My name is Craig Ferguson. The name of this podcast is Joy. I talk to interest in people about what brings them happiness. Here's my old friend Tom Welsh. He's a music aficionado. He runs one of the biggest music festivals in America, Big Years in Knoxville, Tennessee. Enjoy.
All right, So Tom, you have never taken accid?
That is true. I have never taken ascid.
What powerful drugs have you taked? Do you have you taken any powerful drugs? Because I feel like someone who's involved in a music festivals, because I should should probably have a past with exotic hallucigens.
It's not on my CV. But you're you're generally probably correct, right as sort of an understanding or assumption, right, a passage like, look at all these guys that are in this work, they've been drop an acid for you, whatever that sort of thing is. But no, I from my California days maybe look the part.
But yeah, when I first met you had very long hair.
I did that to blend in if you live in San Francisco at a certain age a certain time and just sort of become part of the fabric with guys walking around with long hair.
I just felt you have lost You had long hair kind of the same time Metallica had long hair. And then did you get the cut the same time as Metallica.
Got the cut.
I'd have to check when they went to the barbershop. But I have a vivid memory that you and I had not seen each other period of time. Somewhere in there, I shaved my head and we saw each other again at an event, and you first thing out of your mouth was new Metallica. I was flattered, confused, but honored by that.
Yeah. I don't know who did it.
It was a compliment. It was a compliment.
Let's just say.
I don't know the Metallica guys, but they needed to do it, and I needed to do it too.
Yeah, I think it was time. That comes time in life for a haircut. So listen, tell me this. You do have faced well. The podcast is about joy. I've known you for some time, and one of the most joyful experiences that I think we had together was going to see a gentleman by the name of Iggy Pop.
Remembers going to see Iggy Pop. I do all right, And we went to see.
Iggy and I loved watching because I liked the songs, and I liked seeing Iggy being alive after his story and as of recording to this, he's still alive, which is kind of goes wrong. Well, it's it's an interesting thing given the kind of the group of people he was running with back in the day. Because you're so heavily and I think of you as being someone who's heavily involved in music.
But you're not a musician, aren't you.
Well, I came up as a musician.
Okay, tell me how that happened.
The imagine we're a psychotherapy session and it's the first session, and you have to go through all the boring stuff about who you are and how you got to this point, and then we can get to the bit where you can't go to.
The bathroom without wearing a hat.
Yeah, let us be my first psychotherapy session because you've never been.
No, I think this is it.
Okay, Well, just relax, take a say breath. You're in a safe place, and tell me how it began with you in music.
Probably, like many many kids growing up in America and maybe in the suburbs, you are invited at a certain age to sign up to take music lessons in your school.
Where was this?
I grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and it's probably the I was about to say second grade, but it might be fourth grade where they take you into assembly and they pass out the sheet of instruments that you might select from to begin music lessons. Fourth grade, let's say, And everybody went home with this eight and a half by eleven. No, it's but the larger sheet with a to z all the instruments you could choose that the school offered.
Like a very well equipped school. Was that very well?
We're talking about the seventies, right when music was still in the schools.
Active music there now, right.
And people encouraged this.
This is good for everybody, good for students, good for kids, band, all this sort of stuff, marching bands and the rest. And I went home and immediately said I want to play the drums, and my father said pick something else. So I went back with the sheet into the teacher, whoever it was at the time, and I had checked the box for saxophone. So I grew up as a saxophone player. I was in a family with three brothers
and a sister. All of us played music together. Parents musical people too, not professionally, But there was music in the house all the time.
Was it a very stable environment? Did you have a stable upbringing? It was like an escape into music from the you know, the disruption of a wild family life or anything like that.
These stories will wreck and bore and ruin all of your understandings of a life and music. But yes, it was a stable family that cared about each other. Still to this day, we care about each other and communicate. There was music in the household because it brought joy and fun and something to do. The Christmas Carols was the big the brass. Everybody lined up with their brass instruments to blow the Christmas carouse out the front door into the neighborhood that may or may not have wished
for that to happen. And it was just the rhythm of a noisy family that you.
Still play, You still play the saxophone.
Well, the last vestiges of this are really still the Christmas Holidays.
With this.
Year, the honkas squeak brass corral emerges once a year and then submerges again. There's another generation of kids, the grandkids, nephews and nieces that also picked this up. And so yeah, it's a musical family that is not professionally musical, all.
Right, So life takes its course and you end up. When I met you, you were in San Francisco, that's right. At that point, you were running or managing bands, and you had.
A music store. It wasn't really a store.
I had moved to California with the band actually to chase the American dream, which everybody knows is write one song and then become super famous and you're off to forever.
And these days I think it's just an Instagram post, but it's much the same thing.
This was the olden days when you actually had to have talent, have some talent, and record something with people who knew what they were doing. So we tough that out for a period of time in the club scene in the West Coast, network up and down, and decided after a long run that we really weren't getting along at all with each other and it was time to stop that.
So that's my experience of being in a band.
Too.
Inevitably, you've come to that crossroads that maybe I should be doing something else. What I really wanted to do was to run a record company. I really love the idea of working with musicians, not necessarily being the guy in the middle of the stage jumping around, but to help others get their work moving, get their No.
That's an interesting thing. Why is that from the family background? Do you think that they create and the opportunity for little Tom to choose the drums or the saxophone.
No, I don't think so.
I think in a very small way, as a musician and working in a band and trying to make something happen, we never really went anywhere, but you get a feeling of what's like to be on the stage, to have a room full of people looking at you and waiting for you to do. I don't need to tell you you know exactly what this is, right. The exchange between audience and performer is a very peculiar human moment. In my opinion. Very few people probably want to do that,
and even fewers still do it well. And I think ultimately, as a performer, musician, artist, you have to know for yourself what am I doing here on this stage, What is it I'm trying to put across. What do I want to share with people? What I want people to hear hear me say? Because after all, I've had a room full of people who are now looking at you saying, all right, we've given you our time and attention and maybe five bucks.
Say it, do it?
Did you have anything particularly that you wanted to say?
Yeah?
I think at the time, as young musicians trying to express fun, happiness, some great songs and have a yeah, I have a damn good time. It starts there, doesn't it with.
I think so?
I mean, I think when I was in Bines, I think I was trying to say, was I'm available for casual sex? This is bathed in there, definitely, But I don't think that's the way you said. I think nowadays i'd be on an app or something and just say it.
The menu of things, like I'm available for that, barring that I'll take all the drugs you're offering me, yes, barring that I'll dip into the advance so we can spend it on beer money right now, yes, barring that I need a ride home.
All right, So you end up running this record company?
Yes?
Well right, okay, So we skipped a brief chapter there. When it turned out that music as a performer was not ultimately going to be my direction and calling, I thought, what I really want to do is work with other people, and I fall into literally fall into a small active record company in San Francisco at the time called New Albion Records, which had been going for some time charting trends and developments in modern composition and experimental classical music.
This kind of in between area with very much of a West Coast and Pacific rim point of view. What we're talking about is music of the twentieth century, including people like Lou Harris and Terry Riley, Pauline Olaverro's, John Adams, John Cage, and then onward from there Carlstone and many others. This had a huge impact on me musically, personally, professionally, ultimately, and it.
Is not the music you still listen to now that makes music you listen because it also is quite almost I don't want to be mean, but it sounds a little academic taste of music.
Mean, I mean it to be mean, but it.
Is very grown up and deep cut that that type of music.
Do you listen to abba or yes?
Not good?
The new record really didn't move me the way I hoped to be moved. But then again, it's hard to sugar mil forever. You can try, as we might yeah, the short answer to a good question, you're in a common misconception, or there are no misconceptions in music. Everybody hears and understands and enjoys or doesn't enjoy it to their own taste. This is all out there for everybody's consumption, delectation, and and and take what you you can from it.
But I came to believe, working in the area of modern composition, experimental fringes of electronic, improvised and beyond, these are all artists, perhaps living outside of the mainstream, but all of them are true and honest to the thing that they're trying to do. Nobody's trying to be academic or thumb in your eye on purpose in any way.
These are people just expressing themselves quite differently that, as it happens, have maybe smaller audiences because this is rarefied, sometimes unusual, sometimes difficult to understand because the frame of reference is a little obscure or whatever it is. But I don't think for a second that any of those artists or any other artists are willfully trying to stay outside of your purview.
Take a while to get there.
Right, Well, So let's think that now you run, you're the managing director of this giant music festival, which is one of the biggest in the world.
Right, yeah, so you're flattering to say so, but that's maybe not quite right. I'm here with you in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the home of Big Years, which as a festival that has been going for this will be the tenth edition that happens in March of twenty twenty three.
But I'm not being It's not hyperbolic really. I mean, it is a huge festival.
It has had an enormous and beautiful impact in I think the American landscape of music festivals and culture. Is it huge, probably one hundred and twenty five artists playing over four days in downtown Knoxville. It's intense. It's it's a rapturous deep dive into everything, all sorts of things all at one time.
And see, that's what I wanted to talk to you about it.
So do you have a a polpulist thought in your head when you're booking acts? So, I mean, presumably you're involved in the choosing of who's going to play and who's not going to play. And do you say, well, look, we've already got five guys who are five different acts who are playing obscure saxophone mathematic compositions. Do we have anyone who's you know, doing covers of Partryes, Family or whatever people are listening to it?
You know, A quick check suggests me, we don't have that artist locked in just yet, but maybe I can lean on you about that. Yes or no, there's no calculation beyond let's just find and invite really great musicians without necessarily thinking first of the area or the genre or the old record bins as we used to say
that they're in. What's interesting about Big Ears and unique about Big Ears, in my opinion, is that it's the only festival that I can think of in the US, or certainly the first that wanted to be about just
great music made by passionate, great people, regardless of genres. Typically, you and I would go to this festival that does this certain thing, or go off to another one that does a different certain thing, and the outcome of that is you have a good idea of what you're getting yourself into, you know, perhaps because you bought tickets, because you know all of the artists are playing in that
festival where there's bluegrass, class school, heavy metal, whatever. But big Ears is putting all of us in the same place at the same time, so that you can move freely between one world of sound and another. And it's just all just great. As Ellington Tokellington said, beyond category, why can't we have all of those things in one place at one time.
So let's zero in a little bit more on the personal nature of what brings you joy and that so clearly you get joy sharing different musical experiences with other people, all right, So that brings you joy professionally, all right. So in your life, for example, obviously everyone has a point where there is an absence of joy, and then there has to be, hopefully, at some point, a journey
through joy. Because I feel that joy is an essential coping mechanism and that if you lack it, you can or if you like the ability to manufacture it, it can lead you into a dark path. That's certainly happened in my life. Is that something that's happened in yours? In your world?
It's interesting you refer to joy as a coping mechanism. I'd like to hear more about that. I don't see it that way. I don't think I'm trying to think of my own personal experiences of joy when it comes to me in a variety of different moments, sometimes unpredictable, mostly unpredictable. Let's say, or I share it or try to generate it so that other people can have it in the context of music performances, festivals, and even simple
as sharing records. This thing we used to do a lot. Yeah, but why is it a coping mechanism?
I think when I say a coping mechanism is because I'm aware of having to manufacture it when I have to, as opposed to I suppose when I don't have to, when I'm experiencing joy and don't and I'm not in need of it, I'm not aware of having to make it.
I think I suppose, so at that point I think maybe it's a coping mechanism.
This is think to me because I maybe I don't think of it quite this way. I'm thinking of examples where or instances where joy comes, it arrives, and for me, this is a Yeah. It's a powerful emotional and physical sensation. It's like a wave that arrives. I didn't summon it exactly. I didn't, so you have no power over it. Rolls in like the weather.
Is that what you mean?
Sometimes in circumstances, I'm thinking of a concert experience where the room, the sound, the energy, the people all converges in a moment where suddenly you're levitating and you're thinking, Wow, I'm being swept up into something that I'm absolutely moving to a higher a different plane.
You'll think of a concert where any specific concert where that's a card for you or too many.
Well many, well many, not not millions, but many. I think of while there was one here at Big Ears actually a few years ago, when I wasn't paying close attention to the program, I just ran into the Biju Theater to hear what was scheduled in that hour, and it was an hour of the music of Alvin Lucier that had been organized I think by Stephen O'Malley from Sun to I was so late, I wasn't quite sure who put this whole thing together, but it was a
beautiful hour of Alvin Lucier's music, which is often quiet, still droning, very slow to unfold, so it's music of duration. You have to give it some time or else you're going to miss everything that's happening. And it was beautiful, and then Alvin himself came out on the stage. At this point, he's an elderly man who has done incredible work for a long period of time. I didn't know he was there, and so there was that moment.
Of till he was playing, he wasn't playing his.
Final well, there was an ensemble of people playing his music, and the last piece was Alvin's master work, or the piece that people know him for, called I Am Sitting in a Room, which is a classic of I'm not going to use the word academic that you're going to put out there, because it's not. It is a twentieth century experiments say deep deep cut. Okay, it's a little bit of a deep cup for a little.
Depending on where you're going from from people.
On the playlist, okay, I got but to hear Alvin himself sitting in a chair and to begin his piece, which is a slowly evolving electronic music piece based on he says a long sentence of paragraph that then goes into a kind of a looping mechanism that begins to pull apart like taffy, the sound texture of the words, until the words themselves become slowly unrecognizable. And it just
turns into this cloud of sound. It's a conceptual piece, yes, but it's also quite moving I think, over a long, slow period of time, and the man himself was in this chair doing it. And I didn't know that until it happened, and I was taken away because of the serendipity of the moment. I was not sure that was on the program. I didn't know it happened, and I found myself floating away with joy. Here I am experiencing. This was interesting to me by that. First of all,
you know, it sounds like a very joyful experience. But what you point out is that the composer himself is there, and so it's a very kind of It's much more intimate than perhaps the composer has been dead for two hundred years and someone's playing a piece of music.
Right very well.
Is it important then that the author of the piece be in the room for it to change the tombre, the feeling of the sensation, or can the right musician do that having not composed the piece. Because I think composition is important to you, I think authorship is important to you.
But I'd be right in saying that.
Yes, that's a yes, and because, of course, we have centuries worth of music now that we all enjoy and moves us for which we have no direct connection to the people who authored that music. Right, So this is of necessity we have to be able to there's something in that music that carries through the ages. Not to mention the millions of records that we have between us, made by artists who we will never encounter, but we
love that music too. I've never seen the master musicians of Jujuoka, but these records are never too far away authorship or this question of maybe it's something extra, it's not essential, but here's the person who did this remarkable thing that is always satisfying, isn't it?
Yes, it is, I think I think that's fair to say. I think I would be impressed by that too if it was, you know, if it was a painter who had done an amazing painting and suddenly they're standing next to you saying, how do you like it?
I mean, yes, of course it's it's going to be a thing.
People like to have that connection music, I think is that is an interesting and strange experience though, because I think music speaks a language that none of us actually understand but maybe that's because I'm not a true musician.
You are a musician. Your audience knows this about you, right.
Drummer, yeah, part time shower singer, Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I've done bits and pieces. But and certainly I think, like you know that Robin Williams and I were friendly, and Robin always had a jazz.
Mentality about doing stand up.
He always, you know, kind of talked about and stand up as a jazz improvisation almost, which I'm not a huge fan of. It's wrong to say I'm not a huge fan of jazz because it's too big an area. But there's not a lot of jazz that moves me that I've heard. But I get the idea of improvisation and an instrument. But that's what interests me about what you do, because at any point in big years, do you pick up your saxophone and go and play.
Absolutely not.
Well, they know why.
I'm too busy working with this wonderful team of people to keep this thing rolling. But you're getting to an interesting point that I think about a lot, and probably a lot of people do. But somehow in our world, let's say, the Western contemporary commercial world, that we are moving around in the three and a half minute song became the central currency of music. Yeah, beatles before beatles and onward. But we sort of live in this commodification of music as the song. How did this come to be?
Why is this crucial? Why is it interesting? Because, after all, music and sound is boundless and enormously different than you and I are sitting with our guitars singing a song in the AaB format with a catchy eight bark bridge. This somehow became a what do we say, a routine or the backdrop against which people understand music. I bought a record had fourteen songs on it. I like three of them. I was stuck with the whole album. It's got fourteen songs.
Well, well, the argument used to be, wasn't that the album?
Like if you take an album like the classic argument for this is the dark side of the moon, right, Like, in order to understand the music and the album, in order to appreciate the music in the album, you have to listen to the old album the way the artist constructed the album.
But you've said something just a moment before this, which the secret is in what you said. There's something weird and mysterious and strange about music. The album, the record, the single, the wax cylinder, the CD. These are just containers for sound. So Pink Floyd, we love them. I have those, we have those records. We've shared those records. They are incredible documents of music and sound because the guys knew that they had a container they needed to manage and release into the world.
That's it.
So you think the container dictates what the artist puts into it is what has.
Happened with the arrival of the Internet. Now anybody can make any music available out to the world. The audience, no, audience doesn't matter in any format that they like.
Does that improve things? It seems like a very odd question.
Yeah, this is the raging debate. Is it approves access? Is what it does? Because didn't we sort of imagine that when the Internet arrived fully to average accessibility to people, that somebody would step up and say, all right, We're going to have this musical experience through the Internet, which was or four totally unavailable to us when we had to put music onto a CD or a record or
something like that. I'm going to play a thirty five hour something because I can do that now, and I'm sure people did this, but it didn't quite come on maybe the way I imagine, But I think that the container has always been too much dictating how we're going to understand and consume music.
Isn't it going to the record store by the record?
You think it's also to do with the democracy of the internet. I don't think that music. Now here's here's a let's discuss does music flourish in a democracy? Because I suspect it doesn't like it does It's not like that. Well, we talk about authorship of music. You know, you can
get collaborations, famous collaborations, Lanna McCartney, whatever it is. But it's not like there's ever like twenty people get together, or at least in my limited experience of music, I don't see it as being something which is collaborative to a point where everybody gets to say.
That was always my problem when I was in a band.
You know that it's it's not a democracy there, someone is the dictator.
Here.
One version of this is exactly right. Here is the music I want you all to play. Let's do it. I need your hands to realize this vision. So off we go. This is only one path, right, because there's communal musical experiences, famously the drums drum circle. Let's get right to that. And what is that? This is essentially everybody's equal doing whatever their contribution may be.
But yeah, any drum circlub in part of and thankfully I've kind of let that go a little bit in my life.
But I used to take.
A drum and set in a drum circle from time to time. I assume you've done the same. I think I have, yes, doe. You know, is even in a drum circle that little power games start to comment at the rhythm, don't they commend?
Isn't this inevitable in any relationship of more than one person in a room, there's going to be a dynamic interaction. And I mean, I'm sort we're being a little fstious about drum circle. But it's true, isn't it. This is this is anybody's walking to drift in, drift out, contribute your bit, stay as long as you like. If someone absolute he despises what Ferguson over here is doing, they might give you an elbow or something like that. And so some of this starts to.
Still drum circles that are a little bit like surfers, like people think surfers are cool and relaxed.
And not but they're not.
They're kind of angry in the territorial and competitive. And I think drum circles are a bit like that too, that people are like, no, I can actually do you're messing up my five eight rhythm that you know? Yeah, and I feel that, But that's that's a different type of music. That's a music which the joy of a drum circle is participating in the drum circle.
We're talking about music making. I think.
So there's music that you might say, I got this new record and I'm going to share with you, check it out, enjoy it. It's programmed programmatic there it is consume it or don't. But music making is something else, isn't. It's about participation, drifting in and out, trying to pushing pull with other musicians, maybe to contribute an idea or find something interesting there. I think there are so many channels and avenues and outcomes that offessvals like big ears
are looking for for more. What else is all this horizon that we can hear and enjoy that we haven't had access to before, the sense of discovery and looking for something that I'm not already very familiar with.
Is there ever a point when you hear a piece of music?
And like my father, whenever I was watching when I was a kid, I was watched Top of the Pulps was the was the TV show in Britain the kids watched, And whenever there was a musical acto on that he disapproved of, he would say, that's no music, That's just a noise.
And I would say, you know that, that's kind of what music is. It's a noise.
But is there ever a piece of music where you Have you ever heard music and you thought, I can't, I can't conceive why a human being would want to listen to that.
Sure, there have and a couple of things that come across my radar that generally that the idea of stopping your listening experience or stopping my listening experience has to do with maybe damage, volume, your power. Yeah, it's a combination of loud and frequencies and noise. What we talk about is noise. Now, this is a tricky area because some things that I might think are beautiful and mellifluous, you might say are kind of noisy. So we all
kind of live on the spectrum somewhere. What's tolerable, what's enjoyable, what is what sounds appealing certain ways?
Don't you think?
Yeah, I think that's possibly true. I think that's possibly true.
I don't want to give you the entire the entire thing, but yeah, okay, it's true, it's true.
But listen, what about a world that had let's imagine for a moment, a world that has no music at all.
It's inconceivable, isn't It's it's totally inconceivable to me and maybe to others that as humans who like to engage and connect to live the human life without music. It's just it's just it's beyond it's beyond comprehension. I can't imagine it.
And yet it is so diverse, and like you say, everybody's a little bit different, everybody like a lot different. Do you think that music contemporary music? Because you're very involved in it and all it well well and a slightly academic is the wrong word, but you're in a cooler area of music than perhaps it's not heavily corporate. Although this office in which we say feels a little corporate.
It doesn't take it up with our people.
Yeah, but it doesn't doesn't feel particularly like the main drive is the profit on the broadsheet and on the spreadsheet here, right, And yet music is huge, multi billion dollar industry.
Well, people get involved for different reasons, don't they. We'll talk about entertainment and the arts broadly defined, attracts lots of different people for lots of different reasons. So there's that that seems pretty straightforward.
But you qualify a music's.
Value, and I think I already know the answer to this, and I'm going to ask you. Do you give music a value in the amount of people that enjoy it or the amount of dollars that can raise? Does that Does that affect how good a piece of music is?
I think it's a measure of where that work will kind of land in the stratosphere.
Yes, is it? Is it? Well?
Good and bad? This is tricky business, isn't it? Because I might find enormous satisfaction from an artist's work or recording or whatever it was that very few people ever encountered, and that's for me, and it's great. This has nothing to do with remuneration. It's just all about a connection to an individual, in this case me or you. You must have records that your friends and family don't care for but it's it's important to you.
I love it.
I think, yeah, I mean, I think it's also it's in a period of time music. Also was that basket quote said, the art is how we decorate space.
Music is how we decorate time.
And I think for me, I think for a law of people, I suspect for you too, the music contains it's time travel. If I listen to you know, the Damned playing Neat Neat Meat, I'm sixteen years old, you know, and I can go back in time travel like that?
Does that? Do you use it for that?
Actually?
That's a it's a really interesting area because probably who knows there. I say, most people can hitch musical experiences or the records to moments in their life. As you say, you suddenly flash back to sixteen years old, I'm in school, or first date or what. These sorts of milestones in your life are inevitably hitched to something you heard, or music that you have in your collection or something like that. But I actually really totally deficient in this area. It's unusual, I think, But.
Yeah, I think that is usually for someone so involved in it.
That just seems odd to me.
There are moments through the mile markers in life where you I remember that record was happening when such has happened, but not so much.
Give me one, Give me one in your life. Give me a moment in your life if you can. When you think you associate a piece of music with either great happiness or great sadness, or a great turning point in your life, or something something that brings you to that moment, can you do it?
Yeah?
Maybe.
I was thinking the other day about perhaps one of the greatest, if not the greatest live concert I've ever been to myself was Fishbone in Philadelphia, a small ish club that must have been I'm going to guess here nineteen eighty seven, nineteen eighty eight, nineteen eighty nine, some late eighties, and it was just one of these nights where well, by the end of the night I found that my shirt was off. I don't really know where anything was. How did this happen? I was just over
come in. If you've ever seen Fishbone live, then I've never seen Fishbone, then you probably had a similar experience for the suddenly your you're half naked. I don't know how this happened.
I had way too many experiences where suddenly I was half naked, and not enough of them involved fish boone.
Or indeed music.
Imagine if that had all come together for you at that right moment, things would be different. But that was really I share that one because it was really transportative, transformational hour.
Wait what did it do to you? Where did where did you start from?
And where did lead you?
What was the fork in the road?
Two things come to mind. It was an overwhelmingly physical, fun experience of elation, pure joy, where the band, the music, the songs, the energy, the rapport was all in a way. It was of a piece where like, man, I'm in the middle of If you've seen that, it's like a three ring circus. When they're playing, it's just it's mayhem but controlled, beautiful, fun, incredible, and it is suddenly lefty, I'm in this experience. And years later, this is like
part two of that question. I was sharing this with somebody, like the greatest show I ever saw, Yeah, Fishbone and this friend, musician friend said I was there too. Thirty years later he says, I was there too. Now there's a shared experience, camaraderie. I didn't know him at the time, and nor did I know he was in the room, of course, But now I have this connection to another person who experienced what I experienced. His joy in that room, I'm sure was equally greater than mine, and we talked
about that for a long time. It's really interesting to go find someone way down the road that you were there too.
I think that that's interesting to me because I think the more we talk about it, and the more I hear you talk about it, as we distill it down, it's really about human connection. It's really about the unspeakable or the nonalytical language of music.
Well, here is I think where music is totally different than the other art forms. Okay, exception of poetry, theater, comedy, it's a it's I think there are all forms of music.
Well you tell me.
I was just going to say, they're all in music where you're managing the illusion of time. You are living in an ephemeral world. When the music stops, it's silence, and you're living in sound and sound is vibration, which is physical, and so something is happening to your body.
Of course, this is obvious with very loud rhythmic music, rock and roll, dance music, R and b. It's also true for quiet music that doesn't seem to be doing much, long duration of music of Morton Felden, for example, Ava Lucier. We talked about that earlier, or the Jerone music of Sun, Lamont Young and others doesn't seem like much it's going on, but vibration is happening, and I.
Really it is a mood altering Sun, which is a music live for that I've started to get into recently, and I we were talking about it, and I'm saying, I don't know if I listened to it correctly, because I haven't seen the band perform live, but I listened to drown Mantle quietly and use it as an ambient side, which I don't know if that's acceptable to the musician, but it's how I enjoy it.
You come to it, I suppose you. We all approach music however we come to it. And I'm sure I don't know about the guys and Sun, but I imagine it would say that's fine, you take take what we have to offer and enjoy it as you wish. But there's something physical about all of this activity and music that I believe that the body begins to react much quicker than your mind does. So things are happening to you before you've had a chance to sort of puzzle
out what's going on here. And this is different than standing in front of a picture. I think it's also a communal aspect to this too as well. Now you're talking about live music. Though live music, I think there's two things going on simultaneously to me, which is I'm having this personal, very solitary, singular experience with the sound that the artist is giving to me. I use the word sound in this case, not song or accomplish or whatever, Okay, vibration.
But there's also a room full of people and they're having this experience too, so we're all in this together. With the live experience, or even if you're in a room with your buddies listening to a record, it's a shared experience.
So I sti't think I do that anymore. I think a lot of the time music is solitary. Now it's headphones and earbunds.
I don't know.
I think it's the availability, isn't it isn't it the maybe it's too available.
Do you find I'm going to ask you a question, do you find that with the ultimate availability of all sound courtesy of your phone and the internet and all the rest. That your interest or passions for music and performance has changed more or less. You're going for more, going for less? Do you think about it differently?
Now?
I think that I think of it did, and I think what happened is is that I've circled back around. Very recently, I invested in a proper piece of hi fi equipment with a day that would play Vinyl through speakers into my room and out loud. And I my twelve year old son, who had never heard vinyl played before, I said, come here, I want to show you something.
He is a musician.
And he sat in my lap and I put on a Glasswegian electronic band called Mogwai who are fabulous Yes, And I played it a decent volume and I let him hear and he let up. Now he's this is a kid that was listening to He wouldn't ever listen to children's music when he was a toddler. He was like, no, no, no, dad, it's Iggy or boy or you know, and he would that was this thing and his mother got him into
it very early. But he looked at me as it was coming through the vinyl and the speakers, and he got kind of flushed and he went, what is this And I said, this is vinyl and he said, I feel I've.
Been robbed, and I said you have.
And he's gotten very into it, and he and his friends have gotten very into So I think there is a The availability is great, but I think that something is always.
Lost when the neighborhood is gentrified.
And I think that that that's happened a little bit with the digitization of.
Yeah, you're right about this, I don't when you tell me the story about your twelve year old, I immediately think part of his reaction is the physicality of hearing your excellent, undoubtedly excellent high five system with your radial damned record going on to the turntable or whatever it was, and now you're in a room here experiencing sound.
And it hits your body.
And it is very that's happening to me, or words to this effect, you know, Yeah, different than your little white earbud that gives you information but maybe not a lot of good sound.
Well, what I did as well is when I started putting on albums which I've been hearing digit late for years and then go back and hear. I don't know why I couldn't hear that stuff, but there are instruments that had disappeared into the digital process.
And I love records also albums LPs, but I love CDs and digital music in the right moment. For example, I mentioned Morton Feldman, the great American composer from the mid century who wrote music of great duration, very quiet. It was in the scores like three or four piece, very very very quiet, which didn't profit from being on LP because there'll be long gaps of silence between notes
which would in heaviably spots. And so in some ways I felt that the CD was invented from music of Morton Feldman, because when you the score calls for silence, you get silence, and that is equally powerful, isn't it. To hearing and indulging and enjoying. Music is concentrated listening. I'm making some assumptions here that when we're listening to music we're actually listening.
It's not.
But I think you concentrate and listen to music. I don't think everyone does that.
People do at different times. Sure, sometimes I'm vacuuming and the stones records are or whatever, But you're not concentrating, you've got music in the room. But when you're listening deep listening, listening deeply and concentrating, everything is becomes vivid because you're your focus, You're really focus, you're listening this music. Music.
Let let me then just wrap this up.
Music still brings you joy, even although you are within it, even though you are surrounded by even tho though you are procuring it for other people, it still works.
It's a search, isn't it. I feel it's an endless search for where can I find that experience again? Maybe it's the next Fishbone concert? Are you still looking for the next Fishbone concert?
Yes? Please, guys, come back.
I'm always We're always, aren't we always looking for something that's an experience in the room that levitates us through sound or through other media.
But never ends.
And now all right, we gotta go.
Okay, thank you for having me here at this table.
It was, in fact a joy.
Yeah,