John Andrew Fredrick: The Black Watch Abides
The prolific songwriter reflects on three decades of creative output with The Black Watch, what it’s like to release the band’s 25th album, For All the World, and why he just can’t stop stealing from The Beatles.
Today, the Spotlight shines on John Andrew Fredrick of The Black Watch.
After thirty-seven years of making indie rock, the band’s latest album, For All the World, boasts an energy and vitality that surprises even John. John’s a great guest: His creative process remains rooted in uncertainty, he reads more about music than he listens to it, he draws inspiration from everything from Dostoyevsky to David Bowie, and believes the best songwriting comes from not knowing too much about where you’re headed.
John talked with me about his philosophy of creative doubt, his daily ritual of playing guitar, and why staying uncertain after all these years keeps the music feeling alive.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from The Black Watch’s album For All the World)
Dig Deeper
• Visit The Black Watch at their Facebook page
• The Black Watch discography and streaming links on Bandcamp
• John Andrew Fredrick’s author page and novels at Verse Chorus Press
Albums and Songs Mentioned:
• Led Zeppelin Five - The Black Watch album that courted controversy with its title
• “It’s All Too Much” - Beatles cover featured on Led Zeppelin Five
• The White Album - The Beatles album that inspired Fredrick’s songwriting beginnings
• Ram - Paul McCartney solo album, Fredrick’s favorite Beatles solo work
• The Concert for Bangladesh - George Harrison album Lawrence champions
Literary Works and Authors:
• The King of Good Intentions trilogy by John Andrew Fredrick
• The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin
• Understanding Hunter S. Thompson - Modern critical examination of the gonzo journalist
• The Nice and the Good by Iris Murdoch
• The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
Musical Influences and References:
• The Beatles - Fredrick’s “super über overlord masters”
• Guided By Voices and Robert Pollard’s prolific output
• XTC - Influence on The Black Watch’s Jiggery-Pokery album
• David Bowie - Extended discussion of catalog favorites
• Hunky Dory, Low, and Blackstar - Key Bowie albums discussed
• Steely Dan and 10cc - Examples of pristine recording
Academia:
• University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) - Where Fredrick earned his Ph.D. in English
• Andrew Marvell - 17th-century poet whose “time’s winged chariot” phrase resonates with Fredrick
• T.S. Eliot - Source of “good poets steal” philosophy
• Negative capability - John Keats’ concept of remaining in uncertainty
More About The Black Watch:
• Shimmering & Shining with The Black Watch
• Out of My Tree: An Interview with the Black Watch’s John Andrew Fredrick
• Pennyblackmusic: Interview with John Andrew Fredrick
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: Before we get started, I have to say I've spent the last couple of days listening to the new record. You know, I try to avoid hack music guy phrases about music, but something that kept occurring to me over and over again was there's a real spirit of vitality to it, a real energy. I don't really have a question around that, but I wanted to say that to you, and I'm curious how that lands. Do you recognize that? Do you feel an energy to the record? Because I feel it.
John Andrew Fredrick: That's spot-on, but also a bit nebulous to describe it like that, because there are different sorts of energies. There's an ex-student of mine who used to also play cello on occasional acoustic gigs. I had to Uber her over to mine before I asked her to be in a video with us. Very charming woman named Narada Andrada, who was a top cellist. She came here first, and then we went to my bandmate Andy's house to shoot the video, which is not my favorite thing to do—I'm camera shy anyway, unless it's a Zoom meeting or whatever. She got to my house by eight o'clock, and I was so excited to see her—hadn't seen her in years—and she just goes, "Where do you get all this energy from?"
You know, in part it's coffee, of course, and I'm an early riser. People often say, "How do you find the energy for all of these records and books and all that?" I just don't know. Maybe I feel like time's winged chariot is hurrying near—the whole Andrew Marvell poem. I'm always feeling like I'm gonna die, even though I'm fit as a fiddle and drinking a delicious elixir of life right now in the afternoon. (laughter)
I don't know. It's one of those ineffable things. So I don't know where it comes from. I like to work, I like to do stuff. And as far as songwriting goes or writing fiction, I just want to make more things and steal more bits from Beatles songs to turn into my own songs. I mean, apropos the whole Eliot thing—bad poets imitate, good poets steal—I'll Scout's honor admit to stealing things wholesale from my super über overlord masters, the Beatles. So that's kind of a banal answer, but I'm obviously riffing here. I don't really know where the energy for that comes from.
But I refuse to be jaded about the artists that I love, the novelists and poets that I love, people that I love, and the process of making music. I have these people that I work with who make it, who facilitate it so much. Lawrence, it's not funny. I mean, a couple of the guys who are in the Black Watch now can drum and play piano and play bass like mad people. I don't have to have a proper band. I can pick any one of them and just go, "Hey, I'll play you a song acoustic and get it down. Take it away from there," because I trust them like that. My son has done a lot of work on our stuff as well, and I just bought him a new computer because he's got a house now where he can have a studio. So he'll be next up in the people who just play all these instruments and can fill in and just go, "Hey, take it away."
I'm sure there'll be things that I don't like, but let's go. I write every day as well. You know, they always said that Paul Simon did. I don't do it in a slavish way—they said Paul Simon chains himself to a piano and works two hours a day. That would be far too regimented for me, but I just do it because a guitar is handy and I like doing it and seeing what I can do, messing around with open tunings and different capos on the guitar. Some former bandmates have said, "John, no matter how much jiggery-pokery that you're engaging in, it's all G-C-D occasional E minor anyway." (laughter)
Like, okay, well don't tell anybody that.
Lawrence: I dig that.
John: I mean, thanks for noticing that there's an otherworldly-ish kind of thing to stuff that we do sometimes. We like ethereal things and happy accidents—mistakes that turn into features. Serendipities, you know, that kind of thing. But at the same time, this is all—I don't really have an answer for it, for most things.
Lawrence: Well, it's interesting. As I was going through the discography, I listened to—I mean, anybody that's gonna name an album Led Zeppelin Five is okay in my book. (laughter)
John: We tried for a lawsuit—the confession that I'll make, hoping the Zeppelin Trust would come after us. It would create a lot more press.
Lawrence: Wouldn't hurt!
John: I mean, we say that jovially, but we just thought—I don't know, it made us—when the guys who were in the band at the time, both of them claim that they came up with that title. But I was there and I know that I did. It doesn't matter because they were very clever, but we all fell about the place just laughing to think of that. And it is our biggest-selling one because, most likely, those stoned yearners for the Zep made them think, "Oh man!"
Lawrence: "Dude, there's a new Zeppelin album! Holy shit!" I'd love—I didn't even think of that part of it. That's amazing. (laughter)
John: Oh, it's easily the best-selling record we ever did. So maybe some of those guys with Jimmy Page-issue or Robert Plant-issue dungarees too tight and have no pockets kind of thing kept it in their collections anyway, just thinking, "Oh, okay, there's some interesting direction." (laughter)
Lawrence: Where I was going with that was—I believe that's where the cover of "It's All Too Much" is.
John: Yeah, it's a hidden giant.
Lawrence: As I was listening to it, it conjured up for me a little bit of Guided By Voices, and what I was thinking and what I wanted to tell you was the difference was that you're capable of firing up that and harnessing that looseness and that exciting almost-verge-of-breaking-down that a lot of his tracks have.
John: Yeah.
Lawrence: Yet there's a polish—you seem to have a commitment to the recording, to the fidelity, and I'm curious about that.
John: I don't like super-polished things necessarily, unless we want to go back to the halcyon days of recording of things that are just so pristine that they're not even funny—Steely Dan, 10cc, that kind of stuff. But for my own stuff, I don't want it to sound too slick. My kid Chandler is such an indie rock, Pavement kind of guy—he's just like, "Dad, why don't you mess things up more often?" I'm going, "Well, we sort of try, but I work with such great engineers and I don't get involved in that kind of stuff." They're trained for that. I've touched the faders in a studio five times over thirty-some-odd years. So that's out of my purview. But they want it to sound really good without it sounding slick. And usually the people that I play with are either insanely talented already or very well rehearsed.
I think we rehearsed for three months for Led Zeppelin Five before we went into the studio—quite a long time, even though the players for that particular record were already quite expert. A polished kind of thing isn't something that we aim for. It might just be an outcropping that happens naturally in the mixing. But it's not that we've tried to be willfully obscure, as one website says that can't wait to get our records because "you guys are the most willfully obscure thing." I'm going, "That's not a boon, that's not a super compliment." We're not trying to be obscure. We just are. (laughter) That would seem like a perverse thing that might be okay for a couple of years, but for the thirty-plus that the Black Watch has been around, it would seem like madness.
Lawrence: What a brand! (laughter)
John: Well, Lawrence, I always just go, "Well, I never set out to be rich and famous from being a songwriter, and I've succeeded admirably at both in that I'm neither." So unless—a small circle of people that's expanding like a rock in a puddle. More and more people, and a lot of times people in reviews or podcasts will say things like, "I can't believe I haven't heard of you before," to the point where I get a bit sick of hearing that. But it's also bittersweet—it's nice to hear that somebody just goes, "Wow, I'm just getting around to discovering you."
So I think those who know us are the ones who have been hyped by publicists or who are keen readers of music magazines, which I am myself. I read about music more than I listen to it—maybe it's a time constraint kind of thing. I read reviews thinking, "Okay, the way that this is described is gonna be my cuppa." So there you go. I don't know if that answers your question. I don't know if any of these answer the question. I think your opening salvo made it so that you wanted to talk about life and philosophy and literature and stuff like that. I'm like, "Oh my God, don't wind me up like that," (laughter) because I could just go forever, go nowhere. Go nowhere forever.
Lawrence: No, it's my stock and trade.
John: Good.
Lawrence: Something I wanted to ask you about—and I'm always conscious about this—there's two things I hate to do to artists, but then I can't help myself from doing. One is psychologizing a little bit and the other is getting into process. So I'll try to be diligent about that. But...
John: Go right ahead. I'm the hugest fan of psychology that you'll talk to today, unless you've got a meeting with your shrink. (laughter)
Lawrence: I was gonna say, you don't know where I'm going next. Your songwriting and creative writing both strike me as fundamentally things you do alone ultimately until you involve the editor, until you involve the band. And I'm curious about the role of isolation. When you were younger, when you hurt your leg and you were kind of laid up for a while...
John: A year. I spent a year in bed. My left tibia broken in a football game in fifth grade, and my father had forbidden us to play tackle. But of course we mucked off to a field in an elementary school and I broke my leg so badly that it just wouldn't heal. So I spent an entire—all of fifth grade out of school—with a home teacher who was some doddering little old, sweet old lady that couldn't really teach anymore or whatever.
And my parents, bless them, didn't let me watch more than an hour or so of television, and this is the sixties, the heyday of your Gilligan's Island or Rat Patrol or the Beatles cartoon or whatever. (laughter)
Lawrence: All the good stuff.
John: So I read and I was playing guitar by then, so I propped my little acoustic Silvertone on my cast that went up to my hip all the way to the toes. And I just got used to it. My brother and sister would've been away at school and they're not gonna be amused—hard to play with a kid that's got a giant plaster thing on his body. So I'm just used to it, but that made me who I am.
This is one of the reasons why I don't think we should ever despair, because sometimes those things—those calamities—I think I was reading Nietzsche the other day and he made some allusion to the fact that our defeats are the things that will lead us towards illumination, perhaps not victory, but these things that ostensibly seem like great setbacks and giant bummers. How many songs have come from heartbreak or friendships exploding? I mean, that's territory I've certainly mined before. But it's really quite lonely unless you dig yourself. It's like being in a coal mine—it's frightening unless you go exploring, spelunking down to the heart of it or something. So I'm just embracing that. It's a long-winded way of saying I'm a masochist. (laughter)
Lawrence: Do you remember what it was like? Do you remember that fifth-grade self? Was it sad? Was it depressing?
John: Oh yeah, of course. I mean, I'm still a jock. I play tennis four or five times a week, not super aggressively, mostly doubles and stuff. And a lot of times for fun. In fact, after stopping teaching at university, I've gone back to teaching tennis to kids. So I played all sports in high school. I rode the bench on all sports in high school, but just to be on a team and just to play sports. My dad was a coach for college, for baseball and basketball. My brother played college football. Sports are just there in me.
So to hear the cries of my friends out in the street playing touch football or shooting around was utter torture, because the first week they come by like, "Oh, so sorry Johnny, let me sign your cast." And then you don't hear from them for the rest of forever. But you hear them outside playing in the cul-de-sac where we lived in Santa Barbara.
So it was fine, but then one gets used to anything. It's dangerous kind of thinking—going like, "Prison, I could survive that if that's where I'm headed"—but that's not exactly the same kind of isolation. But I think you kind of embrace it and resent it.
When there was a mania maybe twenty years ago of people in LA—of course every swing a dead armadillo and everyone's got a screenplay—sometimes you'd go to a party and someone would say, "Oh, this is my writing partner." Like, what do you mean? Writing's not meant to be with someone. Are you joking? (laughter) You're alone, partially drunk as hell, or sad as hell and weeping onto the page and with nobody around forever. That's how it goes. I just thought, "Oh my God, how dare you try to drag somebody else into the equation?"
I've never tried to write really with anybody, and just as far as collaboration goes, I don't know that it's—I have a vision of how things go. And in the same way, like with arrangements, if we've ever had a producer, it's been rare who's tried to say, "Okay, maybe we could put the verse here and the chorus there." I'm going, "I already know this song," and in a myopic sort of way, I don't think I can adapt to something as simple as moving the bridge to another place when we write bridges.
So this is another long-winded way of saying, "Wow, this guy's a control freak beyond," or whatever. But it's just the way that I work and like to work and know that seemingly gets the results that hopefully please, or if not, oh well.
Lawrence: Are you able, or have you ever written from a place of happiness or contentment?
John: Oh sure, absolutely. I only write when I'm super up or super down anyway. I mean, I write quote-unquote in terms of just chord progressions or whatever. But as far as the lyrics go, it's either jubilant or in a kind of maybe manic way—either jubilant (we are getting into the psychology of songwriting, which is fascinating, I think) or if I'm really, really down. Or it also depends on what I've been reading, if I'm very inspired, but that could be a kind of jubilance or kind of downer in the sense of, "Oh my God, I'll never be as good as Philip Larkin or T.S. Eliot, or anybody like that." But at the same time that realization—"I'm gonna try at least"—so yeah.
Lawrence: Does your reading—it seems self-evident how reading might inform mood for lyrics or even turns of phrase or just ideas. Does literature manifest in the music? Does it influence sound?
John: I can't say that it does because I don't see how it would. It must seep in a—dreadful word coming, Lawrence—"holistic" way. (laughter)
Lawrence: You're such a Californian.
John: I know. No, I hate that word. "Can I have that with some sprouts?" I'm like...
Lawrence: Nobody told me I was interviewing a hippie!
John: Oh my God. I'm from the sixties. I'm from another fashion. No, with the caveat just saying dreadful word. I can imagine that it does seep in there somehow, but I couldn't exactly finger how it could. It's definitely all over the lyrics. Although I'll be the last person to equate them with poetry—I've had fights with people about that. I don't think that lyrics are poetry. Poetry is poetry. I mean, people have tried in the past, even former professors, to compliment me and say, "Oh, lyrics are poetry." Like, no, they're not. They can be poetic, but to my way of thinking they're separate things.
Lawrence: It's interesting that need to elevate them beyond—elevate the form beyond what it is.
John: What? Oh yeah. I never thought about it like that. That's really good, thanks. In a way it's diminishing them to try to, like you said, elevate them to some status that they don't need. Good lyrics are still a legitimate art form. So to call oneself—I think there's a certain pride that you should have for oneself to call oneself a lyricist.
Lawrence: I think I read in another interview with you that you talked about drawing from the unconscious. Are you of that school of thought or have you—are you a channeler? Are you an antenna?
John: I think so. I think it's part very deliberate using the years of studying poetry in graduate school and beyond to do something that's mannered and disciplined in that respect. And then other times where I just have a dream of a song that comes to me that I channel, like you said. So I think it's probably fifty-fifty, or maybe that you work them together—you get something that comes to you as if in a dream, and then you massage it around to make it suit the cadences of the melodies.
But yeah, I draw a lot from the unconscious. But at the same time, it's not really from the unconscious if I get inspired by having read somebody else. I mean, I think one of my profs at UCSB said books beget books. And I think that's really true. And also music begets music, as I just made an allusion to stealing from the Beatles. Just that there's a provenance in there and a precedent. So again, all of this is just theorizing because nobody knows for sure.
This is one of the reasons why we ask these questions of people who create, I think—try to get at the heart of something that we can't get at the heart of. I mean there's a certain nobility, it seems to me, in trying to articulate that kind of thing and fail, and failing, coming short in a way, or at least making do with it, thinking, "Oh, okay, that's an interesting answer. That's a possibility," without it ever being the definitive thing. How's that for some pseudo-philosophy? (laughter)
Lawrence: And the ambiguity's fine, right? It doesn't...
John: Yeah, absolutely. To live in that ambiguous world is just what Keats called negative capability. He praised—maybe you've read this before—he praised Shakespeare as being the greatest at that, of not needing to know. It's like a Pandora's box thing. There's so much I don't, and a Nietzschean thing—so much you don't want to know that wisdom comes from an unknowing kind of thing. I mean, think of the most obnoxious people you know in your social life—they're most likely know-it-alls, the kind of person who's got an answer for everything. "Actually, that's purple, not blue," or whatever. I don't wanna be one of those people who's got these definitive things. I wanna remain in a kind of mist.
Lawrence: Apropos of nothing, or slightly apropos—what you were just saying reminded me of this meme online a couple years ago. It was after Biden withdrew from Afghanistan. It was a picture of a guy and the top said, referring to COVID, "I used to be an expert in epidemiology. Now I'm an expert in foreign affairs." (laughter)
John: That raises the question of how that term "expert" has been so weaponized and bandied about, people declaring themselves. My kid and I—my kid obviously majored in English like I did, and he's very political. I've tried to be apolitical, but it's hard in this zeitgeist. But he talks about that. He was saying the other month, "It's so insane how people invoke this whole expert thing." Just as mad to me as people talking about "lived experience"—like all experience is lived. It's such a nonsense pleonasm. It's just experience, whether you've read about it or been there.
But I think things remaining ambiguous and not needing to know all the time is really beneficial for artists—not to have made up their minds about too many things. Because all of this expression is just an exploration of sorts, just to see, just to find out. To write to find out. I never plot out any of my novels. I don't know what's gonna happen. I just write to find out, create characters I think strong enough to let them live as it were.
Lawrence: Oh, wow.
John: I think if I came up with a blueprint that this is gonna happen, that is gonna happen, then I wouldn't do it because it would just be like a coloring book rather than a map.
Lawrence: This feels incredibly hackneyed to ask, but again, I'm gonna put my self-consciousness aside and ask you: Do you ever think about your characters after you're done writing about them? Do you ever wonder where they are or...
John: No, no. I mean, they had their time—like ex-girlfriends, they had their time and I'd love to talk to them. It's not always the case they'd like to talk to me. But I mean, it seems—The King of Good Intentions is a three-part thing, just because of course the main character is in a sort of—I'm flattering myself to say Nabokovian way—to play a trick on the naïfs who would think that's really me. It's of course greatly fictionalized, but I had a lot to say. But I don't really think about stuff after, nor do I think too heavily about the records that we've done.
To segue back into that, I do go back and listen to them. I made them because I wanted something, quite selfishly, for myself to listen to. I never believe it when people say, "Oh, I never listen to my old records." Like, why did you make them then? It should have been to make something that you thought was beautiful or profound or rocking or what have you. So I don't necessarily go back to dwell on them because the pleasure is in the actual creation of stuff and the molding of the sentences to get them to where I want them to be.
So they've served their purpose, in other words, and they're also for other people because I don't like to interpret anything I've done really. Unless I'm pressed a little bit, and then I would just say I'm just another interpreter. I don't have the definitive final say about "this meant that, meant the other." I'm a great believer in the intentional fallacy—people say, I'm just going, "Hey, what did you think?" Because I'm just another reader or listener to my stuff. And then sometimes I like what your observation was a minute ago—something will occur to me that somebody saw that I never saw in the songs or in the characters or in the narrative. And that's fantastic. That's great. Something to build on and would be great if it just inspires other people to make things or to react to it.
Lawrence: It's interesting you say that. A lot of times when I talk to artists and we dig into the work or the new work especially, in a lot of cases they're always so grateful to talk to someone who attentively listened.
John: That's probably increased in the wake of the typical overproduction where everybody has a band now. We used to think in the eighties, early nineties, "Oh my God, there's so many bands, too many bands." But they've just sprawled, mushroomed exponentially. So these days to get—I had a meeting with the biggest big shot in the industry I've ever met. Nicest guy in the world, this guy, Tarquin Gotch, who manages AC/DC now and two of the guys from the Police, not Sting. And he said, "John, just release singles. What do you do in a double album? People don't have time for that. What kind of expectations have you got on their time when lots of bands are cottoning to this idea of just putting out singles steadily?"
Just capitulating, in my mind, as a person who's got lots of records and loves the album format, to just kowtow to that sort of mentality or capitulate to it, that of the modern attention span—it's just shot anyway. I don't wanna keep fighting that fight to get somebody to focus on something, even though a double LP is a lot to ask these days. It might not have been when Physical Graffiti came out, or your beloved David Bowie—he didn't, he never made a double album, but he could have. Surely, but I imagine he was "under pressure" enough, pun intended, to...
Lawrence: Ooooohhhhh...
John: To get more stuff. That just came to me. Sorry, Lawrence. (laughter) That wasn't preconceived. I'm just saying I'm fascinated by all the Bowie posters because I'm a freak for the guy—have every, defend his later records against anybody. And the middle ones too. I'm not just about Low and Hunky Dory, though those are totally dear to me.
But I think he could have easily done a double album, and people would've lapped it up. After Ziggy, if there was Ziggy as a double LP, people would've freaked and bought it the first day that was out there. But the nature of the listener, it seems, has changed.
I mean, I still have a flip phone. I'm a total Luddite. I resist technology in the name of progress. It seems to me that their names are legion, where there's just been horrible things. All this technology itself—it's not making our lives any better at all. It's not giving us the peace of mind or tranquility somehow to sit down and listen to an entire album. And maybe that's the truth, and I don't wanna face that, but I think that maybe it could be quasi-combated by just going, "No, I'm gonna do an album. I'm not gonna release little piddling singles here and there. Make some demands of people." That's the kind of prof that I was too—people would say, "Well, you gotta teach to the median." I'm like, "No, I'm gonna drag the people at the bottom up with the good students if I can, and if they fall by the wayside, oh well." So maybe we're just aiming to be even more obscure than ever. (laughter)
Lawrence: What a wonderful self-sabotage that is.
John: I'm gonna go down firing. It's consistent.
Lawrence: To circle back a little bit, you talked about listening to the old music, and when you were talking to me about that, I had this other note. You had made a comment that each album's a reaction to the one before it. That to me is fascinating, and so again, it begs the question: What are you responding to or building on with the current double record from the last record?
John: Okay, that's great because half of this new record was produced by the chap that did Weird Rooms, which had some wonderful English musician who—another one of those guys who's a drummer, but he could also compose strings and play guitar. That Misha—and I inadvertently, it was just the two of us and my son Chandler came out to Austin, to Misha's studio to do that. We didn't set out to do a—what's that Who record that has all the jingles in between? It's my favorite Who record—The Who Sell Out. We didn't set out to do something with these little musical interludes or instrumentals or quirky little radio bits or anything. They just—again, we just amused ourselves and we had little songs left over. We just thought, "Okay, let's unconsciously make a," like by happenstance we made a quote-unquote concept record, and some people saw that it was easy parallel to see to The Who Sell Out.
So I thought, "I'm not gonna do anything along those lines. Nothing quirky, just song songs. My usual—I'm gonna try to make The White Album and I'm going to fail once again. But I've tried." So I think it was a reaction against that sort of thing—that there was a quirky (a better term than cute, even though you could say it was kind of cutesy) to do that sort of thing. But this would be much more earnest, serious collection of songs without thinking at all of trying to go genre hopping or to make something cohesive. Just here's twenty-one new songs. Have at 'em. I dunno what they have to do with each other at all. If somebody sees a through line there, a motif, a theme, good for them, because there was nothing that I planned to do.
I mean, if you look back to a record we did called Jiggery-Pokery, which is the most XTC-ish record we'd done, which has a drum machine and lots of J'anna Jacoby's violin and acoustic guitar like XTC's Mummer. And I think at that time the motif would've been, "I'm gonna do something that's very pastoral and very XTC-like, and charming and old-timey." That would've been a reaction to the one before, which was a lot more dissonant guitars and heavy drums and that sort of thing.
So it might just be—again, like mining the minutia of going like—I think in my mind that it's a reaction. But other people might just say, "Oh, it's a different flavor of it, but it's still the Black Watch." So I think that's the way that I maybe rationalize how I come up with stuff or try to justify, because I've been accused of being prolific. I take it as an accusation. I'd much rather people say, "Oh, you're such a genius," than "You're so prolific." I'm going, "Okay," I just don't know. It seems like it's an insult sometimes when people bring that up, although I know it's not—I'm not a paranoid person.
Lawrence: What's that? What's it triggering in you? What's it implying? What are you hearing?
John: Oh, well, because—I may be dropping so many names, but Susan Sontag years and years ago talked about this thing called prototypical American overproduction, where John Updike's got four million novels and so does Philip Roth. Pauline Kael can't stop writing movie reviews. Just stuff where other European or UK artists seem to be a little bit more deliberate and methodical in terms of their release of stuff. I mean, you made a reference perhaps before we started rolling to Guided By Voices—who could possibly keep up with Robert Pollard's? Only a few absolute kooks, and bless them for that.
But what—and I wonder what he says in relation to the mania that is constant release of stuff. Just that it seems that sometimes, as not a defensive person, it does trigger something in me to where I think, "Okay, now if you use the P word, then maybe I have to go on the offense and justify having done all these things." But it often comes from people who are would-be artists themselves who just look at it and just go, "How could I even do—I despair at looking at your discography or whatever—how do you do that? I wish I could roll out songs like you do." And I don't know what to say to that.
And I have no psychological explanation for why there have been so many records. No one stopped me—that's the simplest thing—and I'm around people whom I love as friends and collaborators. Once we get into the studio, it just seems like I'm always reacting against what I've done. And I always seem to come up with something that pleases me. So if it pleases me as a person with eminently good taste (laughter)—it must please other people. So again, I think it's—no one stopped me, so I carry on.
Lawrence: I have some real problems with that Sontag characterization because I think of, well, certainly your beloved Beatles. Now we can't talk about what would've happened after 1971, but man, from '63 to '70—there weren't too many people more prolific, furiously creating in any field.
John: Yeah, absolutely. Playing off each other. And they had three writers, certainly George as a full-time employee of Apple Corp. by the end. And then of course, the fact that he had to fight so hard for stuff that occasioned his greatest solo thing for me, All Things Must Pass. But yeah, who knows? I mean, there's still boffins to this day—you might know of them—who try to cobble together the records that would've been from stuff that's on Plastic Ono Band and All Things Must Pass. And that's really interesting. I like it as well. Like, "Oh, you're gonna put 'It Don't Come Easy' as the first song on side two." Like, great. That's a great song.
Lawrence: A friend of mine does The White Album without any Paul songs. That's always funny.
John: How could it be? He very famously said—he is quizzed about that—George Martin saying it would've made a great single album. I remember Sir Paul just going, "Come on, it's The White Album." I wouldn't—a lot of my friends who might respect and Beatles freaks like me do say that there's a lot of dross on that. Like, no, leave it. I enjoy the dross just as much. "Piggies" should be on that record, and "Why Don't We Do It in the Road," etc.
Lawrence: I can't—it's funny, I lose my critical faculties with that band, and I'm not alone in that.
John: It's hard.
Lawrence: It's so hard to like, what? You're gonna really question them?
John: Right. Exactly. I agree.
Lawrence: I thought where you were going to go was that the implication was it can't possibly all be good if you're making that much.
John: Right. I mean, and again, I can't be the judge of that. I would say
And I have no psychological explanation for why there have been so many records. No one stopped me—that's the simplest thing—and I'm around people whom I love as friends and collaborators. Once we get into the studio, it just seems like I'm always reacting against what I've done. And I always seem to come up with something that pleases me. So if it pleases me as a person with eminently good taste (laughter)—it must please other people. So again, I think it's—no one stopped me, so I carry on.
[00:37:17] Lawrence: I have some real problems with that Sontag characterization because I think of, well, certainly your beloved Beatles. Now we can't talk about what would've happened after 1971, but man, from '63 to '70—there weren't too many people more prolific, furiously creating in any field.
[00:37:34] John: Yeah, absolutely. Playing off each other. And they had three writers, certainly George as a full-time employee of Apple Corp. by the end. And then of course, the fact that he had to fight so hard for stuff that occasioned his greatest solo thing for me, All Things Must Pass. But yeah, who knows? I mean, there's still boffins to this day—you might know of them—who try to cobble together the records that would've been from stuff that's on Plastic Ono Band and All Things Must Pass. And that's really interesting. I like it as well. Like, "Oh, you're gonna put 'It Don't Come Easy' as the first song on side two." Like, great. That's a great song.
[00:38:15] Lawrence: A friend of mine does The White Album without any Paul songs. That's always funny.
[00:38:19] John: How could it be? He very famously said—he is quizzed about that—George Martin saying it would've made a great single album. I remember Sir Paul just going, "Come on, it's The White Album." I wouldn't—a lot of my friends who might respect and Beatles freaks like me do say that there's a lot of dross on that. Like, no, leave it. I enjoy the dross just as much. "Piggies" should be on that record, and "Why Don't We Do It in the Road," etc.
[00:38:47] Lawrence: I can't—it's funny, I lose my critical faculties with that band, and I'm not alone in that.
[00:38:53] John: It's hard.
[00:38:53] Lawrence: It's so hard to like, what? You're gonna really question them?
[00:38:56] John: Right. Exactly. I agree.
[00:38:59] Lawrence: I thought where you were going to go was that the implication was it can't possibly all be good if you're making that much.
[00:39:07] John: Right. I mean, and again, I can't be the judge of that. I would say that there are songs of ours that please me a lot more than other ones and that seem to resonate with people more than other songs do. I don't think there's anything that we've ever released where I just go, "Oh my God, I can't stand that song." There are records that I favor over others. I don't like to delineate which those are because they'd hurt the people who produced them. But they've all got something that was of a time.
I mean, the first one we did with St. Valentine—the first album that came out was made by people who were very under-rehearsed. And when people in Santa Barbara heard it, they might've gone, "Why don't you take that money and just do a couple songs rather than this rustic sixteen-track kind of thing where the drummer skids a little bit off the click track?" And I thought, "No, I'm gonna be the kind of guy—I was gonna grow up in public. I'm just gonna—this is a map. I believe in the songs. This is what we did at the time. God bless us, everyone. Let's just do that." And I think maybe that's been a through line where I carried on just going, "This is where we're at now, and this is what I have now." If I can find somebody to put out the records then great, but I'm not gonna wait until there's this magic moment or that I have ten songs as good as XTC's Skylarking or something like that. Somehow you could wait forever for something along those lines. So I think just having that spirit of going, "I'm just gonna do what I can now and play these songs with a great amount of exuberance," even though that's a candy word, "and just see how they do and go on to the next."
[00:40:51] Lawrence: I think maybe I came across this idea in the Rick Rubin book, The Creative Act. I don't know if you've read that book. It's...
[00:40:59] John: No. Was it good? Did you like it?
[00:41:01] Lawrence: I did. I found it quite lovely at times.
[00:41:03] John: Really? That's great. You can't argue with his success, that's for sure. And he seems quite articulate anyway—he's earned a right to do a book it seems to me. What did you like about it the most?
[00:41:18] Lawrence: The idea that as an artist, the best you can do is put out the work that's the best that you can do right now.
[00:41:24] John: Yeah.
[00:41:25] Lawrence: You don't have to make the best album of all time. You have to make the best album you can make right now.
[00:41:29] John: That's the gist of it. I like it.
[00:41:33] Lawrence: And if you're capable—if you put the art out into the world and say, "I might make a better album in five years, but I'm not gonna wait five years till I can make that album."
[00:41:41] John: I like that. I should get the book.
[00:41:47] Lawrence: Something you might enjoy about it is that he doesn't often just decide to speak from authority. He doesn't say, "I'm Rick Rubin, therefore these are the principles I've learned." It's a much gentler—it's a very encouraging book. It's basically, "The world needs more creative people. Please just be creative and stop coming up with reasons to not be creative." (laughter)
[00:42:08] John: Wow. There are an infinite number of those for lots of people who are frustrated in that respect. I mean, in my circle of acquaintance, I've got quite a few of those types who just go—you just go, "This is so good. Why don't you release it? Or why would you second-guess yourself? Why are you questioning? This is really good." But unless they believe it themselves, they can be told by Rick Rubin himself, or you or me or anybody how great it is.
There's something about them that seems insuperable in their character to not accept the fact that it's good. And I wonder if that's inextricably linked to sometimes people not being able to take a compliment. In a therapy session long ago, this therapist pointed to me, she's like, "John, why can't you—if someone says this is really good or that was really brilliant, why do you deflect it? Don't you understand that the person went out of their way to tell you that?" And I think that was a hard lesson for me to learn that I've tried to apply these days when somebody does compliment my work, instead of just going, "Oh, it'll never be as good as the Fall or whatever." But just say thank you very much. And I think part of that acceptance might help people who are blocked somehow to just have the confidence just to go, "Okay, thanks. Maybe it is. You're right. Thank you for noticing that," and let's carry on. But then again, that'll just create more competition. So keep on not creating, everyone.
[00:43:40] Lawrence: Stay outta my way. (laughter)
[00:43:43] John: Get outta my—
[00:43:45] Lawrence: I wanna be conscious of the fact that our time together is reaching the back nine, but I know you've worked with a lot of people, you've had a lot of people as part of the Black Watch, and I'm really interested to know what you look for in a creative partner. I can't imagine you sitting there holding open auditions. Is that what you do? Or...
[00:44:04] John: I mean, I've been—we've been around long enough in LA that I have a lot of friends and people who would come in and play bass or cello or what have you. I think mostly in the past we used to audition—Jana and I would audition bass players by making them dance first. We put on some music and go, "Hey, shake your booty to this." And if they could dance okay, and they weren't too self-conscious or whatever about it, we'd go, "Okay, we'll carry on and see if you can play through the songs that you've learned." I mean, I think it alienated some people—one or two just danced right out, waltzed right out of the studio. (laughter)
But I think in part that—and I've had people in the band that I got on with a lot and I had more in common with than others. And a number of them are still to this day incredibly great friends of mine—just life got in the way and they couldn't play music anymore, couldn't afford to, or they had kids or what have you. Or they lost their minds. They drank themselves out of a liver or what have you.
So I don't want to play music with people that I don't really like as people, notwithstanding their foibles. I have to really like them and want to hang out with them as well, because I think it kind of shows. Eventually if you go on some long tour, you're gonna end up being their enemy anyway, almost. That familiarity breeding contempt on the road—that's been a culprit in the past where even two really good friends who were great friends with me, but great friends with each other, ended up fighting on stage in a tour that we did in 2015. I mean, we turned around at North Carolina and had the longest drive—three days' drive back. We just left the East Coast alone. It was just a catastrophe. But yet again, like relationships, one is willing to risk it all over again just to promote the music.
[00:47:21] Lawrence: Do you think that's why the bands that have been able to maintain a steady lineup—I think of U2 or Radiohead, and quite honestly, there aren't many others—don't work that often? They just can't be around each other because I can't imagine a band having the output that you have with the same four or five people constantly.
[00:47:40] John: No, that's inconceivable. Especially over those years, unless perhaps we lived in a very small town where there wasn't anything else to do other than music, and that the people really had other things going that everything wasn't riding on the success of the band. I mean, the report was that R.E.M. in their later years had separate tour buses. They couldn't be in the same goddamn room unless they were on stage together. So I mean, and those seem like—wow, when early R.E.M. came along, you're just like, "Wow, these guys are amazing. They seem like four best friends as well."
Being in a band, being successful—maybe I have to thank the gods for not being successful, that I don't have more enemies in a way. I think success is a deleterious thing sometimes—something's gonna be sacrificed for that. But it's inconceivable that it could have been the same four people.
What's your favorite Bowie record?
[00:48:38] Lawrence: Just one?
[00:48:39] John: You have to pick one. What is it? You get to save one in the fire, Lawrence.
[00:48:45] Lawrence: I really struggle. There are three.
[00:48:48] John: I know. It's so unfair. This is so unkind for me to do this to you.
[00:48:52] Lawrence: Depending on the day of the week—I can't believe you're gonna do this to me.
[00:48:57] John: I know. That's so uncool. I'm sorry. You don't have to answer.
[00:48:59] Lawrence: No, I do. I have to answer.
[00:49:02] John: I don't wanna give you an existential crisis.
[00:49:04] Lawrence: I'm gonna spit out all three. Hunky Dory, Low, and Blackstar. I love Blackstar. Blackstar is...
[00:49:09] John: Blackstar. I wore out a CD of it. I think it's fantastic. But you didn't pick one—you have—I'm just thinking like, I can't—if I pick Low, Hunky Dory's gonna be so mad at me. (laughter)
[00:49:25] Lawrence: I can't. I mean, but then the thing—it's funny, I was just talking to somebody last week about the Bowie catalog. There is a lot of Bowie music that I did not like in real time.
[00:49:35] John: Right.
[00:49:36] Lawrence: And it's only with the benefit of ten years or so that I get it. And I love that about him. And I'm finally revisiting some of the nineties and early two thousands stuff. I was listening to it when it came out, but I didn't love it. And now I listened to Heathen, I listened to Reality, and I'm like, "God damn, if these aren't great records."
[00:49:53] John: They're really good records, both of those.
[00:49:57] Lawrence: They're adult. It was like a man turning into a mid- and late-life popular artist—making pop culture art, but at a very high craft level, at a very high emotional and literary content.
[00:50:16] John: The lyrics are still so—by the person who reads heaps. He was a notorious, keen reader, for sure. That's weird that you should bring that out, because that had the same effect on me. I just started collecting the later stuff during the pandemic actually. I might have left off at Scary Monsters—a great record—but not getting the stuff like Outside or whatnot. But I went back going, "Wow." I think a lot of people must have—you and I are kindred spirits in that respect. A lot of people just didn't understand this at the time. It had to—you have to luxuriate in it and leave it alone, and forget you're not gonna get it the first listen. But you gotta find—I'm sure you could think back to the things that you hold dear that you didn't love it the first time you heard it, but it took a number of times to just go, "Wow, this is my new favorite record." And I think the later Bowie really exemplifies that.
[00:51:14] Lawrence: I had the exact opposite experience with Blackstar. The first time I heard it all the way through, when it was over, I said, "Oh my God, he's invented a new genre of music." I couldn't believe it. I was floored by that album.
[00:51:25] John: Yeah.
[00:51:26] Lawrence: How about you? Do you have one?
[00:51:27] John: I would have to pick—you'd be tempted to pick Ziggy Stardust, but you've ruined it for yourself by listening to it too much in college. I would have to say Low. Low gets me the most often, but Hunky Dory makes me crazy as well. I mean, between those two. But those are two great records. If I didn't get to choose those, I would say the one that I've listened to the very most would be either Blackstar or Scary Monsters—just because I'm a pop guy. But I don't understand the people that dismiss a lot of those later records.
There's a report that Robert Smith, in meeting him—one of his idols—drunkenly said to him, "How does it feel not to have made anything hardly good after the seventies or whatever?" I think he greatly regrets that he said that such a flippant thing to Bowie, because it's so not true.
[00:52:29] Lawrence: It's so not true. He was ahead of us. And we shouldn't be surprised because he was ahead of us the whole time.
John: The whole time.
Lawrence: Let me, since we're playing this game, if you don't mind—what's the best Beatles solo album?
[00:52:45] John: Wow. Okay. You've turned my cruelty back on me. Good move. Well done.
[00:52:49] Lawrence: You hurt me. I hurt you. (laughter)
[00:52:51] John: I'm gonna say Ram.
[00:52:54] Lawrence: Oh, really?
[00:52:55] John: I'm gonna say Ram. I'll have to go with Ram. That's my favorite of them all. Even though for the bulk of my Beatles worship, I've been a John guy, and then more lately a George guy. So it's between Ram, Imagine, or Plastic Ono Band, and All Things Must Pass. But I've had vehement fights with people over Wings' Wild Life, that I love that record. I think it's great. And some people just go, "How can you? It's got 'Bip Bop' on it," and just terrible things. Oh my God. No, it has majestic melodies that are absolutely charming and beautiful at the same time. But that's another problematic deep catalog as well that I've tried to go to the later McCartney not too long ago, being urged by Rob Campanella, my bandmate, who just said, "Oh, you gotta go back to London Town." Like, "London Town. I didn't like it at the time very much." And I hauled out the cassette, put it in my Jeep. It's really good. There's really good things in there. But I would say—if I had to destroy them all but one, I'd keep Ram. That's dearest to me. Part of—those of us who were devastated by the breakup needed things to console ourselves. And those solo records really served that function as a guy in high school with only a handful of friends on various teams, spending way too much time listening to music. It was just the thing that—I'm older than you, I imagine. It was just like we were devastated. So that palliated us somehow to go, "Well, at least we've got Beaucoups of Blues, even though it's not very good at all, but it's still from a Beatle or whatever."
Why, what do you think is the best? If you don't love Ram as much as I do, what would you say is your favorite one?
[00:54:44] Lawrence: I don't think my answer's correct in the big picture.
[00:54:47] John: There's no such thing as that!
[00:54:49] Lawrence: But what resonates—what I listen to so much in my life since the time I discovered it as an early teenager—I listened to the George side of The Concert for Bangladesh so much.
[00:55:00] John: Oh wow.
[00:55:01] Lawrence: I love "Here Comes the Sun" from that.
[00:55:03] John: Yeah.
[00:55:03] Lawrence: I just love that album.
[00:55:07] John: I got that album the day it came out as well. That's really—I've never heard anybody praise it that highly to put it above Band on the Run or something.
[00:55:19] Lawrence: The "Here Comes the Sun" on that is just—I just love it so much the way he's—it's just—and I love the Leon Russell medley, the "Jumping Jack Flash"/"Youngblood" thing.
[00:55:29] John: Wow. (laughter) That's crazy.
[00:55:32] Lawrence: I'm a nerd for that record.
[00:55:33] John: You're gonna send me—well, you're gonna send me back to listening to it, because it's been years. I don't think I have my vinyl copy anymore, but I'll go give it a listen.
[00:55:42] Lawrence: Oh, that makes me so happy. I'm glad that's gonna get spun somewhere on planet Earth today.
[00:55:48] John: Absolutely.
[00:55:49] Lawrence: Alright, one more quick one before I let you go. What's the last thing you read or what are you reading?
[00:55:54] John: I'm reading Iris Murdoch's The Nice and the Good. I still have the graduate school habit of reading seventeen books at the same time. I'm reading that, I'm reading Spenser's The Faerie Queene because I had to sort of read it for my orals. And I have a tendency to read that stuff too fast and it is a little soporific. And I've been getting back into Dostoevsky's The Idiot, something I read quite a few years ago actually. But I've been enjoying that of late—those things: Murdoch and Dostoevsky and Spenser.
[00:56:30] Lawrence: I've never allowed myself until this year to read multiple books at the same time. I always had a real block against that. And then starting this year, I've done that. And I have to say it's increased my—you know how we all come up with these stupid little rules about how you either have to finish a book or you decide you're not gonna make yourself finish a book, or all these stupid systems we have. And reading multiple books has freed me up in a way and made it—if I'm blocked with one book or one text is difficult or impenetrable, I can pick up something else, get through. I have found it a much more enjoyable way to read and I wish I had been more open-minded to that approach earlier on.
[00:57:16] John: Good for you. So what are you reading then right now?
[00:57:18] Lawrence: Well, I almost always have a book going that relates to this work because I try to read every book if I'm gonna talk to somebody—I try to at least read their current book. So I just finished reading Understanding Hunter S. Thompson, because I talked to the author.
[00:57:32] John: Oh wow. Oh great. Cool.
[00:57:34] Lawrence: Really interesting. That's a great series.
[00:57:39] John: I like that series of stuff.
[00:57:39] Lawrence: It's a very interesting reexamination of him. Very clear-eyed, very modern in that he's not let off easy. It's not hero worship, but it also digs into parts of his writing that don't typically get looked at. Like when he was a foreign correspondent, the stuff that didn't get anthologized a lot before he really got gonzo. I enjoyed it. I think of myself as knowledgeable about Hunter Thompson and I learned some new things and I came to grips with how problematic he is.
[00:58:12] John: He's a curious case because so many of us thought that we got him when he was very in the seventies when he was au courant and the coming thing. And it's quite possible, even though I haven't touched his stuff for years—it's quite possible that he was done a disservice by all of us thinking that we twigged what he was on about. I think certain writers really need an exegesis from a different point of view. Like, there's an Understanding Salman Rushdie that I think I should read because I've tried to read all of his novels and barely made it through halfway for all of them just going, "Oh, I'm so sick of how dazzled I am by your prose style or whatever." I think that I would do well by reading some criticism first and then trying to go back to it. But Hunter S. Thompson seems like that kind of guy as well, that you think you got him quote-unquote, but you didn't.
[00:59:06] Lawrence: Really, the heartbreaking thing is that he really did nothing of value at all after Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail.
John: No, no.
Lawrence: He just became a lazy alcoholic and wanted to just get paid to go do lectures. He just skated on his—and he blew some amazing assignments. Like he was in Vietnam at the fall of Saigon, and he didn't want to be in Vietnam, so he went to Hong Kong and just drank. He was supposed to be with Annie Leibovitz at the Nixon resignation in the Rose Garden, and he stood her up and stayed in the hotel pool watching it on TV. Like just stupid shit.
[00:59:43] John: You wonder if he just thought that, apropos of Vietnam, maybe it had all been done and there was—it was as much of a lost cause as that war was anyway. But it would've been great to hear his cogent thoughts about it, or his take about—we can't—those of us who love that period and hate it at the same time would've loved to have seen his take just because he was such a kook. Nobody like him. You can't draw parallels. You can't say Vonnegut's like Hunter S. Thompson. You can't...
[01:00:16] Lawrence: Not even Tom Wolfe. Not none of them. Gay Talese. None of 'em.
[01:00:18] John: Not him too. For sure. It's—well, maybe I'm gonna go back to Hunter S. Thompson. Thanks for that, too.
[01:00:25] Lawrence: Well, I'll tell you one other thing about it before I let you go. The interesting thing is that the author makes the case that he's in the tradition—he's more like Mark Twain than he is modern or certainly not postmodern. And his ideal novel was The Great Gatsby.
[01:00:43] John: That is kind of a perfect book. Well, like Roth's Goodbye, Columbus. It's a perfect novella. You can't change a word. Gatsby's like that too. Oh, that was his aim—to write something that was just a perfectly constructed work of art. Is that what you consider Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail to be?
[01:01:03] Lawrence: I mean, that's what I consider Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. That would be—that's a pretty damn colossal original work.
[01:01:14] John: I think if you try to teach a course in perfect works—that could be like Gatsby and Roth and that one, for sure.
[01:01:22] Lawrence: Well, it also reminds me of what Bill Graham used to say about the Grateful Dead. He said they're not the best at what they do, but they're the only ones that do what they do.
John: Okay.
Lawrence: And that's kind of like that book. That may not be the best novel, but it's the only novel like that, or book or whatever you want to call it.
[01:01:37] John: Right. Thank you, Lawrence. What a pleasure. This was great. Absolutely. Because it doesn't always turn out like this where you very much click and someone gets your sense of humor. Thank you for doing this.
[01:01:52] Lawrence: Alright. Well, I love the record, and thank you very much. Congratulations. And I'm sure there'll be another one in six months. (laughter)
[01:01:57] John: Actually there is one we've just signed to Nick Salomon's label, Blue Matter—the guy from the Bevis Frond. Do you know the Bevis Frond?
[01:02:06] Lawrence: Yeah.
[01:02:06] John: He's gonna put out the one that we've just finished as a follow-up to this. Hopefully not too close to it, but sometime early next year.
