BCR: If we can go back to graffiti-strewn clubs for a minute, you’ve occasionally spoken out against the time-honoured practice of drawing cocks on backstage walls. Is that something that really annoys you?
John Vanderslice: Well, I’m a guy who can go toe-to-toe with the darkest and most horrific jokes ever. I love bawdiness and dirty, slanderous humour. I’m not offended on any level, it’s just the uniformity of the [laughs] the cocks and the size of the cocks and the black sharpie, you know, there’s no originality. The problem that I have with that whole kind of rock’n’roll backstage thing, the stickers and the graffiti, is its unoriginality, it’s so uniform. And it’s uniform continent to continent! That’s the shocking thing about it.
BCR: Are you saying there’s a US standard for the size of cocks on backstage walls?
John Vanderslice: Yeah. Totally! The problem I have with it is it so often goes hand in hand with shitty food provided on the rider and also shitty sound equipment. There’s almost a direct parallel between that and the people that mind the condition of their backstage area, and you don’t ask for much! All you want is a clean and kind space with wireless, really. That’s all you really ask for. Unfortunately I think that there is this old-school cliché about rock’n’roll needing to be dangerous and dirty to be relevant. That’s like saying that you need your novelists to be drunk to be good. And there’s absolutely no relationship between the quality of the work and the amount of alcohol consumed. It’s just one of those longstanding clichés that has outlived its purpose.
BCR: Having said that, I’m a big fan of dirty and dangerous rock’n’roll.
John Vanderslice: But the idea is that the danger and the dirt is internal to the band, it has nothing to do with its environment. I mean, you can see the Butthole Surfers at the Fillmore, it’s just as dirty and dangerous as if you saw them somewhere else. I saw the Butthole Surfers right when they put out Locust Abortion Technician, and that was as dirty and dangerous as it got, but they brought it, they had it, it was inside of them. It wasn’t locational, you know what I mean? They lived that stuff. And the same when I saw Fugazi play at Fort Funston in San Francisco, which is basically a daycare centre. It was a completely harmless, non-profit environment, and that was dangerous. But it was dangerous because of Fugazi, their ideas and their harmonic and dissonant musical sense. It was inside of them. You know, I also saw Pierre Boulez conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony inside a beautiful symphony hall, and that was dangerous.
BCR: Sorry, I don’t know anything about Mahler! Did you study classical music, or have you just picked it up?
John Vanderslice: I’m a huge classical fan. And I’ve got to say, that that’s part of why the whole baggage of rock’n’roll just seems so silly to me. Getting into, especially turn-of-the-century, Richard Strauss, Bruckner and Mahler, and the second Viennese school, Schoenberg and Alben Berg and Weburn, stuff that is so much more fucked up in approach, philosophically and harmonically, than anything you’ll find in rock’n’roll. And it doesn’t have any of that silly, like, mohawks. It doesn’t have any of those accoutrements of people who are desperate to prove that they’re dangerous. And it just… classical music changed my life! The same with jazz – Sonny Rawlins changed my life. I mean, this is a really, really profound statement of musical possibilities… If you ever want to dip into Mahler, just get number 5.
BCR: Symphony number 5?
John Vanderslice: Yes! And get Leonard Bernstein conducting it. And you will not go wrong. It will be a very interesting portal into another world.
BCR: On the internet there’s some amazing footage of you performing with a 30-piece orchestra.
John Vanderslice: Yeah, it was incredible. They’re all San Francisco Conservatory students here in the city, they kind of band together as Magik Magik Orchestra . I got to be really good friends with the arranger and the leader of the orchestra and we decided to do the show. I think we’re going to do it again in the Fall, and do a whole different set. But it was a tremendous amount of preparation for one show, I think we did fourteen rehearsals. And what becomes tricky is that there’s no conductor, there’s no clock, so you have to really read each other when you’re playing. It was an incredible experience – the sound, the top end of all those violins chorusing together… man! I remember the next time I rehearsed with a band after that, and it seemed like the most vacant and empty experience, like we just didn’t have the armament to continue on as musicians, you know? [laughs] And my whole band felt the same way.
BCR: Well, if you do it again, have you given any thought to maybe recording and releasing it? It did sound spectacular.
John Vanderslice: Absolutely! We have more videos that we’re slowly getting together and putting up on Vimeo in HD. But if we do it again we’ll do it as a continuous recording that we’ll put up on archive.org and Vimeo, we’ll get it out there. For sure.
BCR: You’ve always been really good at maintaining a high-profile web presence. I mean, you were putting up Mp3s on the web back in the late 90s. This is obviously something that’s important to you.
John Vanderslice: I remember back when someone first told me what an Mp3 was. That it’s a codec that does, at that time it was like a 10:1 compression… and I remember the first time, I had a modem connection, and I remember the first time that I pulled down an Mp3, and it hit me right then. It hit everyone at the same time, I’m sure. But I knew that the structure that was in place, that was not fun… a limited number of indie records and then these huge behemoths that were slowly consolidating into awful, horrible corporations headed by the RIAA – which is one of the most bone-headed trade groups ever – and I knew that it was going to undermine their power so greatly that it was going to destroy everything that was in place at that time. Including radio, you know, streaming was just starting at that time, it was the Wild West. And I knew that it was going to be the greatest thing that ever happened to musicians ever. And I really think it is the greatest thing that ever happened.
BCR: I think a lot of artists would consider putting up some of their work in Mp3 format as a kind of damage limitation, rather than something that’s good for musicians.
John Vanderslice: Well, when AM radio started there were many musicians who were absolutely incensed that their stuff was being played virtually for free on the airwaves. So people resist anything that doesn’t make sense to their initial idea of what art is. I think that people just aren’t going to have control anymore, and I’m a chaos guy! I think that if things are chaotic and anarchic then that’s more natural, that’s what interests me about life. There’s a lot of bands that are upset that people are chatting about them on message boards, slamming them personally or obsessing over minor details of their lives, but that’s just an extension of conversation. This is just reality. In other words, Mp3s, peer-to-peer, all this stuff, it’s just an extension of the freedom to move around bits of information. It’s not really specific to music.
BCR: So what’s your personal reaction to someone downloading one of your albums?
John Vanderslice: I guess I don’t really have a reaction. I’m a freedom frontier guy. I think that the less restriction and kind of legal worrying that there is in the internet world, the better. I think that everything should be out there. Forget albums, I think that if people are legally going to trade anything – books under copyright, images under copyright – outside of embedding social security numbers in every packet of information that carries over the web, you can’t do anything about it. It becomes a broader philosophical question about freedom. And I don’t want to get bogged down in this, but digital media is infinitely reproducible. It’s not like someone going into a record store and stealing a hard copy of a 180 gatefold vinyl. It’s completely different. And I’m doing fine right now! [laughs] I’m not really worried about it. I’ve been making music at the start of this stuff and now when it’s endemic, and I seem to be making more money and doing better, and I have more people at shows… so my own take on this is that whatever’s happening on the internet is a good thing. I’m not worried about it.
BCR: Have you ever lurked on a messageboard when people were discussing you?
John Vanderslice: I’m not really into ego-surfing at all…
BCR: Ego-surfing? Is that what you call it?
John Vanderslice: That’s what people call it. And I’ll tell you why, because often people will take photos of shows that I’ve done, and they’ll email me and say “hey here’s some photos of you playing this show”, and I’m really grateful, I think it’s really sweet because it’s just people being respectful. But what I want to say is, “hey, I was there, man! [laughs] Why do I need these photos of me playing?” And that’s the same way I feel about reviews. Any chatter – to me it’s free speech. I’m totally down with it. The things that excite me would be really extreme comments, either completely obsessive and inappropriate comments about my personal life or super-creative slams and disses. Once in a while people email me this stuff…
BCR: “My sister listened to this album and then she lost her baby.”
John Vanderslice: Yeah! [laughs] Something like that would be absolutely fantastic. Well, not fantastic, obviously – I don’t want any hate emails! But I think that there’s just so much white noise about everything now… I’m a pretty centred person, I live within this shell, and that’s as much ego-gratification as I need. I’m there at the shows, I made the record, so I don’t need to wonder about the perception. You know, I imagine in 1971 when you released a record there’d be probably five reviews that really have visibility. Now this is another great thing about the internet, because it doesn’t work like that anymore. There’s thousands of reviews that have visibility. I guess the question is, where are you going to put your energy?
BCR: You mentioned before that you have a Twitter account, do you think the increasing popularity of this kind of social networking means artists are expected to be more available to their fans than they were previously?
John Vanderslice: That’s a good question. I know tons of people who have no visibility at all. They’re completely invisible, and they wear it well. I think it’s really up to the temperament of the artist. Personally, I’m on the internet all the time. I like the interface of blogs and my website, and the way that you can chat on the internet. For me it’s a very natural way to have a voice. But some people that I know really have zero interest. Their label pushes them to have visibility and to have more of a voice online, but it’s just not inside of them. For me it’s very natural, but it would be a total buzzkill if it wasn’t. And there are some bands out there that are really putting on a brave face, and trying to be more visible and more online, and that would suck, being pressured to do something like that.
BCR: I guess you’re lucky, in a way, that you haven’t constructed a big rock’n’roll persona for yourself. No make-up, no spandex… that kind of image would be pretty hard to maintain while you’re tweeting what you had for breakfast.
John Vanderslice: Absolutely. The mundane stuff, for me I was always interested in the idea that being in a band and writing songs, it’s no different than if you were a cabinetmaker or something. This is a very unromantic and mundane view, for some people I guess it’s really dismal. But for me it’s necessary and kind of heartening. It’s just like being a novelist, there’s a grind to doing anything. Hey, you’re a writer, there’s a grind to being a writer, it’s just a nine to five kind of thing sometimes. There’s going to be moments of inspiration, but hey, I was a waiter for seven years, and there’s as much inspiration in being a waiter as being a songwriter! I’m not being funny!
John Vanderslice on Myspace
John Vanderslice Official Site
