it is, like at Coachella, there’s going to be 30 percent people there that hate it. Not everybody is there to see Animal Collective, and it’s cool to think we can turn people on to something different and we can have this new way of doing it, but there are also people there that just want the typical festival band who just goes out there and plays the hits. But I think that’s why festivals are cool, too. They’re supposed to offer this wide array of music, and it’s exciting as a fan of music.”

Dibb sees a clear connection between Animal Collective live and Animal Collective on record.

“I think that also goes in line with the way we release records, and it’s ultimately what’s exciting to me,” he said. “Releasing a record like Merriweather and then releasing a record like this (Centipede Hz, the group’s new album out this week). Or going back to Feels or Sung Tongs. They’re all different. There are always going to be people just into one of those sounds and that’s all they’re going to want to hear, and then there are people who are like, ‘I’m really into all these different angles of what you guys can be,’ and I feel the same about the live experience. I want it to be unifying so all the people there can connect to it, but there’s also a part of me that wants the music to be challenging, in the same way that I expect people coming into this who were introduced to us through Merriweather and it’s the only experience they had: You’re either going to be up for this being something new, or you’re going to listen hoping to hear more of theMerriweather sound.”

The success of Merriweather Post Pavilion gave the group some new pressure, though not externally. The album, recorded in Oxford, Mississippi during Dibb’s hiatus from the band, wasn’t just a critical and commercial smash: It was also a high water mark for Weitz, Lennox and Portner.

“Noah has used the golf analogy of trying to beat your personal best,” said Weitz. “For the three of us, Merriweather was really special, and having that feeling like when we finished it and feeling we’d made something we were really, really proud of. I know what that feeling is, so now I know more when I’m settling or compromising myself. But I don’t think commercially, it’s too difficult to anticipate what anybody wants.”

Dibb rejoined Animal Collective in 2010, heralding something of a return to their roots, as the group headed back to Baltimore to write and record in a room together for the first time in…well, a long time. “I would say it was integral to the way the songs turned out,” said Lennox.

“We always throw some words around to get the inspiration, and we had some melodies going in,” said Portner. “Josh, Noah and I had written between the three of us five songs when we went in with the idea that we would keep jamming and write as we went. The three months there was kind of like a workshop and we also had time to work individually and produce stuff as we were writing.”

Though the move was deliberate, the group said it wasn’t because they felt a particular need to tap into what made Animal Collective so special all those years ago.

“I don’t think we ever lost that,” said Weitz. “I don’t think this was so much about needing to recapture something, so, ‘Let’s go back to Baltimore.’”

Instead, it was more about wanting to take a different approach, one which was less about technology and more about the immediacy of smashing the shit out of one’s instruments.

“It was a bit reactionary maybe to the sort of sample-based nature of Merriweather,” said Weitz.

“That manner of interacting with music and performing music, we felt like we had taken that with Merriweather where we wanted to. We needed a change, and with that change we needed to bring energy back into playing music as just a contrast. And the four of us playing live together with this instrumentation seemed like it would accomplish that. Baltimore was chosen more as a convenience than an attempt to recapture something, because I don’t feel like we’d really lost all that much.”

The members of Animal Collective grew up in and around Baltimore, playing music together in various incarnations. But it wasn’t until after high school that the group began to come together as we know them now. Lennox and Dibb headed to Boston for college, while Portner and Weitz went to school in New York City. After working long distance and traveling back to Baltimore to record for a few years, the group turned New York into their home base in 2000, with Portner and Lennox working in one of the city’s still-surviving independent record stores, Other Music. It gave them a chance to both fulfill and destroy their dreams.

“My big goal as a musician was the have a barcode and a really official-looking package,” Lennox laughed.

“I always wanted to find my music in a section of a store I’d usually shop in,” said Weitz. “And at first you’re just in ‘Miscellaneous A.’”

“The first record Noah and I worked on (Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished), that getting a write-up in Time Out and it was featured in Other (Music), it was like, ‘Alright, that’s it!’”

But getting what you want isn’t always a blessing.

“Actually, working in a record store made me hate music for a long time,” Portner said. “Having access to everything all the time, I was like, ‘I can’t even decide what I like anymore.’”

Initial reports of the music on Centipede HZ were often based on live performances of the songs played around the world last year, though as we’ve already established, with Animal Collective that doesn’t exactly give on much to go on. It was believed that the album would be a severe and unapproachable departure from Merriweather Post Pavilion, though that’s proved not to be the case. As PopMatters’ Arnold Pan pointed out in his album review (8-out-of-10), “Centipede Hz is an album that’ll get a hold on you as all its arms grab on and don’t let go.”

“I think there’s something very inherently Animal Collective about it,” said Lennox of the new album. “Compared to Merriweather, there’s a lot more going on and a lot more to navigate. But I don’t think that makes it a difficult record, because some of my favorite records have been like that and you hear more with repeated listens.”

Dibb agreed.

“I think Merriweather was one, and some of our other records have been like this, that it’s an instant thing,” he said. “At least that was my experience listening to it as a fan, that it immediately struck a chord and took off. Not that it wasn’t challenging, but it didn’t take a lot of work to get there. And I don’t think this is an instant record. You have to think about this for a second and take it in.”

It’s worth noting that the group released music between Merriweather Post Pavilion and Centipede Hz: ODDSAC, an experimental visual album collaboration with filmmaker Danny Perez which took four years from inception to completion, was released in early 2010. And a few months prior to the release of Centipede Hz, the group released a double-sided single with “Honeycomb” and “Gotham” an admitted red herring they acknowledged would probably make some fans incorrectly feel like they knew how the album was going to sound.

“Those songs didn’t really fit on the record, and we thought they’d be a good introduction to the band stuff,” said Weitz.

Visuals are also an important part of the Animal Collective experience, from their stage show to ODDSAC. While all four members of the group have had a hand in how their record sleeves are designed, Portner is the most connected to that, often working with his sister, Abby Portner, an artist and musician, to create the final product.

“It’s varied from record to record,” Portner said. “For Merriweather when we were on the way to one of the studios we found that optical illusion and we were all like, ‘Oh, wow.’ For (Centipede Hz) it was more like collecting and we were all involved. Sometimes I have this idea in my mind and ask my sister Abby. Something else I might do on my own or we might all contribute something.”

Asked whether he felt as though any particular Animal Collective record sleeve had visually captured the sound of the music, Portner said it wasn’t that easy to define.

“People react to that kind of thing so differently and it’s so specific to the experience of listening to music,” he said. “With Strawberry Jam there are lots of people who think it’s just disgusting, but for me, it’s a really pretty colorful way of presenting something, and you start to realize the more you do something…Like ODDSAC, which I think is the perfect combination of music and visuals that people are just not always going to get what you’re trying to push out there. But I think there’s something to be said for a really sweet record cover. I really like the cover to Feels a lot, that’s one of my favorites, but I wouldn’t necessarily think that you can listen to the music and stare at the cover and think, ‘That’s perfect.’”

“The cover is just an added flavor to the music,” Lennox said. “It doesn’t affect how the music sounds.”

Animal Collective begin a three-week North American tour later this month, with European dates to follow. They’ll make stops in New York and London, two cities they admit to being among the most difficult to play.

“With cities like London or New York, on any given night there might be four great shows and the people in the audience go to music all the time,” said Dibb. “If you play places that are a little more afield, there’s pure appreciation of the experience of having us show up that can be really gratifying. There’s less pressure in this weird way. In Zagreb, Croatia people are just psyched. We played Moscow for the first time and people were psyched. Those are places where it’s special for bands like us to come through.”

Portner admitted that it’s not always easy to know from the stage whether they’re playing a good show or not, and they don’t always agree with the crowd.

“There are some rooms that are great to play in and some that are tough,” said Portner. “But then I met this guy last night who found out I was in Animal Collective, and he was like, ‘Man, remember that one warehouse show and I DJ’d after you guys,’ and I thought, ‘That show was a nightmare,’ and he said he thought it was amazing. We played this show in New York where I basically just stopped because the bass frequencies were too intense, and for me it ruined the show, but for a lot of people they were like, ‘You guys were playing great.’”

Television provides its own difficulties for a group accustomed to experimentation, and much more so than in festivals the studio is not filled with partisan fans.

“I think the audience in those TV studios is completely irrelevant,” said Weitz. “The times we’ve played shows like that we’ve never even looked at the audience. They’re told with an applause sign to clap. I think more about what it’s going to translate into on the other side of the TV.”

“It’s the furthest away, especially in the live situation, of what we would do, take one song and play it,” said Portner. “Based on our history of how we feed off of live energy is to get this thing going and going and going, and then you’re put into that situation and it’s like, ‘Okay, guys: 4 ½ minutes. Do it!’”

The regimented time slot of a TV appearance isn’t the only hurdle for the group in using the medium.

“It’s difficult for us because they ask what we’ve got that’s four minutes long, and it’s not much,” said Weitz. “And we give them this one or this one, and they’re like, ‘You can’t play that.’”

In 2009, the group played “Summertime Clothes” on Late Show with David Letterman, a clear reminder that Animal Collective exists on the periphery of the entertainment industry.

“Paul Schaffer was really nice to us and acted like he listens and cared,” said Portner. “And David Letterman just made fun of our record cover.”

Things were even worse two years earlier when the group made its national television debut on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, where they remember switching gears at the last minute and performing “#1.”

“Conan O’Brien we’d heard was a really big music fan, and I’m friendly with the guys in Yeasayer, I’ve known them for forever,” said Weitz. “And they said, ‘He was really psyched to have us on the show, he loved our record.’ And I was like, ‘Really? He talked to us about how the Amtrak went through Baltimore, and that was it.’ We changed the song at the last minute, and I think he got word of it and was pretty bummed.”

Dibb remembered almost no direct communication from the lanky host following their performance.

“He actually didn’t say anything to us at all, but after we played he walked through and as he was shaking my hand, he said to the camera, ‘Baltimore, huh? I went through there on Amtrak once,’” Dibb recalled. “Cool. Nice to meet you.”

The sense of relative alienation doesn’t just apply to the world of television; they also feel it within the music industry. Collaboration outside of the group dynamic isn’t a natural fit for Animal Collective.

“There are certain people, especially in New York, where we’re not part of this fraternity who gets the stamp of approval from, like, David Bowie or David Byrne,” said Weitz. “We don’t make records with those people, but everybody else seems to. Not that we don’t like those people. For us it just doesn’t feel like our thing. Like with Arcade Fire backing up Bruce Springsteen just feels like it would be so far off from anything we’d do. And not even just those people, because I remember when Damo Suzuki was on tour, and in every city he said he wanted a different backing band. And for me, I just couldn’t imagine us sitting around the practice space and saying, ‘Damo Suzuki wants a backing band: Let’s do it!’ I just can’t see us making that decision.”

For a group so closely associated with dense sonic experimentation, they’re also acutely aware that not every journey is a good fit for them.

“There’s many different ways you can mix certain songs, and you can take a song like ‘Also Frightened’ and make a crazy mix out of it, and then you sit back and think, ‘Are people going to be into this? Am I even into this?’” said Portner.

“And it’s the same thing with an instrument, too. There have been times where it’s been like, let’s try that and then we realize it’s just not right for us.”

Weitz picked up the thread.

“Pedal steel is a good example,” he said. “I love pedal steel, and before we made the record I thought it would be great to have a pedal steel, because I lived in Arizona for a while and fell in love with that sound, and there’s this record, Chill Out by the KLF, and I wanted to incorporate that into this record. But the notes played in a lot of those country songs might not work with what we’re doing. So we thought maybe about having it played live and we invited Dave Scher who plays in a lot of bands and plays lap steel. And a lot of his stuff stayed on the record, but sometimes when it was too far up in the mix it was just like, ‘That doesn’t sound like Animal Collective.’ The closest thing it sounds like is maybe Wowie Zowie by Pavement or something, but it just takes you out of our world.”

While the musical world of Animal Collective is always evolving, so too are the personal lives of its members. They live in different cities living different lives; two of them, Weitz and Lennox are fathers. For Weitz, the latter in particular represents a big change.

“My work ethic I think is a bit stronger,” he said about fatherhood. “I feel like I can push past exhaustion more. Being a musician can sometimes be a cushiony lifestyle, and I have to think, ‘You know, for the next two weeks I’m not just going to smoke pot.’ And I think that’s necessary – not smoking pot, per se, but recharging – and the idea of sort of having someone to observe your work ethic a bit more, there’s just no excuse for laziness.”

“’I’ve got three hours to sit around and smoke pot and listen to records…Go!’” joked Dibb.

“The writing session we did was probably the most exhausted I’ve ever seen these guys,” added Portner.

But it’s a good change, not just personally but in what it brings to the music, both in its sound and its creation.

“I used to work on Capitol Hill and you don’t get a lot of sleep but you’re psyched,” Weitz said. “I loved my job there, and you’re happy to almost be exhausted. Work is your life, and that’s what this record is like. And the idea that there’s a child observing that, you should love what you do and put your all into it.”

A Cold Day in Springtime... Damon Albarn Is My Hero

Originally published by PopMatters on April 20, 2010

Credibility is apparently a big deal in the music journo biz. I get that, at least in theory. I mean, I know why I’m supposed to take shit at face value and not let myself fall in love. But the whole reason I got into this mess in the first place was because I’m a fan and I get all emotional about music, and then I get all verbose and that just leads to trouble.

I love Damon Albarn.

There, I said it. It feels kind of good to get it out there, like therapy. Or exorcism.

I know it’s uncool or whatever to admit to having a musical crush on someone, but screw it. I love Damon Albarn. I love his vocals, both languid and falsetto, his enthusiasm for music of all shapes and sizes. I love that ridiculous gold tooth.

It started as most love stories do, with a blur. Only this was Blur, Albarn’s first exhilarating whiff of success, both as a songwriter and musician. I was an avid reader of the NME then, having first taken the plunge in college as I kept up with all the various Madchester groups and looked for wide-legged jeans in thrift shops. Blur came along with boasts that they were going to kill off baggy, but the first couple of tracks I heard retained the genre’s “Funky Drummer” beat.

But of course there was something else there, some link to either a past or future not even the Stone Roses could envision or hope to navigate. And if they didn’t actually kill off baggy, Blur outlived it. They outlived shoegaze, though songs like “Oily Water” off their second album, Modern Life is Rubbish, and later b-side “Bustin’ + Dronin’” traipsed through its effects-rich fields. They outlived for years each new scene cooked up weekly by the British music press. And, most fittingly, they outlived BritPop, a movement they spearheaded, one which utterly destroyed their chief rivals, Oasis, who hid behind gargantuan egos and refried Beatle-riffs and stadium-shaking concerts for 15 more years, before finally going out with a whimper, unable to ever achieve the same level of dominance they’d shown during the scene’s all-too-brief run.

Blur themselves nearly succumbed, releasing a critically inferior follow-up to Britpop’s celebrated masterstroke, Parklife. It’s not that The Great Escape wasn’t any good. But in a world that moved impossibly fast, Blur didn’t move quickly enough to shed their skin and re-emerge dressed in some other finery. That would come later, but their misstep nearly cost them their credibility, and more significantly, their guitarist, Graham Coxon, a legendary partier who made the tabloids by being hit by a car and living to tell the tale. His decision to not bail on Blur in spite of his clear discomfort in their chart-annihilating “Country House” video would save the band, not just allowing them to reinvigorate The Great Escapeby giving it untold texture while touring the shit out of the album, but also pointing them in their new direction with his fondness for American indie rock.

References were made to Pavement, though the self-titled Blur really only shared a distant kinship with the Stockton, California band’s music in its comparative refusal to smooth out the edges with a glossy production sheen. Still, the album was a triumph, finally breaking the band in America with the “WooHoo”-heavy “Song 2”, thus putting the band alongside everyone from the Ramones to Gary Glitter in becoming clipped sports arena staples. There was much more to Blur than the album’s first frenetic salvo. “Death of a Party” and “I’m Just a Killer for Your Love”, for example, still retained the band’s songwriting skills, but the tunes were also kinda weird. The follow-up, 13, was both more experimental and romantic, teaming lush ballads to love longing and love lost with often impenetrable exercises in artistic tomfoolery.

Blur released one more album in 2003, the underrated Think Tank, which incorporated elements of Albarn’s now-complete transformation into the world music-touting Sting it was okay to admit liking. The album, at least back then, also marked what felt like the permanent departure of Coxon. The guitarist, who himself had turned his love of the lo-fi indie aesthetic into a series of fine solo albums, appeared on just one track on Think Tank, peeling off a guitar line in the already mournful “Battery in Your Leg” that channeled all the pain and tension and heartache they must all have been feeling as they said goodbye.

On the surface, Albarn seemed alright with the split. After touring Think Tank, he focused his attention on a host of other musical projects, releasing a second collaborative album under the Gorillaz umbrella, joining forces with Clash bass guitarist Paul Simonon and Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen in the Good, the Bad and the Queen and touring An Honest Jon’s Chop Up with a host of artists on the venerable London-based record label he helped kick-start. Blur was gone, and I told myself I was alright with it as long as Albarn and Coxon kept on releasing good music. And they really did.

See, here’s the thing about Albarn – It sounds ridiculous saying it in my own head, so I’ve no doubt it’ll sound completely insane to naysayers and pooh-poohers alike, but Damon Albarn is the closest thing we’ve got to a renaissance man. Not everything he touches is the purest of gold. There have been duds, for sure. But if a guy can put a song like Gorillaz’ lush “Hong Kong” on a benefit compilation instead of as the centerpiece of his own album, well that’s pretty special. The majestic “Sunset Coming On” closed out the Honest Jon’s shows in splendid fashion, and it was buried on the little-heard Mali Music album.

And then Blur weren’t dead after all, performing a handful of shows, both small and massive, including a pair of headline gigs in London’s Hyde Park last July, the latter of which I’d bought a ticket to, yet regrettably could not attend. And then they were gone again, with members of the band sounding as though they’d have liked to see more of the same and maybe some new material too, why not? But Albarn killed that hope, instead pushing a third Gorillaz album, which finally dropped over a month ago to great hype and acclaim

Make no mistake, because everyone’s a critic; Plastic Beach may not be everyone’s cup of tea, especially those who’d hoped it would more closely echo Gorillaz’ sophomore effort, Demon Days. But while the album did share its predecessor’s grand thematic drive and collaborative esprit de corps, it’s something altogether different. The first full track features Snoop Dogg in George Clinton mode, giving “Welcome to the Plastic Beach” its “P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)” smooth. And it rolls on from there, with everyone from Lou Reed to Mark E. Smith to, once again, De La Soul all jumping on board.

On the surface, Gorillaz is a cartoon band, with an elaborately expanding story arc to cover its four characters. But while that piece of the puzzle might appeal to some, what really makes Gorillaz special is Albarn, not only in his grand musical vision and melting pot approach to making it happen, but also his canny understanding of how and when to keep his massive ego in check because the music really is the message.

It’s true, my musical hero doesn’t lack in confidence. People I know who’ve met him have described everything from a sweetheart to a Scrooge, and there’s footage all over the internet to support all points between the two extremes. Maybe Albarn is a real asshole. But so are a lot of geniuses, and if we can’t separate what art from the artist, we’re left with nothing but a pile of dreary detritus, and that’s not a whole lot of fun to listen to at full volume soaring down the motorway with the windows open. “Stylo”, the first single from the futuristic/apocalypticPlastic Beach, on the other hand, is perfect for such road-based outings, and its video sure sells that point nicely.

And as I listened to “Rhinestone Eyes” and “White Flag” and – especially – “Empire Ants” for the millionth time, I knew I had my summer soundtrack, felt the warmth of the pavement breaking through the bitter, fleeting cold of winter. And then came the news that Blur maybe weren’t really dead after all.

It started as a rumor, or at least appeared to be. Did Blur suddenly get together in a studio to record a track for a very limited run 7-inch single in celebration of Record Store Day, the annual event designed to keep the little guy from getting dragged into oblivion by the murky undertow of technological progress. Was Blur really about to release its first single with Coxon back in the fold since 2000’s “Music is My Radar”? Thankfully, yes. That’s exactly what happened, and after the 1,000 copies of the single sold out on Saturday, the band put the thing up for free on their official website as a download. And, yeah, I’ve crippled my objectivity by falling prostrate at Albarn’s well-heeled feet, but gee whiz, “Fool’s Day” is really, really good.

It’s hard to know what goes on in a man’s head. Did Blur reunite last year because they felt like they had unfinished business? Was it the promise of truckloads of cash being dumped at their front doors? Was their bond with each other and their fans so strong that the pull proved to be too difficult to ignore? It was probably a bit of each, with a dash of whatever enigmatic folderol Albarn had coursing through his veins on that particular day.

But when it was all over, when the tents were folded up and the footage for the documentary and concert film shot, why didn’t Blur just let goodbye be goodbye? The answer, or at least part of it, might be found in the lyrics to “Fool’s Day.”

It’s a day in the life for Albarn, as he covers what happens from the moment he wakes, interspersing mundane images like eating breakfast and dropping his kid off at school with marginally existential side roads thrown in. And part of this day’s journey, April 1, 2010, is a trip to the recording studio, and most gloriously for Blur fans, “A love of all sweet music. We just can’t let go.” Whether this is a new beginning or the end through an admission that these four men mean more to one another than they knew is unclear. If this really, REALLY is the end, it’s a beautiful goodbye.

That lyrical itinerary recalls “Busy Doin’ Nothin’”, a song on the Beach Boys’ 1968 album Friends. The album comes in at just under 30 minutes, and was almost forgotten upon arrival. But I’ve always really loved it, in part because it’s got a warmth and intimacy and, well, friendliness. It was probably therapeutic for Brian Wilson to work on albums like Friendsand its predecessor Wild Honey after the whole SMiLE/Smiley Smilefiasco sent him over the edge. And while I appreciate that gentle vibe, there’s one song that just takes the comfort level a bit too far. “Busy Doin’ Nothin’” is essentially a list of shit Brian’s planning to do that day. And it’s a boring day, too. But the Beach Boys, like Blur, somehow manage to make it sound way more interesting than our own boring days.

And so on to the music. Dave Rowntree is as solid as ever on drums, and Alex James’ bass seems to have shelved its debt to Duran Duran’s John Taylor for the Romantics’ “Talking in Your Sleep” by way of Simonon. And the harmonies… and the guitar… Much as I convinced myself that Think Tank was alright without more than a brief Coxon cameo, his guitar on “Fool’s Day”, especially that riff as the song fades, with hints of sweeping harmonies in its wake. This is what always made Blur so brilliant, all of it together.

Albarn’s other band, Gorillaz, closed Coachella on Sunday, bereft of the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, who were grounded by volcanic death dust. If the water cooler disappointment on the festival’s official message board is any indication, there was too little cartoons, too little energy, too little when a festival closing slot needed much too much. I wouldn’t know. I spent the night with the Blur: Live at Hyde Park film, comforting myself over missing one Albarn concert by watching another one I’d missed. Such is often the way with fandom; the missed opportunities so often pile up toward the sky while the good stuff can fit in a tiny box on your dresser. But it’s those moments, and the music what it does to us that makes it all so meaningful.

Hey, Hey, etc... Why I Love the Monkees

Originally published by PopMatters on March 9, 2010

I’m used to catching grief from friends for some of the quirky stuff I listen to, so whenever the Monkees come up in conversation, I’m always prepared for a lively debate. I’m not naive enough to pretend they were one of rock’s great bands, though I do feel as though their music has been a bit shortchanged by history.

Their groundbreaking series lasted just two seasons, and was followed by a delicious stream-of-consciousness feature film (Head) and an even more bizarre TV special (33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee), which had the lousy fortune of airing opposite the Academy Awards. By this point, of course, the Monkees were hellbent on blowing themselves up from within. Scornful of the ridicule they faced from much of the “serious” rock cognoscenti, the pre-Fab Four made every attempt to shed their bubblegum image and strike out on their own.
 
It began somewhere around the time they recorded their third album. After playing sparingly on tunes for the first two Monkees’ records, the band took over for themselves. With the assistance of Chip Douglas on bass, the Monkees turned into a semi-actual band on Headquarters. It wasn’t a virtuoso collection by any means, especially when compared to many of other rock albums released in 1967. Never mind the Beatles’Sgt. Pepper; that year also saw seminal works drop from Love (Forever Changes), Captain Beefheart (Safe As Milk), the Velvet Underground (The Velvet Underground & Nico), Pink Floyd (Piper at the Gates of Dawn), 13th Floor Elevators (Easter Everywhere), the Doors (The Doors) and the Jimi Hendrix Experience (Are You Experienced?).

Still, Headquarters is the work of a pretty alright garage rock band, one with a keen interest in experimentation. That thread would follow on the band’s second album of the year, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., which featured forays into country rock, vaudeville pop and psychedelia, the latter including what has often been regarded as among the first uses of the Moog synthesizer on a rock song (both on “Daily Nightly” and “Star Collector”).

1968’s Head may be the Monkees’ creative zenith, both on film and vinyl. The script, such as it was, was written over a drug-fuelled weekend in a cabin in the woods with Jack Nicholson. Yes, THAT Jack Nicholson. Nicholson makes a brief cameo in the film as does Dennis Hopper (the two worked together on Easy Rider the following year, a film financed, in part, on Monkee money), Frank Zappa, a very young Teri Garr, a very puffy Sonny Liston, Annette Funicello, Victor Mature, Carol Doda, Toni Basil and American football great Ray Nitschke.

Opening with Micky Dolenz jumping from a bridge to certain doom, the movie sunk like a stone in limited theatrical release, but went on to become something of a cult classic.

The soundtrack features just a handful of original Monkees’ material, but what’s there is among the very best music they ever recorded. “Porpoise Song” is a swirling epic, and “As We Go Along” (with guitar by Neil Young), is a love song of fragile beauty. The oft-marginalized Peter Tork has two songs on the album, including the Indian-influenced “Can You Dig It?” (with vocals by Dolenz) and the sprawling stomp of “Long Title: Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?” Even the sometimes schmaltzy Davy Jones is in fine form, on the Harry Nillson-penned “Daddy’s Song”. Nicholson compiled the album, gluing the songs together with dialogue and sound effects from the film. The only misstep—replacing the incendiary live version of Mike Nesmith’s “Circle Sky” shown in the film with a flaccid studio recording—was undone when Rhino Records remasted the album for CD release over a decade ago.

Following the disastrous results for 33 1/3…,Tork wriggled his way out of his contract and split. As a trio, the Monkees released two more albums in 1969, much of which included songs recorded as early as 1966 that had just been sitting in a Colgems vault collecting dust. Nesmith’s “Listen to the Band” (originally given a psychedelic freak-out paint job with Tork still on board for 33 1/3…) was the last great Monkees song. The last “musician” in the band, Nesmith left to form his own country rock pioneering outfit, the First National Band. Dolenz and Jones put out one last album under the Monkees’ name before finally pulling the plug.

There’s no question the Monkees were fabricated. But so was the cast of your favorite film, and they made great art together. And when the Byrds or the Beach Boys used studio musicians on some of their now-classic tracks, no one blinked an eye.

While stuffy critics like Rolling Stone‘s Jann Wenner have always pooh-poohed the musical relevance of the Monkees, perhaps their greatest detractors of all have been themselves. Both Nesmith and Dolenz have frequently said in inteviews they didn’t think much of their music, with the former especially dismissive.

However, because they actually sorta gave a crap at the time, it’s impossible to objectively lump the Monkees in with other teenybopper acts of the day. Even if one doesn’t think much of them, they’ve got to at least fall somewhere in the chasm between the era’s rock and pop rather than at one end or the other.

I love the Monkees. Not just because I enjoy watching them on DVD with my eight-year old daughter (her fave rave is Nesmith, though she’s got bobblehead dolls of the whole group), but because I actually do enjoy their music. Some of it is simple to the point of hardly being there at all. And a few of their attempts to create art flamed out when they tried to fly too close to the sun, like Dolenz’ “Shorty Blackwell” (which is a total mess) and Nesmith’s “Writing Wrongs” (which is also a mess, but a curiously satisfying one). Yet there are gems to be unearthed far beyond the confines of a hits compilation. You may even find it’s worth doing a bit of exploring.

Our Favorite Record Stores: PopMatters Picks

Originally published by PopMatters on April 20, 2012 as part of their coverage of Record Store Day

Permanent Records - Brooklyn, NY


Even in New York City, there’s no longer any guarantee that you can simply walk out your front door and find yourself within spitting distance of a record store, rad or otherwise. Fortunately for urban denizens in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood, there’s Permanent Records. Warm and inviting, Permanent Records combines the rare with the recent, and the staff is knowledgeable without ever coming off as elitist snobs. In other words, this is where you want to be whether you’re a music neophyte dipping his toe in the water or a sophisticate looking for the perfect fix. 

Different Flavored Skulls: An Intimate Conversation with the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne

Originally published by PopMatters on January 27, 2012

Talking to Wayne Coyne is exhausting.

It’s not that the enigmatic frontman of the Flaming Lips doesn’t have anything interesting to say, but rather the opposite. Ideas come quickly, like an enthusiastic machine gun. There are many reasons why so many people love the Flaming Lips—their unhinged pop aesthetic; the sheer massiveness of their sound; their theatrical live performances; their weirdness—but if not for Coyne, none of that would even exist. He’s an otherworldly motivational speaker, a psychedelic soothsayer, a court jester who felled the king and took the throne for himself.

I could say that it’s an interesting time to be a fan of the Flaming Lips, but that’s always the case. Their history includes explorations in sound (the four-disc Zaireeka and its associated parking lot and boom box experiments), B-movies (Christmas on Mars), and the exhilarating day-glo expansion of the tent revival approach to building a collective experience (pretty much every live show they’ve ever played).

But in the age of the digital download, when artists and record labels are scrambling to figure out how to get music fans to actually pay for music, the Flaming Lips just did what they always do: they got weirder.

Early this year, the Flaming Lips released “Two Blobs Fucking”, a descendant of the Zaireeka days that was a single song divided into 12 separate YouTube videos meant to be played simultaneously. It signified, at least in part, the coming year of odd releases. And when you’re as odd as the Flaming Lips, that’s really saying something.

They’ve released an EP with Neon Indian, performed shows paying tribute to their own classic albums and put four songs on a USB inside a novelty item called the Gummy Song Skull. They’ve rarely let a wild idea go unchecked, unrecorded or unreleased. And they did it all on a major label.

If Warner Brothers isn’t always an active conspirator in the bizarre shenanigans undertaken by Coyne and his fellow Lips, they’re certainly willing cosigners. In fact, Coyne says, his experience with Warner Brothers is considerably different than the stuffed shirt shitstorm indie hopefuls are always scornful of.

“I think a lot of major labels get a bad rap from unknowing portion of bands who have, I guess, had a bad experience with them,” says Coyne. “But most of the people that we’ve dealt with at Warner Brothers, even previous to being signed there, were all about being creative and being unpredictable and doing new things and being, you know, absurd and being unique. All these myths about major labels wanting to take you and normalize you and put you in a mold, I mean we’ve never experienced that, otherwise we would not want to be at Warner Brothers. The people that signed us ... the woman that signed us signed Van Halen, signed Dire Straits, signed KD Lang, signed Devo. You know, the people that we signed the deal with, there was a guy that signed Jimi Hendrix and the Sex Pistols. I mean, that’s pretty extraordinary. These are not conservative money-oriented people. These are people that loved music, and when they brought the Flaming Lips to the label, they were like, ‘We found another part of our story. We have another Frank Zappa. We have another Captain Beefheart. We have another Jimi Hendrix here,’ and I was like, ‘Wow, amazing!’”

Coyne added that the relationship between the Flaming Lips and Warner Brothers has reached the point where the label will often allow the band to follow their own path outside of the artistic realm.

“Warner Brothers is arguably one of the biggest corporations on the planet, you know, and they deal with in-depth, to my liking, sometimes bullshit entertainment strategies,” Coyne says. “They’re a big bureaucracy, and something I can do in ten minutes, sometimes when they get involved—and they know this—will sometimes take ten months, simply because there’s a lot of people who have to sign off on something. Back in the day, if we wanted to do something that had a budget of half-a-million dollars, well you’d have to get 200 people to say, ‘This is cool,’ and that takes a long time. That’s a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of desks things have to go through. Lucky for me, they have a lot of money, and if I’m patient enough, I can make that work for me.”

That goes beyond the decision-making process, as well. According to Coyne, many of the Flaming Lips’ projects are completed with almost no label involvement at all.

“Nowadays we don’t really need them to give us money,” Coyne says. “We just can say, ‘We know how this shit works, and we are going to move ahead on this.’ When we made that Neon Indian record that, I believe it was March when that came out, we recorded it and in six days actually had a record in our hands. When I asked (Warner Brothers) how long it would take, they were like, ‘Well, if you can get the music to us, we can get you maybe a demo, a master that you can listen to in six weeks,’ and I can’t take six weeks. I just started to say, ‘Well, I’m going to find somebody who can help me do it quicker and better and not so much bureaucracy.’ And I didn’t know if it would be three weeks or if it would be four weeks. I tried to get it overnight. And so I found places that can do what we want them to do quicker. And they wanted that.

“We’ve been doing this for almost 30 years now. We made our very first record ourselves back in 1983/1984. It would be difficult for someone young who was just getting into it to do what I’m doing. I have a lot of people that want to help me do cool shit that have been doing cool shit for a long time. That being said, some of it is that we can just move a lot faster without the giant machine of Warner Brothers being dragged along with us, you know? So they want to find ways to be more immediate and to be more current and to be more spontaneous. But it’s difficult for them, because they’ve got thousands of people that have to sign off on shit, for better or worse.”

The Gummy Song Skull was devised in a similarly independent way.

“We knew that we were going to do these objects, and I’ll give you the quick, you know, fast-forward version,” Coyne explains. “Our very first record that we made had these versions of these skulls on them, and when we knew that we were going to get into this self-imposed indie version of ourselves here ... we never have any fucking ideas, and so we fucking panic and say, ‘We’ll use the skull again! That’s what we did in 1984!’ So I bought some skulls, some plastic skulls at Urban Outfitters, and we just started to play with them in my shop.

“We started to think of like objects that would represent whatever the Flaming Lips represent. And we were dipping them in rubber and plastic and doing shit with them. I ended up with this pink rubber skull, and my wife has some pretty exotic perfumes and has a perfume that smells like bubblegum. So I sprayed a pink rubber skull with some bubblegum perfume. I have parties at my house all the time, so people are over here doing drugs and shit, and they were fucking with this skull, and they said, ‘Wayne, this skull is made out of bubblegum, can we eat it?’ And I said, ‘No, you can’t. It’s made out of rubber even if it smells like bubblegum,’ but it gave me the idea to make them out of bubblegum. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have a fucking bubblegum skull?’ Well, we tried to get it made out of bubblegum, and no bubblegum company could figure out a way to do it. But in this process of trying to find a bubblegum place, we stumbled upon this gummy guy who’s out of North Carolina who makes giant gummies. We called him and said, ‘Would you like to make a skull out of gummy with this?’ He was a Flaming Lips fan, so bam! You can fast-forward to where we are now with these things that are so elaborate. But without him being a fan, and without him being a freak and without him being ambitious and without him wanting to try new things, this could take a year. We made the first skull ourselves; we believed it could be done. Having a lot of experience and just being lucky to find likeminded people with skill who have a great thing they’re doing that can sort of enhance what we’re doing, you’ve just got to get lucky.”

There’s also room in Coyne’s world for mistakes, especially as they often lead somewhere unintended with the end result something potentially more special than the original idea. It all stems from Coyne’s unabashed optimism.

“To me everything is an opportunity, from the size of the box that it’s going to be in to the way it’s going to smell,” Coyne said. “It’s not just, ‘What is the music going to be?’ All dimensions of things are an opportunity for you to say, ‘Here’s what it could be.’ So when we started to think about flavors, part of me was saying, ‘Can we make a brain that’s marijuana-flavored?’ and your imagination just goes wherever it goes. When I said that to (the North Carolina gummy guy), he said, ‘Yeah, let me try that.’ He sent me samples of his hemp-oil experiments and some of them failed miserably and were too oily. When people are willing to try, especially in the realm of art ... you’ve got to know that if you can’t do weird shit in the Flaming Lips, it’s going to be a bad world. We are willing to try and see what happens. Part of it, too, is aesthetic. When you see a skull that’s red, you’ve got to think, ‘Is that strawberry? Is that cherry? Is that blood-flavored?’ There’s a lot of things it could be. But you kind of want it to be, not an obvious experience, but to play along with it. So, I don’t know. All that stuff to me is another opportunity to insert your will of the world on it.”

The malleability of a Gummy Skull could well represent Coyne’s own flexibility when hurdles suddenly pop up.

“If I’d have been stuck on saying, ‘It must be bubblegum, godammit,’ we would really be in a pickle,” Coyne said. “Part of it is that you’re not rigid with your ideas anyway. Our movie that took seven years to make, Christmas on Mars, I think in the beginning you have a lot of ideas of what you want to do, and some of them work and some of them don’t. And I would say even the very first scene that I shot, I was using the cement factory that’s on the south side of town here, and I spent months getting this scene ready. It was in an abandoned cellar of the cement factory, and it was filled up with water, and I was going to have this space guy emerge from this water, and we were going to add computer effects to it and it was going to be a big hallucinogenic thing. And the day that I went down to film it, the motherfucker who owned the place didn’t tell me, he had it pumped out. I went down there and all the water was out of it, just kind of like out of nowhere. And I was like, ‘What are you doing?’ And he said, ‘Well, I knew you wanted to use this place so I’m getting it ready for you,’ and I said, ‘Dude, I’ve been getting ready for a month with this water.’ We just had to fix up whatever we could do now that the water wasn’t in there, and fill it up with smoke and lights. But I would say that it turned out a thousand times better than if the water had been in there. I think for me it’s just this idea that you cannot be set. You can say, ‘I always have ideas, and they’re good if they turn out good,’ and that’s all you can say. Your ideas are always failing and exploding and turning into another one all the time.”

But when your brain is firing full speed every minute of every day, the realities involved in making your dreams come true can sometimes be a bit of a bother, too.

“These devices that kind of take some manufacturing, you kind of have to get a little bit ahead of the game, which to me is just a mindfuck,” Coyne said. “You’re always living in the moment, but you have to project ahead and think, ‘Fuck, we’ve got to get that thing going.’ It’s kind of like planting grass. It’s like, ‘I want that hill to be green.’ Well, you have to plant the grass now so a year from now it’ll be green. It’s always those types of dilemmas.”

But for all the Technicolor imagery and sensationalism surrounding the Flaming Lips, it all stems from the music. For Coyne, that means tapping into a feeling he experienced nearly 35 years ago.

“It’s hard for people to relate to this now, but when I saw The Who in 1977, they were to a lot of people not at the peak of their power,” Coyne recalled. “But I think the night that they played in Oklahoma City, they were having an extraordinary night. And they had giant laser beams and they had their great energetic freak out show. Pete Townsend was probably at the peak of his peakness. Moon was playing, and they were loud. I mean, I was only 15, and it was like a religious experience where you feel like, ‘They’re speaking to me, and they’re speaking everybody, and we’re all feeling this love and this energy all at the same time.’ And it was extraordinary. Everybody that was there came away feeling like we got to peek at some other life. I’d seen plenty of bands before that, and I didn’t know that much about The Who—I was pretty young, and I was experiencing a lot of new music. But I was like, ‘Fuck, why doesn’t every band play like The Who?’ And my older brothers would say, ‘Dude, it’s ‘cos they’re The Who.’”

Coyne couldn’t be in The Who, but he didn’t have to be. Because for the Flaming Lips, a big part of their collective goal is to knock the crowd the fuck out, to have someone’s older brother tell him, “Dude, it’s ‘cos they’re the Flaming Lips.”

“Having experienced that sort of power, it was like, ‘Fuck, that’s what I want to do,’” Coyne said. “I didn’t want to do music. I mean, I know it’s about music. But I wanted to be in a band that got to do that, that did that sort of thing. Not in a band because we’d be popular, and not in a band because we’d be famous. I wanted to be in a band that did that thing. And I’m sure it’s connected to that, seeing and experiencing it from the other side. And I’m always putting myself in the audience, saying, ‘What are they getting out of this? Does it sound right? Does it look right? Is it powerful? Are we building this momentum? Does it work?’ I want the audience to have that thing. When they respond, we feel it too. And I think that’s exactly what The Who was feeling that night. They were feeling that energy and that love regenerating itself in the room. That’s why they played so fearlessly and so confidently, because they knew as they did it was going to work and make it better.”

But Coyne also recognizes that experience is a two way street, noting that much of the energy and excitement comes from even the furthest corners of wherever the band happens to be playing on any given night.

“I don’t always feel like we’re the ones responsible for it,” he said. “I feel like music has such an impact on people that they give it this epic meaning, because it’s a personal thing to them so it has no limits of what the meaning can be. You could see where it would be impossible for me to create exactly the meaning that it has. I kind of make the song and you kind of make it special to yourself. I think the more people think that about our shows, the more people are drawn to our shows. They think, ‘This will be a special experience.’ Our audiences get filled up with people who are willing to have this kind of over the top experience with us, and so when that happens ... if you’re kind of a casual person in our audience, if you think, ‘I’m just here to get high and listen to music,’ and if you’re standing next to ten people who are completely overwhelmed by this show, you’ll probably be overwhelmed as well because it’s just kind of this group thing, this kind of contagiousness that happens when you’re in a group. Not to put a negative twist on it, but that’s why people are always concerned about riots, because once they start it’s very difficult to resist. And that’s true in the other sense as well, that we all become one and love each other and can get taken away by something. That’s contagious as well. I’m not saying that I’m doing that. I just know that once that starts to happen in the audience, it’s easy with the way our music works and the live show and there are so many visuals and all that, that by the end of it, you could have walked in and, you know, ‘Fuck, I’m just here to listen to music and get laid,’ and then you’re like, ‘I love everybody, man!’”

And for all the laser beams and gigantic Hulk hands, the Flaming Lips make the greatest impact because of the music. The excitement of recording new music is as tangible for the band in 2011 as it was back in the ‘80s when they weren’t sure anyone was ever going to hear it.

“In the beginning, we always are in a panic and struggling with what we can just to make one song any good, you know?” Coyne said. “And we think, ‘Well, if we get one song that’s good, in that process it usually would turn into a fucklot of things just because you’re being immersed in ideas. I don’t know if it helps. If you’re working on something and everybody is excited in that time, that’s all you can ask. Sometimes we do something we love, and then six months later you hear it and go, ‘Oh, that’s just kind of ridiculous. Why did we do that?’ But you just kind of have to believe in the moment you are wanting to do it. But, yeah, it sometimes gives you a lot of freedom to think, ‘We’re doing four songs as opposed to one.’ And then you think, ‘Well, one can suck and it won’t matter.’ We really do think like that.”

That renegade swashbuckling vibe is part of the reason the Flaming Lips veer so effortlessly between pure pop confection and sonic exploration, often within the same song.

“When we made Embryonic, the record that came out a couple years ago, the fact that it was a double-record changed everything for us,” Coyne said. “You don’t realize how rigid you are. We were thinking in terms of songs, and then we thought since it was going to be a double record, we knew we were going to have this abstract, avant-garde side of it. We’d do a song, and then we would kind of relish the freedom of doing the freaky stuff, you know? After we did that three or four times, I said, ‘Why are we fucking with these songs? Why don’t we just do the freaky stuff, because that’s what we want to do anyway?’ And we ended up making a record that was all the other dimension of the record. You don’t know what tricks your mind is playing on you, because it’s all done in your subconscious. Occasionally you get this insight where you realize, ‘We’re retarded. Why can’t we just do things this way? Why can’t we do things like this all the time and not worry.’

“But it’s hard, because you’re always looking for a system to work on, and there is no system. But if you realize there’s no system, you’ll go insane. So you always build one no matter what. It’s the music as well. Sometimes we make this music, and we forget, ‘Dude, this is going to come out in three weeks. We’re not just sitting on this.’ And to me that’s where the real freaky joy is. We’re not mulling over 100 songs here and releasing four that we think are great. We’re literally making them and releasing them. And it’s a wonderful, spontaneous time to be creative. And it’s exhausting. Everybody around me is fucking sick of making music and candy and all this shit. But fuck, it’s cool.”

ATP America Presents: I'll Be Your Mirror Curated By Portishead & ATP

Originally published by PopMatters on September 26, 2011

After three years in the middle of the former playground of Borscht Belt comedy, All Tomorrow’s Parties America is bringing its annual I’ll Be Your Mirror event to the beach. From Friday, September 30 through Sunday, October 2, Asbury Park will play host to one of the world’s most unique festival experiences. PopMatters spoke with the festival’s founder Barry Hogan about where ATP has been and where it’s going.

ATP America Presents I’ll Be Your Mirror boasts a lineup curated by Portishead and ATP this year, with performances on tap from Jeff Mangum (Neutral Milk Hotel), Public Enemy (performing Fear of a Black Planet), Swans, the Horrors, Mogwai, Battles, the Pop Group, Ultramagnetic MC’s, Company Flow, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, and many, many more. There’s Criterion Cinema featuring screenings of films from their vast collection, comedy, DJ sets, rock & roll bingo and trivia and so much other one-off cool shit, it’s no wonder past ATP attendees are so dedicated to the festival, traveling from all over the world for its intimate and friendly atmosphere.

Fittingly, the locations for the past four years have come on the recommendation of friends and colleagues, with both Kutsher’s and Asbury Park coming into play thanks to childhood memories.
“The manager of Dinosaur Jr., Brian Schwartz, he said to me, ‘If you’re doing this in the States, you’ve got to come look at this place I used to go to when I was a kid in the Catskills called Kutsher’s,’” Hogan recalled. “We went to look at it and went, ‘Wow, this place is amazing.’ We fell in love with it and decided to do the event there”.

Though the Asbury Park iteration is on the threshold of its inaugural weekend, the town actually came into the picture well before the Catskills.

“Before Kutsher’s, we looked at the Paramount and Convention Hall (in Asbury Park),” Hogan said. “There’s a guy from Other Music in New York called Josh Madell, and he used to go there as a kid, and he said, ‘If you ever do it in America, you have to go to this place.’ He took us out there, showed us the Hotel Berkeley, where Johnny Cash used to live and owned and what have you”.

The idea of Asbury Park cemented itself in Hogan’s mind after a visit to Asbury Lanes for a birthday party a few years ago. 

“I thought, ‘I love this: This is magical,’” Hogan said. “We had so many people saying to us, ‘You’ve got to do it here,’ so we made the decision to come down and check it out”.

The decision to move ATP from the Catskills wasn’t an easy one to make, but Hogan said it was important to maintaining the integrity of the festival.

“We did three events there and they were great, and we were very happy with how everything went with Kutsher’s, but we found it financially restrictive to make it work without raising the ticket price to sort of an insane amount which would put people off,” he said. That comes not only from years as a music promoter, but also years as a music fan, something which puts the promoters of ATP squarely in the company with the people who come to their events.

“Myself and Deborah (Higgins), who is my wife and helps run the festival, we’re just passionate about music and we’re passionate about presentation,” Hogan said. “We’re kind of like an alternative to other festivals. You go to a festival, and they’re trying to charge you for everything. They charge you for the program with the schedule inside, and to walk into certain areas. It’s crazy. The whole thing with ATP is, yeah the ticket is not the cheapest thing in the world, but it’s good value for your money when you look at it and think about what you receive. We give away free booklets, and the quality is great. Seeing Jeff Mangum and Public Enemy in a space like Convention and Paramount, that’s kind of unheard of.”

This brings the conversation around to the sometimes uncomfortable topic of money, and the underlying internet buzz that a festival like ATP might not be able to make it work in the U.S. on a consistent basis without making compromises that would sully what they’re all about. Hogan said that while things are going well for the first visit to Asbury Park, there are always questions about whether it’s something that can be sustained.

“Obviously they’re expensive projects to put together,” he said. “It’s hard to say with the economy so up and down whether people will have enough money to come out to things like this, but this year has sold more tickets than Kutsher’s had ever done, so we’re really pleased. We want to keep doing it, of course, and we’re hoping to be able to continue coming to Asbury Park. And if it works there, we hope to be able to expand it to other locations. But before we start trying to turn it into a Starbucks, I want to make it so that Asbury is kind of the crowning jewel and starting point so everybody always refers to it as the place where it really began and expand from there, if it does”.

Hogan said the temptation to go for some craven money grab isn’t something that’s ever even entered his mind.

“Obviously, we could have veered off the track and gotten someone like Limp Bizkit to curate or somebody like that, and that’s when things would go horribly wrong. Fred Durst would probably turn Asbury Lanes into a nudie bar or something”.
Though the lineup is set in stone, Hogan did make an allowance for the possibility of an impromptu set by one of the area’s most celebrated native sons: Bruce Springsteen.

“I’ve heard that if you walk around the boardwalk you might see him,” Hogan said. “If he wants to come down to the Paramount, he’s more than welcome. We’ll give him a guitar and he can perform Nebraska for us, and we’ll be very happy”.

Whether Springsteen shows or not, Hogan said ATP has always been quite lucky, and this year is no exception.

“It’s like we’ve taken our records and put them on the floor and said, ‘I want this person and that person,” he said. “And I guess over the course of time we’ve worked with a lot of these artists, so we’ve been really fortunate”.

Still, Hogan has a wish list.

“Dream curators? I don’t know if they necessarily would want to curate, but someone I’d love to see would be Kraftwerk play ATP,” he said. “And we’ve also been quite vocal about the fact that we love Wes Anderson films and the music in his films we’ve always liked, so we thought he would be a good curator if he’s available and interested. The list is kind of endless, I guess”.

The future of the festival could be in Asbury Park, provided things continue going in the right direction. Makes sense to its founder.

“So much musical history has taken place here,” Hogan said. “It’s a perfect place for us and it will open people up for people who maybe live in New York but have never been to Asbury Park and are curious about it. Hopefully it will ignite their interests. I hope people will enjoy the event enough that we’ll be back”.