LR – Okay we’re there. Can you hear me?
NC – Yes sir...
LR – Okay cool. I appreciate you making the time. I’m sure you’re crazy busy. I know how it is.
NC – It’s a little busy. It’s been a crazy year but it’s good.
LR – That’s cool. That’s great. Well, I’ll try and keep it short. I’ll just jump into it. I don’t know if they told you what we’re doing but I have this magazine...
NC – Yes ... the future of the guitar.
LR – Yeah, the future of guitar, that’s sort of the general idea, but also we’re talking to a lot of different guitarists and we’re also in some ways just trying to look into the past and sort of enliven the stories of the guitar and the guitar’s mythology, trace it through culture, talk about it and sort of, you know have that in it’s own way enliven the present and the future of guitar too.
NC – Okay, well, we’ll see how it goes. (laughing)
LR – Yeah! One thing I’m sure you’ve been asked before but we’ve been starting with other guitar players, you know, about their own personal history with the guitar, you know, if you could talk a little bit about that to start us off, that’d be awesome.
NC – Oh boy, well, I guess I started playing guitar kind of not so seriously at around age 11 or 12. I grew up in west Los Angeles, California and was listening to The Byrds and the Rolling Stones and you know, some Dick Dale and whatever surf instrumentals most of which were knock offs of not even the real artists that you could buy at the drug store.
LR – So it was knock offs of Dick Dale?
NC – Yeah I mean I didn’t even know. They were probably like wrecking crew guys I learned later.
NC – Roberts and Tommy Tedesco or somebody but you know you could get these surf compilations at the drugstore and my twin brother, Alex, who plays drums and percussion, he and I grew up to listening to everything together and just doing everything and playing everything together and that was kind of the first steps toward what you might consider guitar but simultaneously to this I was exposed to the music of Ravi Shankar in my 5th grade elementary school India course or focus and the teacher, Miss Godlin, played Ravi Shankar Live a world pacific record which was unbelievably transporting and enchanting to me and I think in retrospect it was the first time I had the inkling that music was not just entertainment but it was a higher calling and a spiritual endeavor. Nonetheless, I became completely fixated on Indian classical music and almost took up sitar because Ravi Shankar had a school at that time in Los Angeles, an Indian music school that closed in I believe 1966 which was the probably the year I was hearing this music for the first time. When I read his first autobiography “My Life, My Music” and read his descriptions of the arduous practice regimen he was put through to learn the instrument I realized this was not something I was going to do. (Laughter)
NC – Anyway, my dad got me a little Melody one pick up electric guitar, that I still have, for students for I think $30 and that was my first guitar and I didn’t know anything about how to tune it, you know, I’m left handed, I picked it up right handed just like many others have done you know, who are left-handed
and play right-handed and it was when I heard Manic Depression by the Jimi Hendrix Experience that I was so galvanized and transported and electrified that I decided then and there that I was gonna play guitar for the rest of my life.
LR – And do you think Jimi Hendrix was some marriage of the rock and roll stuff you’d been hearing but then like the, you know, what you called Ravi Shankar and sort of maybe a higher pursuit of an instrument or of music or...
NC – Oh, I don’t know if I thought about any of that, I mean, it just basically sounded like pure magic.
NC – It still does to me. You think about that period of popular music and the element of what was eventually called Psychedelia was a very, very powerful and colorful time for sound and for popular music and the sound of Jimi Hendrix along with the sound what The Beatles were doing then, ah, having our minds blown by Strawberry Fields Forever and I Am The Walrus and the like, you know, Tomorrow Never Knows and also hearing The Yardbirds’ Happening Ten Years Time Ago and Little Games and Love Seven and Seven Is, you know, these were like extremely potent sonic experiences besides being, you know, on the charts. Radio at this point had not become carved up into genres and playlists and it was not long after we had these listening experiences together, me and my brother Alex, that underground radio started in southern California in a radio station called KPCC that was from Pasadena, California that was a very faint signal in West LA but that we would listen to nightly to KPCC and that’s how we heard the first Led Zeppelin record before it came out and the first Allman Brothers record before it came out which for me was a very, very crucial moment as I became an Allman Brothers fanatic and then later in high school we met a boy named Lee Kaplan who played bass with us and he turned us on to a lot of progressive rock that we had not heard yet. We were already listening to King Crimson and at that time progressive rock wasn’t really a term but by the early 70s it kind was a term and that’s when I started getting into Yes and I got into Van der Graaf Generator and Focus and it was at that point I decided I was really going to have to learn some music and stop playing with just two fingers, you know, figure out how to really play the guitar. Simultaneous to this is when I heard John Coltrane and I heard the song Africa with the Eric Dolphy arrangement that was the beginning of a major shift in my perception and in my personal musical path and I started to embrace what I guess is generally called jazz music in a kind of sideways fashion, as I’ve done pretty much everything. And also, in retrospect, I think there was something besides the incredibly haunt- ing and compelling sound of John Coltrane and the saxophone on that piece but it also had something to do with the drone which is something that marries this type of jazz or as it was called at the time by many “Anti-Jazz” with Indian music and with rock and roll. To this day I’m not really the most savvy guy for playing millions of complex chord changes and with tons of modulations. I think that my natural instinct is to stick with the drone.
LR – Yeah, I feel the same way. I’m like a blues guy. I like a drone. So was jazz something that was going on in LA at the time or was this something that was on learned from records?
NC – Yeah, well I mean, it was mostly records because you know, I was crushed to learn that John Coltrane had already passed away. The first time I heard this it was 1971 and he had died in ’68 so I was never to hear him play his horn live. But on the other hand, we started scouring the record stores for all kinds of creative improvised music not just so-called jazz. My brother got straight off into Eric Dolphy and the Art Ensemble in Chicago and Anthony Braxton and all this kind of music that was coming out of the AACM of Chicago and also we got into the European improvising world, a lot of the ECM music but also the music that was going on in England with Derek Bailey and Evan Parker and Tony Oxley and the like and in Germany and Holland, you know, so we were basically just interested in sound and I think sound is still what I find the most transporting and marvelous and magical thing and I kind of go into an instant, I guess, happiness or I don’t know what it is, just into another place as soon as sound is happening that has some sort of consideration. I don’t know, it sounds good. I think it’s my generation, and my instrument and my sensibility that makes me so able to listen to so many different types of music and attempt to play them.
LR – So was punk rock and early proto-punk type stuff happening in LA yet?
NC – Oh yeah, I mean, the scene, for one thing you could hear, like especially in the summer, you could go around and hear jazz music for free in different places. We would get our friends together and we’d go down to Lighthouse and Hermosa Beach and we heard all these guys in the 70s. We heard the ETM Festival at UCLA, we’d go hear Jack DeJohnette and Keith Jarrett and Herbie Hancock and Weather Report and all these people and then hear all the King Crimson at the same time. Punk rock was of no interest to me whatsoever when it started because here I was trying to learn how to play the guitar. I was trying to learn how to play music and the idea of this kind of primitivism and this “basicness”, we had already done that as kids, you know, we loved The Stooges and thought they sounded kind of like us, that looked like a cool singer, you know, and by the time 1976 came around I was starting to work in a record store called Lionel Records in the late 70s and as such I heard every damn 7 inch that was coming in on consignment, by ’78 everybody had a band and a single. It was primarily Patti Smith’s group and Television that interested me but when you think about that music it’s really not punk music, it’s just good rock and roll music and it wasn’t until maybe 1980, you know, I was listening to The Clash and The Jam and these kinds of bands, Wire ... you’re enjoying these records, but it wasn’t until I heard Minutemen and I seemed to have anything to do with each other because I realized that what these guys were doing that was kind of like what my brother and I had aspired to do earlier in our lives without the economy certainly, without the vocal intensity but it’s the kind of same vastness, they were all over the place in terms of what their musical palette was and also their sound, like D. Boon’s guitar sound reminded me so much of myself and I don’t mean to sound like a jive motherfucker when I say this but I mean, he played the melodies with this kind of trebly sound that was not unlike the way I played coming out of high school.
LR – Huh, cool...
NC – And also they were from San Pedro where my dad grew up, where my grandmother lived and my then uncle, aunt and cousin lived and that seemed completely amazing too.
LR – That’s so cool. Yeah, I talked to Mike and he was saying how D. Boone had this idea, the trebly guitar and creating space for the bass and the drums and that being a sort of radical political notion in and of itself, restructuring the roles. I thought that was such a cool idea.
NC – Well, as Watt would say when I was touring with him and he would be de- scribing the way Minutemen came about their music because they also, particularly I think, Watts had the same lack of awareness of what a bass is supposed to be than I did about how to play a guitar. It wasn’t like you could go on YouTube and look at videos of how to do everything. So they thought about it politically, you know, it was political. You have the treble, I have the bass and we moved in our sovereign realms that way but then we combine, we unite through group music making, you know.
LR – Yeahyeahyeah. I like that idea a lot. It seems pretty profound in its simplicity but kinda radical. I really like that. Okay, all this stuff, I guess transitioning talking about the guitar a little bit, I’m curious because obviously, you know, maybe this has to do with too the time you were growing and getting into guitar, and being in California you had all these different influences simultaneously, really rich...and I’m curious about how that has influenced your particular guitar language but then also, I mean the guitar to me is kind of fascinating because there’s all these different traditions of guitar playing and I see the modern guitarists as having choices to make about how their going to relate to that or not relate to it or how they’re going to pull from that and make it into something that’s their own. I’m curious if you can talk about that and ...
NC – Oh God. That’s pretty vast. I mean, I don’t know if I’ve made these things my own.
LR – Well, I guess for me I feel like the guitar has these, one side of the guitar is idiosyncratic, there’s all these riffs and phrases from Chuck Berry to punk rock; there’s all these things that signify certain moments in time and musical language and then there’s another side of the guitar that’s sort of vast and un- defined and infinite and I’m curious how you put those two together. Does that make sense at all?
NC – It’s so hard to imagine ...well, for one thing, growing up in southern California, I don’t know really to what extent that was such a major player in my development only because everything we were listening to except for The Doors and you know, a few other things were not vocal acts, you know. We were listening to music from England, music from the south, music from New York City to Detroit. You know what I’m saying.
NC – ‘Cause it was all on records but then later of course being able to go and hear music in Los Angeles, there was tons going on and I ended up working at ... my friend started a concert series, he started bringing in people like Oliver Lake and Leo Smith and John Zorn and Eugene Chadbourne and all these kinds of people and so I ended up working the door at these concerts and hearing all of those concerts in addition to be able to go hear, you know, Herbie Hancock at the White House or something like that, you know. Weather Report at the Whisky a Go Go. You know a lot of people in this so called avant garde music scene didn’t play Los Angeles. They would avoid Los Angeles and only play San Francisco but other than that we were basically listening to records so we had to wait, you know, wait and wait and wait until we finally gonna set our eyes on Terje Rypdal or Jan Gabarek or somebody like that and I think that for me on the guitar, my first impulse was to play what I would consider to be a kind of more modest melodic style because I thought that Jimi Hendrix was a kind of magician, he was like some kind of almost super human being and I didn’t try to play like him, I thought it would be kind of almost just plain wrong, I don’t know what else to say.
NC – But on the other hand, people like Peter Frampton when he was playing in Humble Pie, they had this very beautiful melodic style as did of course Dwayne Allman who became kind of my main guy to try to emulate because there was something about his sound that sounded so related to the blues to me but at the same time it was sort of kind of forward looking and had a kind of what I guess I was thinking of as jazzy, whatever that is, which just means that he was playing some other scaled tones in there as was Peter Frampton, you know.
LR – So were you playing slide when you were into Dwayne or ...?
NC – No, oh no, the Dwayne slide thing I just left to Dwayne, you know. I’m talking about the way he would play on something like Memory of Elizabeth Reed or the way he would play on It’s Not My Cross To Bear or whatever. Cipollina with Quicksilver Messenger Service, that super fast nervous vibrato. It became really uncool after Eric Clapton pretty much slow hand sound and maybe Mick Ronson, sort of changed everybody’s idea of what kind of single vibrato should be used. So I tried to slow it down and that’s when, you know, John McLaughlin had a pretty fast vibrato and he became very influential on me particularly his playing with Tony Williams Lifetime, as did Bill Connors when Bill Connors was playing with Chic Corea Return to Forever, his first record, I saw that band many times and Jan Akkerman in Focus, all these guys became kind of big influences but I don’t to what extent I was able to learn what my style was or how to do what they did because I never had a guitar teacher of worth, I never learned technique on the guitar but I just listened and tried to find out in some really backwards way how to get my own thing going and not play some sound just like somebody else, you know, I wasn’t just one of those people who sit down and learn songs, just spend all day doing some kind of a mental kickdown and go through on a record and learn, know dozens of songs. I’ve hardly ever known any songs, I just like to play. I like to play, improvising. So I think I was easily satisfied in this way (laughing). Just as soon as we’d start playing I’d move my fingers around and I felt good. On the other hand, people like John Abercrombie and Ralph Towner became inspiring not so much technically but they were writing beautiful pieces with harmony that I didn’t quite understand. When I met my sort of musical partner for years named Erik Von Essen, he started showing me what was going on with these pieces of music and I learned more about music from him and from playing with people better than me than I did from any guitar teacher.
LR – So he taught you harmony or sort of the basics of harmony…
NC – Well, he taught me how that harmony was which basically was a coloristic harmony. When it came to functional harmony I just went back to school, I was a philosophy major. I had been told that it was too late for me to study music at a college level so I studied philosophy for awhile until I realized this was ridiculous but I just wanted to play music for the rest of my life and I didn’t care if I got a degree so I went back to a community college. I went to Santa Monica college which technically was supposed to be some sort of come down because I had good grades. Community college was someplace people went when they couldn’t get into colleges. My mom said “you either have to go to work or you have to go to school.” So I kind of did both. I started working at the record store and I went to Santa Monica College and I had this amazing theory teacher, his name is Rule Beasley, and he’s the father of the great pianist in Los Angeles named John Beasley who in those days was in high school. But anyway, it was from Rule Beasley that I started to realize that I could understand and even excel in music classes which in high school had not been the case for me. That’s when I realized that I was getting really poor instruction in high school which is not an excuse, it just happened. Having had excellent instruction from Rule Beasley made it acutely clear that I had not gotten good instruction and that the mysteries of music were starting to be revealed to me through Rule Beasley’s teaching and through my music collaborations with Erik Von Essen who was basically a genius. I don’t think I’ve answered your question, have I?
LR – That’s okay, we’re just talkin’ about guitar in general, you know, I was talking to Bill Frisell and, cause I went to Berklee and all these jazz luminaries would come talk to us and we’d raise our hands and say ‘how do you play jazz?’ and they would just give us this funny look and they say stuff like ‘I don’t know. I put the horn to my mouth’ and then they’d put the horn to their mouth and they’d play jazz but it’s like a funny thing happens to musicians, you know, like most of them seem to forget how they like came to do what they do.
NC – Yeah. Well, I don’t consider myself a jazz musician, for one thing, so if anyone asks me that question I’ll do the same thing except I won’t even play after I answer. (Laughter)
LR – (Laughing)
NC – I will go play some jazz, you know, like I’ll go and sit in with the Wes Paul trio and come up with a song list and they’re all excited because I play tunes with chords, you know. They say, “Oh my god, this is great! Changes!” you know? Instead of rock guys goin’ in there to try to save their Monday nights and just play 1, 4, 5 all night, I’m not one of those guys but I’m not a real jazz guy. Jazz is not my life’s discipline and my life’s mission, you know, like if there’s anything I think I’m good at or that I feel the most comfortable doing it’s spontaneous improvisation and everything else is pretty hard for me, to be honest.
LR –Yeah. No, I understand that. Well, so this leads me to a question, ah, you mentioned Coltrane earlier. I went to Berklee, no one called it this but I always had this, like the legacy of Coltrane and practice was sort of this complicated thing, I feel like in jazz there’s this idea …
NC – Oh yeah! There’s this complete apocryphal lore…
LR that’s like living your life in a practice room and so I was just curious to hear you talk about guitar and technique and practice and sort of mastery of … I think improvisation, you know, a lot comes from having some elements of mastery in your technique and … I don’t know, I’m just interested to hear you talk about that a little bit.
NC – Okay, well I seem to have developed some sort of facility on the guitar. I actually remember back in 1985 touring with Julius Hemphill’s electric band and Bill Frisell was the other guitar player in the band and he was listening to me practice, whatever that means, basically running my fingers around the guitar to warm up I guess and he was staring at me and in typical Bill fashion he said, “Hhh…How do you do that?”
LR – (Laughter)
NC – Bill, you see, has this whole other way of playing the guitar where his hand moves up and down the neck and it looks like a fist and he doesn’t have his fingers splayed out in a million different directions with his hand turning at different angles like I do and so I feel like what I’ve done over the years is try to play within my head which is essentially a billion notes going all at once. I have this hummingbird brain of thousands of notes which I think may have been one of the things that was driving Coltrane insane …
LR – The sheets of sound idea.
NC – Yeah, and none of which is useful to me when playing music like Wilco’s music where economy is what makes the music sound best in my opinion.
LR – Yeah, sure.
NC – I think others would agree. But I think I just tried to get close without too much discipline, try to get close to what I’m hearing in my head which is just a lot of rapid fire note stuff and then also sound to find, the effect pedals that now I guess has become part of my identity (WITH COMPLETE ACTION) in a way and also I seem to be able to utilize them in a coherent way or at least in a natural way, (AND GETS THE THING) that our sounds that are closer to expressing what I want to hear which are not necessarily guitar sounds that are, I don’t know, they’re just pure sound. They’re sometimes very strident sounds and uncomfortable sounds but they make me feel something so what I’m going for always even if it’s very very harmonic music or very rhythmic music or if it’s completely open and free or microtonal or non-tonal or textural, it’s more of an emotion than any kind of theory system. I’m just trying to expand the expressive possibilities of the instrument to treat myself really. It feels like something, you know, this is why I love Sonic Youth music so much, because it makes … Sonic Youth music made me change the way I play because I started playing, ah, intentionally playing slightly out of tune units and notes and playing certain idiomatic things on the guitar to try to get closer to their sound world because the sound world made me feel so marvelous and so I think that for me, if somebody asked me about what they perceive of as a kind of prolific technique on my part I’d have to tell them like well don’t get too dazzled because it’s really just bad habits sped up, you know. As opposed to somebody like Julian Laws who can, you know I told him, I just can’t stand listening to myself ‘cause sometimes I start a phrase at the same little lick or I have this thing where I end up on this thing and I do this little tiny trill at the end and I’m so sick of doing these things and he said, “Well, just invert it.” And he said, “What one of your lines?” and I played it for him and he learned it and then he just completely played it as a pattern inverted …
LR – (Laughter)
NC – And I just stared at his fingers and said, “That’s never gonna happen.” (Laughter) I don’t have that kind of ability. My point being that what I can do is listen while I’m playing which I think is crucial to improvisation and to music in general, to be listening to everybody, not just yourself and then I have pretty good, you know, my ear training comes in handy, I try to know what notes other people are playing. If I want to use that information I have it, if I don’t , I don’t but at least I can make an informed decision and the other part of it has to do with I think the ability to imagine things, just has to do with imagining sound, imagining melodies, imagining chords. It’s just about imagination and not just about playing what you know and I know we all play what we know when we all imagine, you know, to levels and degrees that sort of changes one person’s imaginative playing or maybe you can’t perceive of how imagined someone else’s playing is because it’s too imaginative for your tiny brain or whatever, it’s all a very subjective world. But I think for me it’s all about imagination really. The discipline came more from theory and ear training than it did from guitar.
LR – Right. That’s interesting. Yeah, I like this idea of imagination. I was curious when you were talking about it if, you know, you were talking about how your pursuit to be alive on the guitar, sort of what you were imagining or what you were hearing in your head and I was curious if over time or maybe this goes back and forth where you feel like in your imagination, you’re hearing something more. That has to do with guitar playing or does it have to do with composing or sound, you know like when you mentioned Sonic Youth like to me, I almost think of the whole band where when you talked about Coltrane of course there’s the sound of the quartet but you know, I’m thinking about him as an instrumentalist, I was curious about …
NC – Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think it’s definitely mixed bag in my case. For example I’m gonna be playing, tomorrow night I’m gonna improvise duets with Otomo Yoshihide, he’s one of my most favorite musicians and multi instrumentalist and his guitar playing is very singular and it’s, can tend to be kind of spare but extremely strong verging on strident, like FLASH melodic statement and controlled feedback and I’m not exactly sure how I’m gonna meld with his world because everything tends to be kind of spacey and cosmic and his is actually very, in spite of its expressive power it’s rather ASCETIC in a way. And so I’m kind of trying not to think too much ahead about what I’m gonna do but I kinda need to decide what to bring to the gig.
LR – Yeahyeahyeah
NC – And so this kind of thing where I’m using, I’ll have my effect pedals there where I know I can go into the realm of pure sound and not have it be, I don’t even have to fret the guitar if I don’t want to but the sort of many possibilities can be, if I think about it too much, can be rather daunting. On the other hand, if I’m playing with Julian Lage and we’ve sort of decided straight away to just play guitar, we don’t use effects pedals and we have a little reverb and that’s about it or we play acoustic, which I did for years and years, you know in a group called quartet music with Eric Barnett and my brother, Alex, and Jeff Gauthier on violin and did a lot of acoustic playing. Primarily in the 80s I played with Charlie Hayden’s Liberation Music Orchestra West Coast, I had a nylon string guitar and these days people actually say “Oh I didn’t know you play acoustic” (Laughing) You know, it’s like Whoa! Okay … but I play guitar… Anyway, I find it extremely liberating to play acoustic or to play just the straight guitar with Julian because while it may actually limit the sonic possibilities, playing with someone like Julian who has such great ears, our music becomes very very specifically about note choices and about harmonic choices and the like and you know, tension and relief, density and space and it’s just as satisfying and in no way kind of more or less challenging. It’s just kind of freeing in the sense that I know I’m just gonna be concentrating on note choices and dynamics and things like that. And so I guess in a weird way, it doesn’t sound possible but I don’t really differentiate that much between the two things and when I was in my early life in the 80s, earlier life I should say, I had turned these distinctions, or these different parameters into dichotomy. I had this dichotomist way of thinking about it that drove me gradually insane and I thought I had to make specific choices, you know, one or the other, I couldn’t do all of the above. And it drove me so nuts that I almost stopped playing guitar. Until I realized that if I didn’t play guitar what I would probably do is either write or do visual arts which would drive me just as insane and then be solitary endeavors rather than collaborative and that I might as well sort of forge ahead so I started my own trio then. This was in 1989, it took me that long really to start my own band and then write my own music just for my own band. Everything I’d done before had been collaborative, sort of democratic, writing along with other people like you know, my tunes, my brother’s tunes, Eric’s tunes, Jeff’s tunes, whatever. And I think that was the beginning of me coming up with some kind of aesthetic that was kind of unique to me and the only reason I did it was to not go insane and quit music, really. Okay. I just need to start my own thing and do what I want and not take shit. From myself, not just from other people.
LR – And before when you were saying you were driving yourself insane, what you were speaking about before was maybe the difference between how you were gonna approach improvising maybe in a more sonic way or a note way or with restrictions. Can you speak more about that? I’m just curious. What was the wall that you hit that you felt was …
NC – Well I felt I had to decide between electric and acoustic, I had to decide between jazz and rock, loud and quiet, you know, microtonal and in tune. Instead I just decided to combine all these things. You know, I do feel a little critical of a lot of the people who are considered today’s geniuses, that many of them I think are engaging in a kind of very very well tooled kind of pastiche. Like they have really great record collections and they know what to borrow from. I know that I’m sort of one of those guys but I don’t really want to be one of those guys but there is a sort of an operation going on where I am borrowing from things that inspire me, I am trying to touch them, I guess, in a way by doing some kind of, I hope it’s not imitation but at least some kind of homage or some kind of reference to things that I consider to be inspiring or strong or in some way visionary. You know, I’ve spent years and years of my life for example obsessed with the first 3 minutes of the Durufle Requiem, for example, but I realized that it wasn’t just the notes because I listen to so many recorded versions and realize that there’s this one recorded version where the sound all comes together in this very very magical way for me personally, so I realize that it’s sometimes not just about the notes, it has to be about just what happens and they you kind of have to let go and just continue to move forward. You know, I have many regrets about my recordings, you know, most of the time it’s about the guitar solos but you know, the thing I like to hear least is me soloing, you know, they’re too long, the records are too long or why did we record this one jam when it’s just not something anyone’s gonna listen to over and over, you know, where’s my self-editing, where’s my sense of economy and then somebody will come up to me and basically say that that piece of music. You know, once you play it, once you record it in a way you’ve kind of just given it away so all you can do at that point is move forward so I’m trying not to go into that mode anymore, dichotomist thinking, it’s kind of retroactive anxiety or something, some kind of regret, you know, I really think this type of thing is possibly, in spite of my southern California roots it’s part of my DNA, I’m trying not to listen to that voice so much.
LR – Yeah.
NC – That’s another digression, I’m sorry.
LR – No no no, that’s okay. It sounds to me that what you’re saying, well it ties back to what I was wondering about earlier when I was talking about the idiosyncratic language of guitar and I guess this present moment of having so much available to us, this wonderful rich history of music and guitar that one can access and sort of pull from and put back together but it can also end up rehashing a lot of the same stuff too.
NC – Well, the threat of rehashing does exist, so does the threat of being overwhelmed. I think, for example, if you imagine me at age 17 hearing Derek Bailey for the first time and being utterly perplexed and at the same time thinking ‘there’s something here I need to understand’, you know, and then trying to hear his influence in people like Henry Kaiser who I met in the 70s and trying to realize there’s a whole stream of thought going on here and even before that hearing Fred Frith’s record called Guitar Solos which he did in the late 70s, might have been mid 70s actually, anyway, these were seminal records for which I had no, there was no precursor, I had no other type of information with which to approach this music so as a result whereas in Derek’s place it was perplexing, in Frith’s case it was absolutely inspiring because here it was, a person basically taking certain things that he had learned from Keith Row and a few aspects of Derek’s world and then certainly a lot of his own ideas and creating a whole other language on the guitar that nobody else could approach in my opinion. And then later I saw Fred in concerts where he just had guitars on tables, he would drop objects on them, play them with bows and do all these different things. Seeing his band Massacre in the 70s was a really really seminal experience for me and at that point, you know, that’s already a lot of possible choices about what to do with a guitar, you know, way far away from Dwayne Allman and Peter Frampton, you know what I mean? Or even Ralph Towner and John Abercrombie. I feel like technology itself is moving forward in spite of itself so you know the idea that, and I remember really well and this is a slight digression but I wanted to really get guitar centered for a moment, you may recall that in the late 80s there was this whole thing particularly in England about how the guitar is dead. And there were all these bands who were kind of synth bands, basically saying, you know, that the guitar, you know, has this kind of outmoded elements in rock and roll or in popular music and then the next thing that happened was grunge rock and Sonic Youth and so-called grunge and this kind of post no wave situation where guitar was the absolute most crucial sound (laughter), and it became this massive thing and in a way, you know, I don’t have a chauvinistic view of the guitar, I’m fine with music not having guitar in fact it was confusing for me when I first started listening to so-called jazz when I was in high school that so few of the recordings had guitar on them and so few of the recordings that had guitar that I was particularly inspired by, you know, I mean certainly I was inspired by Wes Montgomery and George Benson and Pat Martino and Joe Pass and some of these guys but most of the recordings I liked the most didn’t have guitar, you know? It was later when I heard Jim Hall that I realized that jazz guitar, that there was somebody doing jazz guitar at this level that for me was absolutely sublime, you know, a visionary. Using the language of jazz guitar but also taking it into this harmonic realm, this kind of visionary realm that heretofore I had not experienced. That sounds like I’m ranking people. My point is that all these amazing recordings did not have guitar. And so I don’t care if recordings or music features guitar specifically. But I did get a big grin on my face when so-called Grunge rock made the guitar sort of off the charts again after being called dead. I do love guitar music and I love the sound of the guitar, you know? I like how the guitar’s centric in my sonic interest but I’m not a chauvinist in terms of its role in music.
LR – Yeah sure. That makes a lot of sense. Well, that leads into my final question too, and talking about the future of guitar not to ask you to make any predictions but just the idea of it, you know, what’s the idea of it to you like if you hear sounds you feel like point in some direction that are inspiring or where you’re at with the guitar these days or … I’m just curious about your thoughts …
NC – Well, I feel like a little bit remiss, I feel like I’ve lost touch with a lot of the innovation that’s going on right now in music in general. I spend so much time going out and playing live and doing my thing so I feel like I might be missing some important things but I’m intrigued by this kind of music that just happening now where there is a presence of guitar but it’s not, and this is maybe popular music I’m talking about, there’s a presence of guitar but it’s not its most crucial element. For example, my wife, Yuka, was showing me some footage of FKA Twigs that she really loves and listening to them play live and mostly play on Roland sample pads and whatnot and then every once in awhile they have bass and guitar and the guitar is really clean and it’s a beautiful tone and a lot of reverb, sounds like it could’ve been sampled off a jazz record but it isn’t, it’s played live. Similarly, Annie Clark (St. Vincent), astonishing guitar style and this amazing stage presence and songwriting and singing ability and the guitar has this kind of incendiary, like she just turns it on like a flame thrower periodically and then the rest of the time it’s not really the most crucial voice in certain of her songs, she can go 3 songs without playing guitar and it can still be marvelous so I’m kind of interested how the guitar has this kind of slightly subtler or maybe more like maybe a cameo that make more of a sporadic statement rather than being the lynchpin of the sound but that’s good. I’m always gonna be a guy that loves listening to something where it’s guitar rock, you know, it’s guitar music and I love the sound of, you know, two guitars are always better than one in my world because of the natural chorusing and because it’s, you know, even if they are slightly out of tune with each other it’s still one of the greatest sounds in mankind as far as I’m concerned. But as far as what I’m thinking about on the guitar, I just wish I had more, I don’t want to sound absurd, but I wish I had more knowledge, more technique and more versatility. You know when I listen to people who play amazing finger style guitar I think ‘why didn’t I learn good finger style guitar?’ Or I hear somebody play like amazing flat picking bluegrass, I go like ‘Wow, I’d really like to be able to do that.’ Or just, I don’t know, when I hear people who are able to play solo guitar and play songs and you know, melodies and chords all together. Do something like Jim Hall can do and re-harmonize them and put a personal stamp on it and it’s different every time, I just think ‘Gee. I sure wish I could do that.’ Maybe I’m just lost in my own kind of like longing to be a better guitar player as I understand what a better guitar player would be and God, I have so many damned guitars, I better get better, you know?
LR – (Laughter)
NC - I’m addicted to guitars. It’s terrible, it’s like a disease.
LR – (Laughter) I think it’s a cool thing.
NC – Well, it is what it is, I suppose. (Laughing)
LR – (Laughing) Yeah. Well, that’s awesome. Those are all my questions. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us and I think it’s gonna be a pretty cool article.
NC – Great! I think my parting shot is to say that I get asked who are good young guitarists coming up and I feel like such a jerk because I never can remember, I go hear is somebody and I go ‘wow, that person is insane on guitar’ and sometimes I don’t even find out that person’s name but even hearing like these kinda pop bands coming out of Brooklyn like Lucius, you know, there are guitar solos, it’s not exactly guitar driven but I listen to improvisers, you know, mostly the people I’m aware of here that live in NY are not as young as Julian. They’re all these wizards coming out of school now and I don’t know where they’re gonna find work but basically the level of ability that’s coming out of school these days is absolutely astonishing but in the meantime hearing people like Mary Halverson and Ava Mendoza and Liberty Ellman and all these people that are doing really amazing work here in town is always upping the ante as far as I’m concerned, inspiring me.
LR – Yeah, that’s cool. Actually my friend knows Ava. I was thinking about talking to her about the article too.
NC – I’ve known Ava a long time. I guess I met her when she was 18 back in California. Yeah, she’s amazing. I love Mike Campbell. He’s not really living here now. There’s a lot of really great players and every time I go to do some gig or I go to a gig or something, there’s like a whole ‘nother bench, you know, it’s not like there’s a deep bench, there’s like 40 deep benches. There’s a whole other thread that I didn’t even know about and I started following it back and I realized ‘oh no!’ There are even more levels of astonishment and inspiration. It’s pretty incredible. Even though I won’t probably follow in their footsteps, I’m interested in these groups that are happening now that use technology and acoustic music and songwriting and improvisation in kind of these much more unique ways. It’s sort of like a new palette.
LR – Yeah. Like paint brushes or something.
NC – Yeah. There’s a lot of possibilities and I hear a lot of younger people coming out these way interesting combinations of sampling and it can be really really intimate at the same time it’s being completely visual. There’s just a lot of interesting stuff going on and that’s why I never have been one of those people that despairs about like “Oh pop music is so stuckass nowadays” or listening to this kind of music is wining and the art is losing, you know, I really do feel that no matter what, there’s always somebody somewhere you haven’t heard yet that’s turning everything on its ear whether it’s some kid in his garage in Poughkeepsie or whatever, you know, that could eventually emerge and just blow minds. It’s always around the corner somewhere. I just think it’s hard these days for people to figure out how they’re gonna actually survive making music. I think it’s always been hard but I think it’s a lot harder now. There’s so many more people playing but there’s also so few ways to make a living doing it. We can’t all play all these gigs at the same time, there’s not enough audience, there’s not enough venues. You just have to keep going no matter what.
LR – Yeah, totally.
NC – That was the end of my sermon.
LR – (Laughter)
NC – (Laughter)
LR – That’s a better way to end … Dick Dale really went off the deep end at the end of his interview.
NC – Oh, he’s one of the people you interviewed. Well, he’s nuts.
LR – Yeah, it was awesome. It was like talking to a … Like, I’m reading Arabian Nights and you’re like reading it and it’s like you understand the words but it’s like the culture is like so different, like it almost doesn’t make any sense, it’s just such a different time and that’s sort of what it was like talking to Dick Dale, it was like mytho-poetic.
NC – (Laughing)
LR – It was Jungian Guitarism. I mean it was incredible. Here was a guy who hung out with Leo Fender and they like invented the Stratocaster together. It was really fascinating, he had a zoo and he kept animals in his bedroom and a lot of the guitar sounds he was trying to imitate his lion. Really crazy stuff.
NC – I like it!
LR – Yeah, it’s cool.
NC – But see though to me it’s like to talk about Dick Dale, the pure exhilaration of a song like The Wedge is pretty hard to match. You know? That’s an adrenalin rush, man.
LR – Yeah totally. And he’s a wildly inventive guy. I feel it was wilding interesting to speak to an early guitar time, I mean, talk about Fred Phipps, it’s sorta like this too in a way, I mean it was like they were really inventing the guitar’s role in the culture, you know. It was really a very exciting exhilarating time. It was pretty cool.
NC – Yeah, yeah.
LR – Yeah it’s really cool to get all these stories from all these people because there’s so much individualism and there’s so much overlap you know. Bill Frisell and Mike Watt saying the same things, it’s like the stories are so interwoven. It’s really neat.
NC – Yeah, yeah. I met Bill in ’83. I actually was aware of the Minute Men but not met Mike Watt until I was playing, well it was a couple of years later. I was playing on a show with Charlie Haden who was opening for the Minute Men.
LR – Charlie Haden was opening for the Minute Men?
NC – Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra West Coast and McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica and basically Charlie’s son, Josh, basically picked up bass because of Mike Watt. He had a punk band then called the Treacherous Jaywalkers and essentially the show was put together to entertain Josh as far as I can tell and yeah, he ended up improvising with Minute Men, Charlie did. But I only said 4 words to the Minute Men that night even though I was a big fan. But Bill I met in ’83 because I came out to NY to audition to play with Paul Motian’s band ‘cause he was thinking of adding another guitar player and it’s kind of interesting when you mention, to realize that I’ve actually known Bill a lot longer than I’ve known Watt but I’ve certainly spent a lot more time in a band with Mike Watt (laughing).
LR – Yeah …
NC – Although Bill and I did spend 6 weeks in a band together in 1985 with Julius and that was wow, quite a tour.
LR –Yeah, that’s awesome.
NC – Bill’s incredible. I mean, everybody knows it. It’s just a fact.
LR – Yeah, it’s true. Well, there’s sure a lot of amazing guitar players. That’s so cool. I sure appreciate you spending the time talking to me.
NC – Hey, ask me a question and watch 2 hours go by. (laughing)
LR – (laughing) Well, I’ll get in touch with Ryan and those guys once we’ve finished and I’ll send you copies of the magazine and everything and hopefully I’ll see you around.
NC – I hope so. If you see me somewhere, flag me down.
LR – I will.
NC – Thanks. Have a good night…
LR – Thanks … okay, you too!