There was a time when a record was a budget and an idea, right? Obviously the ideas aren't going away, but what does a record mean these days?
A record means nothing these days. What means something these days is the experience of hearing the music and hearing the sound. A record is a receipt. It's like a document. Records now are just business. Music is vast. Endless. I think playing live is really important. Recording live music is really great — documenting live experiences is really important. As far as those days where you sit down and you craft the record and it takes Axl Rose seventeen years to make a record... That's good or bad — why? Records don't necessarily mean all that much. It's the experience and the memory. Records are just memory. Notation is memory. Tape recall is memory. Music should be experience — memory. Get past the 'solid' of it. I still like the graphics and whatnot. I still like hardcopies. The download thing — the only reason I don't like the download thing is because I like hardcopies. I like to have the thing. It's like, "Did you buy the painting, or did you hear about it?" I'm conscious of the money but I'm getting it other ways. I'm telling motherfuckers, "You owe me money." People say, "You're a national treasure. You changed my life." I say, "Good. Give me money." It's not business anymore. That shit wasn't business anyway. That was oppression. It was manipulation.
And always dealing with the bullshit because the traditional business model was so foul...
And dealing with people — on one side you have the artist, who knows exactly what he wants to do, and on the other side you have an asshole who has not a clue. So, what kind of relationship is that? There are very few exceptions.
So how does it work without money?
We'll get money. People say the economy is bad. Fuck the economy. People say times are hard. People are cryin'. I don't buy that. From the clean slate, you build the next music. You start from nothing. It's going to be the next phase of music — "entertainment" has very little to do with what I'm interested in. I just did this record with a Dr. Frank Lipman; he's an acupuncturist from South Africa who's treated many, many people — including [Nelson] Mandela — heavy people. His concept, when I met him, was in the West we either don't know, or we've forgotten, why music happened. It was for funerals. It was for weddings. It was for giving life. It was for killing. It was for all these heavy things. All of the sudden it turned into business, and it turned to dancing around on a stage, and that's not what it is. I hooked up with this guy and I did a record, it is called Spent. "Spent" means when you are just done. Well, I was spent. I couldn't walk. I related to the guy a lot. I got a call from yoga people that I know. They said, "You have a huge fan. He's one of the greatest doctors in the world. He wants to see about rehabilitating and restoring your muscle." It's hard to get up, even now. I have to use a handrail to get up the stairs. That shit was serious. So I made this record. It's called, Spent: Beats to Bring You Back. We did the cover. It's a compilation, basically, but I did mixes, cross fades and whatnot. It makes a lot of sense. I was thinking maybe that's the key to part of the future, of what's going to become. Because the music business is done. Major labels, big business, CEOs getting millions of dollars from sitting around doing nothing — that's done. Bands should be dropped. All bands. Keep ZZ Top. I like them.
Reminds me of some of the deepest kinds of music there is, like the deep Vodou stuff in Haiti — the only reason you bring the serious drums out is to take care of some business.
Yeah, the only reason. A lot of Africa is like that. A lot of India is like that.
I think of all the field recordings from Africa that you've done, my favorite is the first Gnawa Music Of Marrakesh record, Night Spirit Masters, on Axiom.
That was recorded in the Medina in Marrakesh. I had Billy Youdelman, who's a great engineer. We were there for the first time and tried to get the essence of it. I'm not sure we got the spirit totally of the music, but we got the sound of it, for sure. It's probably the greatest sounding Gnawa record that will ever be made. We had major gear; we took a lot of stuff with us. And I took a serious, world-class engineer.
And then you came home and mixed it big and fat, like a rock record.
Always. It's all rock music. If it's not, it's weak. And if it's weak, put it in the shitter.
My impression is that those "electric" Miles Davis records you drew from for Panthalassa were made with tape edits.
Edits, all edits.
So what you were listening to was long jams.
Yeah. I knew the records really well. For me, when people talk about that project, and when they talk about Miles and the seventies, it all gets back to On the Corner. If you listen to that record, it's really two bass lines, two beats — it's cut up in a lot of different ways. In no way do those pieces represent anything that anyone was doing to create music in the studio. Nobody came into the studio and said, "This is my music. Let's record it and put it out like this." It's just cut up into a one-minute piece, five-minute piece and a six-minute piece; but it's all based on motifs, bass lines, and rhythms — there are about two through the whole record. There are six or seven reels of that information, which go in a lot of different areas, and those weren't used. It would take some time to sort those out. That's a two-record set right there — it could be great.
Did you always know where those edit points were on the original records?
No, I never thought about it. If you listen to Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival 1970 by Miles Davis you hear the whole band playing and, all of a sudden, it's in a different key and a different rhythm. I thought, "How can they do that?" [laughs] What's weird is that they were influenced by the recordings — the band would be playing, he would signal and the band would do something else. That's a direct influence from the recordings, from the editing of the music. Because a track like "Rated X" — I'll give Teo [Macero] credit for being ridiculous enough to push a solo button on an organ [track] and create these incredible breaks out of nowhere. It's like the whole band is playing, then just organ and then the band comes back. You can hear the click of the solo button on the record. That's pretty radical for the time.
