Jason Pierce has been a moving force in music since the conception of Spacemen 3 in the late 80’s. Taking a bevy of influences and creating something fresh, new, dangerous and challenging. After the demise of Spacemen 3, he reinvented himself with Spiritualized. Taking where he left off, expanding upon it and making something once again; original and challenging. A true cavalier of rock and roll he has gone on to earn a place of legendary status, not by asinine rock and roll antics, but by making quality music. Good music based on songwriting as much as aesthetic. Music that forces one to think, shake your ass and songs that stick in your head. I had the pleasure of sitting down with him to talk about Spiritualized most recent album “Amazing Grace.” As well as the mechanics of creating good music. What he said had been floating around my brain for years, so to hear someone like J. verbalize it was a gratifying experience to say the least. Unfortunately the interview got cut short by soundcheck and other writers waiting to interview Jason. We talked about doing it after, but it seemed so inappropriate after their performance. These words will definitely shed light on the thinking of Jason Pierce. Enjoy.
-Sam James Velde
Interview by Sam James Velde
Most photographs by Travis Keller
Top photograph by Sam James Velde
[Originally ran in June 2004 on Buddyhead]
Do you like touring America?
I like touring anywhere.
Is there a particular place that you like the most?
San Francisco.
Why?
Because it’s got really fucked up people that live there. Portland’s got really fucked up people too. I like it, but there aren’t any real favorites. It’s all good really. I also like places like North Carolina, or Boise, or Utah. Places where people who’ve never been to a concert, never seen an electric guitar before. And there’s just this fucking energy, like “You came here!”. I’ve always thought its easier for us to get on the bus and drive to where you are then it is for you to get in a car and drive eight hours to the nearest place we’re playing. So we’ll do as many places as we can. If we cant play there this time around well try and come back and do a show there next time.
You said you like San Francisco and Portland because the people are fucked up. What about that do you like? Does it make a better show?
No, there’s no real favorites. It’s not like it’s head and shoulders above the rest. It’s a random thing, and also we played there last night. I’m not good with memory questions, and I just still hold that memory. (laughs)
Does having people fucked up attract you to live music?
It’s just that you want an audience that’s not uptight. You want people that are going “Hey we’re down with this, when’s it start, etc.” I think there are two types of audiences, and I’m good with either. There are audiences that stand on their front foot and say “We’re ready for this,” and there are audiences that stand on their back foot and say “Come on, impress us, show us how good you can be”. In certain places in the world they’re always on their front foot. Places like Glasgow, or Dublin, or San Francisco, they’re right on that front foot, they’re leaning over.
I’ve been reading stuff by Lester Bangs, where he’s talking about the early days of the Stooges and how at the time their fans were just fuck ups, loser, etc. They attracted a ‘certain type of fan.’ Does that apply to Spiritualized at all?
I’ve always appreciated that, how Rock ‘n’ Roll, to some degree is just primordial. The best music comes from people who are out of control and don’t know the answers. If you know how to do it, you know what’s gonna happen when you push the button. Then it’s kind of dull. Like I said, I’ll play to both types of audiences, I’m not trying to win over people.
Do you think that’s happening in music today?
Well, you kinda know what’s gonna happen, and with the best music you don’t. It seems like today, going to shows, I’m rarely surprised by a band, or taken back by a band. Maybe because I’m hoping for it to happen.
yeah, its hard to be surprised when your waiting to be surprised!
So much music is people copying someone else’s style or attitude and passing it off as their own. You can calm your friends down and hold your cigarette just right and put on your leather pants and say “This is Rock ‘n’ Roll”, or take your shirt off and do the postures. But unless it’s coming from a place of absolute truth and honesty people will see through it eventually. You can sell both types. You can sell the type that’s all style and no content, and maybe you can make more cash from that than you can from the real stuff that’s coming from people who are really where it’s at. But I don’t think “that music” lasts, it gets locked in with the fashion of the time. There’s a ton of music now, and as exciting I think it is you’re putting a guitar around your neck, hitting a single note, and saying “this is where I stand in life, this is the noise I want to make”, it’s this garish thing. There’s a time it’ll be locked into; early 20th century Rock ‘n’ Roll revival. Because it’s totally backwards looking, it’s about this kind of vowel, this “great Rock’ Roll stopped in 1962″. I think that great music always checks back to make sure it’s not repeating itself, or just blindly doing something that’s been done before. It’s about…… you know Jerry Lee Lewis would sit in the corner of a studio with his piano pushed into that corner playing music and saying “Well, I think this is about as good as it’s gonna get for me.” He was like “Where’s my fucking car, where’s the airplane, where’s the fucking girls, let’s go, let’s take this way into the future”. He wasn’t trying to replicate some 1930s Blues cotton-picking song. He was like “This is energy, this is going forward.”
I read something where you referenced that, and you said something about “creating music beyond your ability.”
I think you have to do that. That’s what you get from Sly Stone, that’s what you get from Van Morrison. It’s not like these people are saying “I know how to do this, so I’m gonna do it.” They’re going “I don’t know how the fuck to do this, but I’m gonna go there anyway”. It’s like if you set your sights so high that even if you don’t quite match them, you’re still way ahead where most people, mere mortals, land. But so much music is like cabaret, like the easiest way to make money from music is to make another record like your last record that sold a million copies. And that’s where a lot of music comes from. Maybe it’s a little bit harder, but I will always be there to make music that is unlike stuff I’ve done before. Sometimes when I talk like this, people think what they’re gonna get from Spiritualized is way beyond their wildest dreams. I can’t apply this to someone else’s dreams in music or somebody else’s idea of what’s extreme or what’s not extreme. The only person that’s relative to this is me, the only person that puts pressure on this is me. So what I’m doing is making records in a way I’ve never made records before, each and every time.
That’s pretty obvious with the records you’ve made. This one was made in like three weeks, right? Mostly live, in comparison to the last album?
This record was way more experimental than the last record. I know it doesn’t sound like that, in it’s content. It’s almost like the opposite of a Rock’n’Roll record even though it sounds very Rock’n’Roll. But Rock’n’Roll is primarily a rehearsed thing, you go into a rehearsal space, you rehearse your songs, you rehearse what you’re gonna do, and then you go out and play them live if you’re not gonna make a record. “Amazing Grace” was put together the way Jazz music is put together. It’s about immediacy and spontaneity. You hear someone else in the room playing something and you can either respond to it or not respond to it, it’s immediate decisions. And that’s how we put the record together, we gave the band the songs the day we recorded them. So what you hear is a drummer playing to a bassline he’s never heard in his life, playing to guitars and words they’ve never heard. And you get this immediacy, this kind of energy that doesn’t usually happen in this kind of music.
So you had never rehearsed the songs?
The band knew nothing of the songs until that afternoon. We wrote out a different song each day so we could say “Okay, today’s song is this”.
You were conceptualizing the record? is that how you saw recording – in a Jazz sense?
I made a record with this band Spring Heel Jack called “The Amassed”, and they asked me to go in and play guitar alongside Pat Benney, Evan Parker, Kenny Wheeler, Paul Hereford and John Edwards, these giants of European Jazz. Prior to that they’d made a record with William Parker and Matthew Shipp, the American Free Jazz players. They took the same set of songs to Europe and made the same record over again. I think it’s an amazing control trial. It’s recognizing this place where American Jazz and European Jazz split and the European went off in a way where it was never gonna come back together. Just being involved with these kinds of musicians that were talking music, talking the language I understood, and they were reinforcing things I’d always said about Spiritualized. That it’s about life, about spontaneity, it’s as much about what you don’t play as what you do play. It kind of all made sense, and I wanted to apply a lot of what I learned to “Amazing Grace” and the way that album was recorded, almost without production, that you’d just stick the microphone into where the action was, and record the squeaks and the vowels, the sounds of fingers on brass, and this kind of physicality of playing an instrument. It isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. People talk about expression in music, when you’re expressing yourself through a little brass tube or whatnot. The way that album was recorded was all about expression, and it wasn’t about production or processing. That was also how we made “Amazing Grace”, it wasn’t like something done by Phil Spector or Quincy Jones, it was about no production or processing. I kind of got to thinking that so much modern music is all in the production.
Especially right now!
Yeah, you almost don’t need a song or something to say or any kind of new message, you can still go a long way with great production or a song that works for radio. It’s almost like people are making music for the first time ever that is made specifically to work on the radio. I think that’s kind of weird. In the same way people make film at the moment, connected with music. “How does MTV like their film? Then that’s how we will make our film ” I just wanted to get away from that whole thing, just say that these songs better be able to stand their own, and that’s all you’ll get this time. We’re not gonna lay down any kind of sheen. This is what you get. You get this energy, and you better buy into it and understand it. My ear was leaning towards that kind of stuff recently, I’m more moved by Robert Johnson or Charlie Parker or Elmore James than anything that has a big production to it.
I’ve read a lot of the press for this record and a lot of it amounts to “Oh, it’s so different from the last two records”. This record was what I was waiting for as a fan. It doesn’t seem out of place or anything. It seems like a logical progression from the last 2 records.
When I say I’m aiming outside of my expectations every time I make a record, it doesn’t mean the leap is going to be so great. The circumstances between the 2 records will effect this one. But there’s a thread to it all, a thread right back to the first Spacemen album. The first album wasn’t based around a whole set of ideas and things I was ever going to be embarrassed about. Spacemen 3 was coming from Staple Singers and the Stooges, and the Cramps, and Fanclub, and the way Fleshtones were live and the way Mahalia Jackson sings, and this whole thing from Kraftwerk, and this weird kind of electronic thing to it as well. If you hear that kind of music, then you never grow tired of that kind of music. It was never rooted in fashion, so it was never going to be petty shit. We really looked like that, we really sounded like that.
On the new record, I still heard the same influences that I’ve heard from the beginning. You referenced the Gun Club, Elmore James, and stuff obviously influenced by the blues.
What was good about those bands when I was a kid was they came to England, not pretending that they dropped out of the sky with all of their musical ideas completely coming from them. They came to this information. It wasn’t like “This is my music”, it was like “This is the music that is the end result of a long line of music.
That’s important. Its always made sense to me that you could go from The Stooges to the MC5 to Sun Ra, and then you’re in another world already. You could go from Kraftwerk to Devo, or Kraftwerk to Brian Eno to Devo, and then you’re in another world. I just think that’s great. I still see threads between, you know, recently I’ve been seeing this thread between Devo and Dizzee Rascal. I think the reason I love the Dizzee Rascal record so much is because it reminds me of Laurie Anderson and Devo mixed with Beenie Man. All this kind of weird stuff. I’m sure he’s never listened to a Devo record in his life, but there’s a kind of musical connection there. Aside from people being influenced by stuff, there’s this convergence that people arrive at without ever having knowledge of each other’s work. At the end of the day it either works or it doesn’t. You’re either moved by it or floored by it or you don’t touch it. I think that great music doesn’t try and compete; it just sits in the air and you either get it or you don’t get it. There’s nothing desperate about great music. There’s a lot of desperation in the business of selling music, and the business of trying to make a buck from music. But great music doesn’t need to even try.
I wanted to ask you about the artwork on your records. What are the ideas behind the look? What’s the connection when you’re putting an album together with the songs and then putting a look to it?
Well, “Amazing Grace” again comes from the sort of Jazz thing. Aside from the arm, which I think is a beautiful photo, a really strong image, the photos were just “These are the people who played on this record”. It’s just that simple. It wasn’t trying to dress it up or anything in any kind of real fancy way, exactly the way the record was. But it’s still really beautiful, and I think that’s just important to me, that you’re not trying to just throw stuff out cheaply. You’re not trying to round off the edges and try to make it as cheap as you possibly can. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Record companies are going down like balloons, and they’re throwing out records like ballast. How can we get higher without effort – let’s just throw some more of these cheap records out. “The Best of Girl Groups in the 70’s” or “The Best of Girl Groups from the Late 70’s” or “Best of Early 80’s Pop”. And all this that Brian Eno used to call the “glut of CD” – coming out and coming fast and tons of it. And all you can really say about it is “This is what I do, there’s a lot of passion in this, there’s a lot of soul in this,” and just present it in the best way you possibly can. I’d rather pay to do it, and I’ve always paid to do it. CD’s have a top line of like a quarter cent for packaging, which kind of goes to show you how much the profits are on that. It’s not like “How cheap can you make the record, how cheap can you make the packaging, how cheap can you do the whole thing,” it’s like “How well can you do it” is more important, and whether you get it right.
There’s a song on the middle of the record that’s obviously pretty “free jazz,” with all of it’s horns. Was that improvised?
No, that’s sort of an oddity to the record. The horns, Evan Parker and Kenny Wheeler who play on that, weren’t actually at the sessions. They were put on as overdubs to it, so it’s the one bit that doesn’t fit well with what I’m talking about. Because they could only respond to what was on the record, we couldn’t respond to anything they played. It’s sort of a grey area on the record.
So if they had recorded their parts first, it would’ve been hard for you to play against that?
No, it would’ve been far superior to have done that. Because what I’ve been saying about “Amazing Grace” is that it’s all about people being able to respond to what else is in the room. So we did that as Spiritualized. And then when we got the people who that’s how they make music, Kenny Wheeler and Evan Parker, the one shame of it was that they could only respond to what we had put down, we couldn’t respond to what they were playing. It was the only way it could happen on this record, but for future records we won’t make that mistake again, or I won’t make that mistake again.
Did the title come from the idea of how the record was recorded?
It came from a few areas. One is because the very thing that made this record start, put this record into life, was listening to Matthew Shipp and William Parker’s version of the standards. I kinda love the way that in Jazz you do standards and in Rock’n’Roll you do cover versions. In Jazz you kinda make your own, and in Rock’n’Roll you’re kinda paying homage to someone else’s work. A lot of time cover versions are so inferior to the original versions. In Jazz it’s just a different sort of thing. So I heard that version, and I said “Let’s do ‘Amazing Grace.'” When we first performed it, it fractured into about four of the tracks you hear on “Amazing Grace”. Stuff like “Hold On”, and a version of “Amazing Grace”, which we released last year in America. It worked on this connection of songs. To me, “Amazing Grace” is like the other half of the music I love. American music is from the blues,
Rock’n’Roll stems from blues music. But “Amazing Grace” is like European music that came to America, like the German/Lutherian, stuff like “Silent Night”. English songs like “Amazing Grace”. Fused with American music, they became like American Country, and Bluegrass, and Gospel music. It’s this kind of mixing of music’s that we get. It made a lot of sense that way. Everyone wants to reach that state of ‘Amazing Grace.” And without being too pompous and insolent, it’s almost slightly cynical. You’ve got “Amazing Grace,” but you’ve also got tracks like “This Little Life of Mine.”
I read that you’ve been saying that, since the band from the last record was stripped down, going in to record these songs, no one in the band had heard them so they were free to contribute. So is there is this large amount of contribution on the record from other people, other than what you had written on your own.
No, it’s always worked like that. People have this idea that I’m in control of things and telling people what to play. You don’t get music by instructing people what to play. Well, you get a kind of music, but you don’t get great music. Great music comes from people that don’t have to look over their shoulder, people that don’t have to say “Am I doing this right?”. The only way you achieve that is giving absolute freedom. That you are free to contribute, nobody’s gonna pull you up on anything. The more you put that into practice, the more shows we do, night after night, the better we do.
Do you guys write a set list every night?
We don’t change the set list, because you’ve got no reference. If you’re doing a different song every night, saying “hey, which one here”, you don’t know how good it is. You’re doing a performance of it, like a cabaret performance. If you’re playing the same song from the night before, you know just how electric it can be, and you use that as your ground, you use that as a starting point for the next show so it evolves over time. Two months from now, it will be so much more electric, so much more powerful. The last thing you want to be doing is “what’s coming next?”. We know exactly what’s coming next and we know exactly how electric it can be. It’s simple science, you’ve got control. This is how it can be, this is where you start.
In my own experience, sometimes to get band members to write a set list can be like pulling teeth. They don’t want to play the same set every night or they don’t want to write a set list at all, they want to have the spontaneity of what’s happening on stage at that moment.
Well, yeah. I sort of stand in the middle. It’s not like we’re always doing the same thing. It’s not easy. It doesn’t make things more comfortable. It makes it so that it isn’t about playing the notes in the right order. It’s so “Okay, we’ll do this song.” It’s about energy, it’s about excitement, it’s about electricity. If you’ve got the control, you can say “Well, this is how it can be”. It’s simpler.
You said earlier that there’s that great music that lasts. That music that’s made for art, without worrying about anything that’s happening in the industry. I see that thing in Spacemen 3 and in Spiritualized. That sort of thing happened with say, The Stooges or the MC5, at the time those bands were fairly obscure in the whole scheme of popular music. And now they’ve become so influential. Were seeing that with the contemporaries of the Spacemen 3 or Spiritualized. I see that in modern music right now, there’s the BRMC and bands like the Warlocks, things like that. Coming directly from music that wasnt interested in what was happening. This is directly in line with good music lasting and influencing. Do you see that at all? And if you do, how does that affect you?
Another Voice: It’s time, Jason.
I’m gonna go do this quick, then I’ll be right back. I wanna keep this going……………
(Interview ends)