September 15th, 2003- In the Madcap Studio

 

LK: Talk about some of the earliest music that you heard very early on that really inspired you.

GP: Well I guess just songs on the radio that I heard when I was a kid. My brother was about three and a half years older than me, so he was buying records really early, what you would consider classic rock and roll records now, you know, Jerry Lee Lewis and things like this. I was hearing this at a very early age, and was really into it. Throughout my musical early influences, he played a big part in exposing me to music all along. He’d always be bringing home records. Prior to me learning to play guitar, he used to run a record store. He would always be older than me, getting these records, and bringing them into the house and I’d be hearing them. All early rock records, all those Sun session records, and stuff that was on the radio. Although that’s a lot different that saying that about what’s on the radio now. Back then, radio was more localized. People would play things based on what they liked. There would be lots of rock hits that you would hear, that may not even be that big. I guess now it’s referred to as Rockabilly, but some of those records there was an emotional content to them. When I got into sixth grade and started hearing things, I remember hearing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” on the radio, and any record like that that had the effect of taking you away to another place was the whole thing to me that was appealing about music, was anything that would transport you to some other state of mind or consciousness which I think is a real common theme for a lot of people for whatever reasons, they are looking for a place to take them away. It’s an escape. I know in my house, my interest in music seemed to become more and more important in my life the more my parents drank. As my parents alcoholism escalated, my diving into music and trying to find a world or a place that took me away from that became more and more important. It wasn’t a particular type of music, it was more the emotional content of the performance of whatever type of music it is. So it’s hard for me to pick out a particular song, but that’s what I was drawn to. Songs that did that. I pointed out Jerry Lee Lewis, not that he was any kind of big influence, but certainly when you see those early kind of primal performances of him they were sort of transcendent experiences, and that was very appealing as a little kid.

That just carried through until I was a teenager in the early sixties, when my brother had this record store, and he would discover all of these records before they became popular. I was just looking at that first Doors album. I remember buying that the day it came out, none of us had even heard it, but my brother would just get these records. At that time we’d get anything that was on Elektra Records. Any artist. That’s how we discovered Paul Butterfield, Tim Buckley, and Love and the Doors. So that was a record that had a very big influence on me, and was very much a record that definitely took you to another place. I can remember being in my room late at night, and I’d have my stereo sitting next to my bed, and just have the speakers up by the bed and I’d be listening to that every night before I’d go to sleep. My parents would be downstairs, and there might be a fight breaking out, but you would be listening to this thing and it took you someplace else. So listening to music was a place to go where I felt safe. It made me aware of the potential and the power of my imagination. That’s what it triggered in me.

LK: Why guitar? What happened when you picked up the guitar?

GP: I don’t really know. My brother had a guitar in the room, and I was listening to records and a lot of music he was listening to, and I didn’t know what it was that I wanted to do with my life, and I wasn’t even thinking about it. I loved music, I loved comic books, comic books had the same effect on me. I think about comic books and music being very connected. I used to get really into whatever I was doing, and I think that’s another component of being in that kind of environment where you want to escape. But when I picked up my brothers guitar one day, I picked it up and hit the strings, and literally the minute I hit the strings and the sound that it made, it just was like it unlocked a door in my mind, and my mind was filled with sounds. I really did literally know in that instant that that was what I was going to do for the rest of my life. It was like standing in the middle of a tidal wave and getting hit by something.

LK: Talk about the first guitars you had, up to the guitars you have now.

GP: The first guitar I got was an early fifties telecaster. These classic Telecasters you see, these blonde guitars with black pick guards. I loved that guitar, but I have fairly small hands, and It didn’t feel comfortable to me. You know the Fender necks are a little bigger and I remember picking up a Gibson guitar and liking the way it felt better. So I sold that guitar, and got one of these Les Paul SG’s, it was the first year that they made SG’s 1961, I got one of those at a pawn shop. When I started playing guitar was 1966, and these guitars that I’ll talk about going through, these guitars were not valuable at that time. They were just things that we all used to trade with each other. At the time that Telecaster was only $150. Those were the first two guitars I owned, and since that point, it seems like I have been trying in the guitars that I fool around with, to create what I loved of those two guitars. The guitar that I have now that I’ve been playing for so many years, that Gibson L6 that I’ve taken completely apart, is to me a combination of those two guitars. The front pickup is actually a pickup from one of those guitars. It’s an old early sixties patent applied for humbucking pickup, the back pickup is and old Telecaster pickup. After that SG, I went to another SG with P90 pickups, and experimented with other guitars with P90 pickups, and after going through those, I ended swapping guitars with someone and getting for $110 getting one of these original 1950’s Gibson flying V’s. I’ve read of them going for a hundred thousand dollars. But back then, I got it for $110 in Atlanta, and I think there was like 113 of them made, I can’t remember, but at the time there were three of them in Atlanta and you couldn’t give them away to people. Nobody wanted them. I just liked them because you could play up high on the neck and not hit your hand on anything. I tore that guitar apart. I put a P90 pickup on the front and a telecaster pickup on the back, I reamed out a hole in the middle and put a humbucking pickup, and cut out the topside of the guitar with wood and stuck a telecaster control thing in the top slot of the guitar that controlled the middle pickup…I’ve always been into creating something with guitars that I perceived of as being more capable of finding the sounds that I was hearing in my head.

After that flying V guitar, I had some guitars made by this guy called Jay Rhyne. There is a story about Jay Rhyne making the guitar in the “Echoes” CD booklet. Jay was notoriously late. Never getting guitars done by when they were supposed to be done. He was supposed to have it done, 1969, but a year later he calls me up, he goes, “Glenn baby. You better get out here, and get out here now. This guitar is finished, and she is hot. The windows are shakin.” So, I call up Mike Holbrook, and we drive out there, and it was really far away. We drive out there in the middle of the night to get my new hot guitar, that I’d been waiting a year for, and we go it, and when he’s telling me its hot, he’s saying that the pickups are so hot, that when he plugs this thing in, it’s shaking the window. This was before the age of hot pickups and everybody customizing and doing this stuff to your pickups, so we’re really excited. We get out there, and he’s got the guitar, he goes, “Stand Back.” And he plugs it in. He hits the strings. There’s just no sound. He looks at it, and goes, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute.” He flips the switches on it the guitar. He hits it again. There’s still no sound. He goes, “Hold it. It’s the cord. It’s a bad cord.” He switches the cord, and plugs it in. No sound. And then he looks up at me, and he just goes, “Glenn baby, I’m gonna flat lay it on ya. This thing ain’t worth shit.” And he jumps up, turns off the light in the room, and we’re in darkness. All of a sudden, a big spotlight comes up, and he is standing up on a table with the guitar underneath a spotlight, and he’s going, “Do you have any idea how good this will look under stage lights? Look at the flame in this wood. Look at this! Look at the flame!” So he made that guitar for me, and that’s the guitar that I used on “Lost At Sea” and that I recorded the Hampton Grease Band record with. It was so unbalanced, that he poured molten lead into the guitar, and I’ve got the guitar still in my basement, and there is a big chunk of molten lead, he melted lead and poured it into the guitar and I had to wear a special double strap that went around to the back, and another came around to hold it up to play it, but it did have a really weird sound. Which, you know, any guitar filled with molten lead would. It really does sound incredible. It’s a really unique sound, and after that I can’t remember what I went through, the guitar is in pieces. I guess anything that hot was bound to end up in pieces. He ended up making me another guitar, a solid body guitar that I used on my record “Swim In The Wind,” which was my second album, and that was another one of my bastardized attempts to try to get an SG and a Telecaster together. But there were problems with the necks on these guitars, so I ended up getting that Gibson L6 and kind of re-building them myself. Those have been the guitars I’ve played since then.

LK: Talk about the Hampton Grease Band.

GP: Well, it was formed more like a clubhouse than a band now that I think about it looking back on it, it was a bunch of people that knew each other in high school, and my brother Charlie was the original bass player, and he was friends with Bruce Hampton, and Bruce was enamored of Harold Kelling. He really looked up to him. Harold was initially the only guy in the Hampton Grease Band who could even play an instrument. Harold is a very talented, brilliant guy, and he head a band called “The Four of Nine,” and Bruce used to follow their band around. He looked up to Harold, and Harold was an easy guy to look up to. He was very charismatic, and Bruce would sit in on a song with them, and one of the things that he used to do back then was he would get a guitar, and he couldn’t play guitar at all, he would get a guitar that wasn’t plugged in and would go to the front of the stage, and Harold would hide behind his amp and play all this great stuff on guitar, and Hampton would get up front and go nuts and act like he was doing it, and fall all over the stage, and roll around, and people would kind of stand in awe. Bruce loved the attention. That was basically the chemistry of the Hampton Grease Band. It evolved to where Harold and I would write all the music, and we’d get lyrics where we could. Bruce didn’t write lyrics very often. Like the song “Halifax” was a song that I had written, and it was a twenty minute piece of music, and the band had worked it up, and Bruce didn’t have anything to sing over it, and literally I was downstairs where we practiced which was Harold’s basement, and I just got frustrated, and said, “Sing this.” I pulled out an encyclopedia, and just opened it up to Halifax, and just started taking lines which were all just lifted out of the encyclopedia, and Bruce started singing them. It was really a unique chemistry, because Bruce was a great, charismatic performer, and like any good performer does, he liked getting attention from people. And he was driven to that. Harold and I were very much insulated into the world of playing guitar together and creating this thing about the music, and the combination of those two things together, and Harold and I started to trigger each other in a good competitive way, bringing the best out of each other, and this music would get very elaborate, and Bruce really didn’t have a desire to write lyrics, and he didn’t really have something to say except he wanted to get out and say it. He wanted to perform. And the fact that he didn’t have any lyrics is what

led to the fact that the lyrics were as abstract as they are, which was a perfect combination for what the music was. So it was a unique chemistry that I think the three of us had together. It was a great time while the band was together. I guess that we were the core of it. We went through different bass players. My brother Charlie, we literally told him to play bass because we needed a bass player. And we told another friend to learn how to play drums. He’d never played drums in his life. So we did go through a few different bass players and drummers to get to Jerry Fields and Mike Holbrook who played on “Music to Eat.” That was the definitive Grease Band. It was an incredible experience; it was more about the bond between the people, and that taking the shape and form of a very idosyncratic type of music that was unique to us, and us alone.

We literally created an insulated environment that wasn’t intentionally that way, but was looking back. It was just to shut out the rest of the world. It was us against them. I’m not saying we were consciously doing that, but looking back I can see that we were doing that. It was a safe place for reasons for all of us to go, we were very safe and comfortable with each other, and that triggered everybody’s imagination.

LK: Talk about “Lost at Sea.”

GP: When the Grease Band broke up, that was a very depressing period of time. What was really depressing was the time prior to that. When the band split with Harold. Because that’s really when the band ended. Any time you took anything away from that chemistry between Bruce, Harold, and myself, with any one of those three people being gone, it wasn’t really the Grease Band anymore. Things split up with Harold, we kept going for probably another two years after that, and we had a couple of landmark moments. We played the Fillmore after that with The Mothers, and that was a show that John Lennon and Yoko Ono performed, and there were some neat moments, but the band was never the same after that. It eventually just fell apart.

Bruce got an opportunity to audition for The Mothers of Invention. He left the band. At the time I was really upset that he left. Looking back, he did the right thing. The band was gone already. I do think he did the right thing, but I didn’t at the time. He didn’t get the job, but it all worked out for the best for everybody. He went on and did other musical projects that were really good. So, I was going around playing with different people. I used to sit in a lot with Little Feat. I got to know Lowell George, and we had an offshoot band from the Grease Band called The Stump Brothers. It was Jerry Fields, Mike Holbrook and different people that would sit in with us. I started writing these instrumental songs, and we did a show with Lowell George and he really liked the stuff, and he took me to a studio to record some of these instrumental songs that I had written. He just did it on his own time, and he took those tapes to Warner Brothers, and they were actually going to sign me to Warner at the time. He had gotten me a record deal.

Well, The Grease Band, before we had broken up, had signed a deal with Herb Cohen Management, Frank Zappa’s manager. Bizarre Straight Records. Herb at the time was engaged in a law suit with Warner Brothers. He was a very antagonistic, typical cliché of the hard-nosed manager ass-hole kind of guy. So, Warner was going to put this record out with me, and Lowell said do you have any contracts with anybody, and I said, well, we have this old Grease Band contract with Herb Cohen. He told me that was not good, Warner Brothers was having a feud with him, but they’ll have to deal with it. So they called him up, and said that they wanted to put a record out by this guy, and Herb Cohen said, fine, you can have his contract for a hundred thousand dollars. Which at the time, was an enormous amount of money, there was no way they were going to pay that for somebody unknown, making an instrumental record.

Probably the only reason they were going to do the record in the first place is because Lowell George brought them the tapes. That whole thing fell through. It was very frustrating, because I had all of these songs that I was writing, and that ended up being “Lost At Sea.” I literally couldn’t record them, because this guy, just out of spite, was playing this weird little game with this label. Around the same time my father killed himself. I have described this in the past as feeling like the experience was like a gigantic ball of energy that I felt was in front of me, and it would either get on top of me and crush me, or I would get on top of it and it would lift me up higher that I had ever been before.

I just really felt, as a matter of survival, that I had to make this record. At the time, I wasn’t aware of anybody putting out independent records, I didn’t know that was anything anybody had ever done. But I just thought, I’m going to do this. Somebody has to get these records pressed somewhere. I can’t put them out with a record label, this guy is screwing with me and won’t even allow me to do it, I’m just going to put it out myself. I’m going to record it myself, I’ll find a way to press it, these things have to be pressed somewhere, and I’ll just put it out myself.

So I made the record, and it really was a matter of survival for me. It was my way of taking my father’s suicide and turning it into a redemptive experience in my life. I think the most valuable lessons you learn in life are from your parents mistakes. I think it was too late for my father, but there was something contained in what happened to him that I could either use turn into a negative experience in my life, or it was him giving me something positive. I’m not saying that making that record straightened the whole thing out for me, but it sent me down the right direction. At the time that’s the only way I knew how to do it. To let it form and shape music. Use that as a way to communicate and connect with other people. So that record for me was very much about surviving that experience. To this day it’s still one of my favorite records. It’s a very emotional piece of music, but not in a negative way. When I listen back to it, I hear in myself, someone who is very self-absorbed, and confused, but making the effort to try to move in the right direction with it.

So I made that record, and just started selling them at band jobs, selling them out of my house, selling them out of a trunk of a car in the parking lot after shows. It was very odd that someone was putting out their own record at that time. Somehow John Peel of the BBC got a copy of the record, and started playing it a lot. I guess he liked it. There was a reader’s poll in Melody Maker magazine of import records that the readers would like released officially in Europe. And “Lost At Sea” if I remember right, came in at number two. So Virgin Records called me up, and flew me over there, I stayed with Mike Oldfield at the time, and this was back when Virgin was Richard Branson, and it was a very exciting, great label to be around. It was an incredibly lucky thing for them to stumble onto, and be interested in this record. They took “Lost At Sea” exactly as I had made it, they pressed it up from the master tapes, they used the exact same cover, and released it over there. I did well enough that they wanted to do another record. They wanted me to go to Europe and record with session musicians. I really didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to go and make a session record with a hot guitar player. Which is what I thought it would end up being. I’d been forming a nucleus of a band. The people that played on “Lost At Sea” went their separate directions. It wasn’t really as much a band as it was to make that record. We played a few jobs, but it was more or less about the record.

Bill Rea had started playing bass with me, and Doug Lansberg. I wanted to stay in America, and I wanted to produce the record myself, and make it with the people that I want to make it with. Shockingly they let me do it. So we were able to go into a studio, and we were able to do anything in the world that we wanted. They gave me a big budget, and I spent it all, and it was only spent on music. We experimented with everything in the world. I remember one night we had a bagpipe player walking around in circles, and a guy from the symphony that whistled, and a banjo player. The record is very eclectic and pre-dated things that people consider to be fusions of World Music. In terms of grafting Country Music, into Rock, and World percussion into Rock, and it wasn’t done like, let’s make a Country song and an African song, it was about putting all these things together, and it was a really neat experience. Virgin sent somebody over to the studio from England to check up on me, and I wouldn’t let them in the studio. I just didn’t care. I always felt like, I’m going to do the music I want to do, or I’m not going to do it. So they let me do it, and the record came out, and we toured America and Europe with Steve Hilledge, and played places like The Rainbow Theater, and it was great.

I remember The Sex Pistols record came out while we were over there, and went to number one, and it was a really exciting time to be in England. The bad business move I made was, not any of the other stuff which they actually indulged the other stuff and they were fine with it, because they were very open minded and creative. At that time in the label’s history they were very supportive, not just of me, but you look at everything they put out. They wanted us to stay over there after we toured. They wanted me to make a live record and stay in Europe, and we really wanted to come back to America. Me especially. I think the whole band did. But I really wanted to. My girlfriend was in Atlanta, Bill Rea’s wife was in Atlanta, and we really wanted to come home. We were homesick. Looking back on it, it was not the smartest move. We should have flown them over to England. We came back, and they had an American office that they were starting. I had met the guy that was the head of that, so we felt really encouraged by that. We came back, their American office folded, my girlfriend moved out, and Bill’s wife left him. And it all happened at the same time. Right after we got back. I remember Bill and I were best friends, we still are, incredibly close friends and we have been for all of these years, but at the time we were both devastated and shot down that we had come home to be with our partners and they had both left. I remember about a week after I had got back, I ran into Bill at the grocery store, and I was shopping for groceries, picking up my new bachelor cereal and toast, and Bill had this pathetic looking shopping cart, with bread in it or something, I looked at it and I just knew. I looked at him and went, “Did Janie leave?”

We just knew. We found out at the grocery store. So it wasn’t the smartest move, but after that, I started putting records out by myself again. I put out “Dark Lights,” “Razor Pocket,” “St. Valentine’s Day,” I just released all of those myself. Then there was a record called “Elevator” that came out on SST records. ESD records put out the records after that. “Scratched By the Rabbit…” and Shotput Records put out “Walking Through Walls.” It’s just been going from label to label. So many of these small labels unfortunately just fold. They’re up for a while and then they are gone. The last record, “Angel Sparks” came out on Gaff Music. Scott Beale is just trying to create an independent label and keep it alive, and do whatever it takes to create a home for so many artists like myself that can’t find any other label to put out their music.

LK: Talk about “Angel Sparks,” your new record.

GP: What I’ve done all along, with all the records, I finance all of the records myself except “Swim in the Wind.” That was the only record somebody gave me. I just have not wanted people to be interfering with the record. So after “Swim in the Wind” all of the records I make I just finance myself, and when it was finished, and completely mastered and mixed, that’s when I would take it to labels. Doing that is commercial suicide. You are not allowing a label any input. But creatively I felt it’s what I had to do to keep my music alive the way I wanted to keep it. So that’s what I did with “Angel Sparks.” I have noticed as I’ve gotten older, and this probably reached it’s most extreme with “Angel Sparks”, is my vision has become clearer of what I want these records to be, which is great, but then doing that, the clearer your vision becomes, sometimes the longer it takes to make the record because you know when it’s right and when it’s not. You just get deeper and deeper into it, and that particular record, after I had written all of the material which I did over the course of a few years, from the day I went in to record that record with all of the material written, to the day I finished was three years. It’s not like I’m in the studio every day for three years, but I would go in and record things, and then take them home and listen to them, and not go back into the studio again for a month. I’d experiment with the tapes from home. I’d experiment with the overdubs.

It was a very long process, and in the midst of that process, a lot of people were dying around me. Both involved with the record, and personal friends, and in my family. For instance, some of the songs I wanted to do on the record with congas instead of drums. I got together with these two conga players that were friends since they were kids. They had this percussion team, and they played together. I met them and they just sounded incredible together. We worked up all of this material together, and it sounded great, and we were getting ready to record, and one of the guys had just gotten married, and his wife was pregnant. He came to a practice, and he told us all of this, and said that’s great, and then he came to the next practice and he told us he had a headache. Then he went home, and within a few weeks from then, he was dead from a brain tumor. Which was obviously devastating to me, and even a million more times devastating to the other percussion player. It was another one of these situations where you try to turn something positive into it. What we did, was the percussion player that had worked this stuff up that was still living, Matt Cowley, Brian is the player who died, Matt worked up all of Brian’s parts. He didn’t do it initially. We didn’t even start talking about this until months after this had happened. He went in and put all of his parts down, and then overdubbed all of Brian’s.

That was again, trying to take something that seems negative on the surface, and try to turn it into something positive. If it is about somebody you care about, that’s the best thing you can remember them by. So that record very much became a thing that became sort of a bookend to “Lost At Sea,” of being years older, 25 years older than when I made that record, and going through very similar experiences. In the midst of making the record, my Mom died. Which very much tied things together for me.

I had gone out to see my Mom, she was very reclusive, she had quit drinking years ago, and like a lot of ex-alcoholics tend to do, you know, the alcohol was sort of their way of coping with reality. When all of a sudden, they quit drinking, they tend to get sort of reclusive. My Mom, we talked on the phone a lot, but I rarely saw her. She didn’t really want to get together that often. It was stress for her. I remember one time I was going out to California, to play on one of Henry Kaiser’s records, and I hadn’t seen her in five years. I said, “Mom, I’m coming to California! I’ll be right by you, I’m playing on a guy’s record, I’ll be out there, I can see you.” There was just this long pause. And then she goes, “That’s nice honey.” You have to know my Mom, to take that with a sense of humor. It freaked her out having to deal with a visit. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her kids. She was like that. When it got to the point that I realized she was really sick, and she’s not going to live long, while I was making this record, I just thought I’ve got to see her before she dies, but if I call her up she’s just going to freak out. She’ll tell me to come, but she’ll freak. So Katie and I just flew out there. We didn’t tell her. When I got in California, I called up my Mom and said, “Mom, I’m in California. I’m coming over to see you.” She hung up the phone, and I found this out when I got to the house, she had this nurse there to take care of her, and this nurse told me that after she hung up the phone, and she hadn’t been out of bed hardly at all, bedridden, but this nurse told me after I called her up she ran through the house yelling at me, “My Son’s coming over! Get his picture back on the wall!”

So I went to see my Mom, and I knew it would be the last time I’d see her, and you don’t know what you’re going to say. So, on a gut level, I thought, don’t think about what you’re going to say to her, if you just see her, you’ll know what to say or what to do. I was alone in the room with her, and I was kind of surprised this shot out of my mouth, but I just said, “I know you think you’ve been a horrible Mother.” And she said, “I do. That’s what I’ve always thought.” And I said, “Well, you haven’t been. You don’t just teach your kids about sunny days at the beach and happy memories. They learn from watching their parents fall down and get back up again. And I’ve had a very happy life from what I’ve learned from you and Dad.” I meant it . I wasn’t just saying that for her. At that point in my life, I knew that I had had a very happy life, because of what I had learned from them. They were both alcoholics, and I’ve never drank in my life; I’m an alcoholic personality. I’m as addictive a personality and alcoholic a personality as I’ve ever met in my life. From what they went through, I learned from their mistakes. And that’s a real gift. Your parents give it to you, and it’s the biggest gift they have to give to you.

This record became to me very much all of those things I was confused about at “Lost At Sea” and this feeling of losing a parent when you are younger, and it’s unexpected, and you don’t really know how to take all of these things, and being older and being able to have that moment with my Mom really seemed like a luxury compared to what happened with my Dad. So the record very much became about the passage of death, and the aftermath of it’s effect on the living, and how that can become a positive experience in your life. A friend of mine’s mother also died during the making of the record, that I was really close to, and I went to their funeral, and I was watching his family in the aftermath of their Mother’s death, and watching how much they were affected, and shaped by their Mother after she was gone. I was trying to think of a way to describe that, and the same thing with my Mother, with this conga player, and different people, that passed away during the time of making this record, and he told me that his Mother’s maiden name was Angel Sparks. That just sort of captured to me the concept of being affected by the dead, and these sparks, the turbulence that you go through, and the darkness that comes, and the light that is drawn to it at the same time. How it’s your choice to pick one over the other.

LK: I’m going to give you some words, and you just talk about the first thing that comes to your mind. Pen Lines.

GP: I was talking earlier about how much I was affected my comics when I was growing up. I still think about this a lot, I’m still into comics now, and I look back at these comics and to me it’s like an artist’s medium. I was so drawn to some artists. And other ones I just didn’t like at all. It all comes down to those pen lines. The power that just the subtle differences can make. It’s always amazed me, the creative expression is always about making choices. What makes somebody make a clean line, and somebody else make a broken-up line, and how that little line can communicate so much, and draw somebody in. I look back at some of these old comics, and some of them just transport me to another world, and I still to this day am very much connected to them. And I look at other comics from the same era, written by the same person, and drawn by somebody else and they have no affect on me at all. It still amazes me the power of that pen line, and I’m still mystified by how it can have such powerful effects. Something so subtle. It communicates so much about what somebody’s feeling through something so seemingly small, but actually massive.

LK: Blue Screen.

GP: The first thing that comes to my mind with a blue screen is when Katie and I are at home, and Katie who I’ve been with for eighteen years, we have very different personalities. When we are watching a video, I always leave on a channel. Like when we stop for the commercials, and fast forward the video, I want to watch something else, and see what’s on the other channels, look around, and check other things out. There’s one channel where you put it on, and its just a blue screen, with no sound and no channel. Every time we get to a commercial and fast forward the video, if there is another channel on Katie goes, “Blue Screen! Blue Screen!” So we have to switch it over to the blue screen because she doesn’t want her train of thought interrupted. So when you say blue screen, I know this sounds kind of remote, but that’s what I think of. It sort of symbolizes our different personalities. I’m fine with checking out other things while we’re going through the commercials, and then picking back up on what we’re watching, but she’s not. It shakes her world up too much.

LK: Pink Fuzz.

GP: For some reason that makes me think of the fifties. This era when I was growing up, and I was really young, and I was taking in a lot of this culture, and people expressing themselves through their culture. Through cars and music, and for some reason Pink Fuzz brings that to mind. I don’t know why, except my Dad used to have a pink Cadillac convertible at one point. He was really proud of it. My Dad was a very open-minded lovable guy, and he worked for Metropolitan Life Insurance. He was kind of high up in the company. He met Richie Havens and his band one time at the airport, and they had a layover in the town where my parents were living at the time, which was California. He brought them all home for dinner. I think of this pink convertible Cadillac and that being an icon of this fifties era.

LK: Lamppost and Television.

GP: Anytime I think of a lamp post, I think of…I had a girlfriend when I was in the seventh grade. You know, all the make-out parties, and I had a girlfriend. I remember when all the kids starting drinking at the parties, I extricated myself from the whole thing. I had such a negative association with drinking, and since as an adult of course I have had tons of friends who were alcoholics, and it has no effect, but as a kid because of what was going on at home, from eighth grade up to the point when I was sixteen I didn’t have a girlfriend. I just removed myself from all of that. This social party scene. I came home one day from school, and this new girl had moved in across the street, and she was in the kitchen talking to my Mom. I came in and it was just like, I had stayed away from girls and dating and all this stuff, and it was like a big thing about to explode, and I walked into the kitchen and I saw her, and it was like, “Kaboom!” I remember talking to her, I mean, she lived right across the street! It was so…close! So I called her up, and asked her if she wanted to get together, she said yeah, so I went over and picked her up. She said, where do you want to go? And I said, I know a place we can go, and I took her to the plumbing store. It was ten at night, and we went by the hardware store, and I said, “Look at these pipes!” She got it, she was laughing, and so then we drove over to the park, and stood underneath a lamp post and we just started making out. It was the first time anybody had put their tongue in my mouth, and it changed my world. So when, I think about the lamp post, I think about making out with her underneath the lamp post. That was the girl I ended up having two kids with, one of which was adopted, a daughter born on my eighteenth birthday, and then again real close to my twentieth birthday.

Television, I think about being one of these places you sort of escape to when you are a kid. I actually got a lot out of television when I was younger. Just watching these shows, like that are considered classic or corny television, but television was a place that I liked going to when I was younger.

LK: Mermaid and Pharaoh.

GP: Well, Mermaid and probably Pharaoh too would make me think very much of comic books. That’s the first place I was exposed to those things. I’ve thought a lot about the effects that comics had on me when I was younger, and when I talk about music triggering my imagination. Comic books did that for me, they were another place, another world. To me comic books are a modern mythology. All mythology is modern mythology, at some point or another. People are very ingratiated with the concept of traditional mythology and they should be. It’s incredible, these things and what they represent, but mythology, whether it’s in a comic book or it’s about some ancient text is always about people expressing themselves through their imagination. That’s what to me religion is about. It’s people taking stories and mythologies and fabricating through their imagination a way to express what they feel inside. I really believe that that’s where the truth is revealed. It’s where you find the truth. In my life, it’s been the main way I have found the truth, through my imagination. So when I think of mermaids and Pharaohs I think back to looking at these things when I was younger, and how I would follow these stories, characters, and these things, but what it was doing was opening up places in your mind and triggering your imagination.

LK: Adopt-a-Highway.

GP: The first thing that popped into my mind…Jeff Calder and I are close friends, he’s the singer and songwriter in the Swimming Pool Q’s, and he and I have written songs together for years, and we have the band The Supreme Court. I think of a thing that happened with he and I by the highway. It was back when there was a politician at the time named Pat Swindell, who was one of these Mom and Apple Pie right-wing guys who you just knew was a complete phony. He was later convicted on drug charges, but this was prior to that. Jeff and I couldn’t stand him. They posted this gigantic Pat Swindell sign up on the corner of the highway where he used to live. He wanted to deface the sign. And I’m into defacing signs you know. I think it’s a valid form of expression. So, it was posted up near this place that he used to refer to as “The Meat Fort.” It was some kind of place where they sold meat. “They’ve got a Pat Swindell sign up by the Meat Fort. We’ve got to deface it.” So he comes over and gets me, and he’s got a can of spray paint, and he wants to paint swastikas on it. I said you can paint the swastikas, but I thought to make a good sign defacing it has to be capable of being done by a twelve year old. That’s what makes it correct. The swastikas were okay, but there had to be more than that. In the center of the thing, it said, Pat, and in gigantic letters underneath it it said Swindell. So I said, in front of Pat put the word “Please, comma” and then after it, put “my ass.” So it says, “Please, Pat my ass Swindell.” So, he gets the can of spray paint, and I’m out there with the camera because I’m taking pictures of it, and he paints “Please, Pat my ass Swindell” and then he puts the swastikas up in the corner where he wants them, and prior to us doing this, he says, “What do I do if a car comes?” Because, we’re on the highway. It was late at night, so there weren’t many people coming down it, but it’s usually a pretty well traveled road, and I said, “Look. Just drop the can of paint, and we’ll just act like we’re walking down the street.” So he’s painting this stuff up, he’s painted “Please, Pat my ass Swindell”, he’s painting the swastikas, and a car comes by and he starts running around with his hands up in the air, still pressing down the can of spray paint, shooting paint out of it, yelling “There’s a car coming! There’s a car coming!” Jumping around. So when you said, Adopt-a-highway that’s what comes to mind.

LK: I’ll let my sweater figure it out.

GP: That’s a tough one, because I’ve never been much of a sweater person. It makes me think of Katie who likes turtlenecks. She always wears these turtlenecks, and she’s tried to get me to wear sweaters, and I just hate the idea of anything around my neck. I never wear a tie. I just always hated wearing suits, or a tie, or anything remotely like that. Ever since I was a little kid, it makes me feel horrible and choked, and claustraphobic. So it reminds me of this personal phobia I have of having anything around my neck.

LK: White Glitter notebook.

GP: I said earlier I had a daughter when I was eighteen years old, and she was adopted. And she did find us years later. I have noticed that creates a pattern in your life, and a kind of yearning. I’ve read about other people who have given up their kids for adoption, and they tend to have friendships with kids, and all throughout my life I’ve had these close friendships with girls and watched them grow up. I think it’s trying to fulfill this experience in my life and I form these really close bonds. There was this girl that lived down the street from us in our old neighborhood, and I knew her from when she was a little kid, and I’m still close with her and she’s out of college now. One of these kids had a notebook with, and she put all this stuff on it, made me think of that. She just showed it to me the other day, and all of these pictures and glitter, and all of these things she had done on it. It reminded me once again of taking an experience of loss, loosing your daughter and loosing a chance to see her grow up, and turning it into a way to reach out to other kids in your life, and connect with them. That’s been a very important part of my life.

LK: Modern Orange Sky.

GP: It makes me think of pollution. Orange sky would make me think of a sunset, but when you say Modern Orange Sky it makes me think of pollution, and city scopes which are not appealing to me at all. I’m not really a guy that’s about get back in the mountains, I like neighborhoods and I like being close to people, but what’s happened in cities in America is not really appealing to me.

LK: One more. We have asked everybody we have interviewed this question, and it was actually inspired by you. Slow Fear.

GP: Well, Slow Fear is a title of a song from the “Walking Through Walls” CD, and the impetus of writing the song, I was reading books about alien abductions. I read one of these stories about this person talking about the aliens, describing it creeping through her room, and taking her over, and what a terrifying it experience it was, and that really affected me in what it represented. Now in a song form, just literally speaking, I was trying to portray that experience. There’s this plucky delay guitar in the beginning, this little thing going on, and that was like the aliens creeping in the room, and the guitar comes screeching in real heavy, it was like this person being terrified and creating a song about this experience. What Slow Fear represents to me, that title, and the experience that person was writing about was to me, is the things in your life that affect you from childhood, and you’re not even aware that they affect you. They create fears in your life, that last into your adult life and hopefully as you are an adult you begin to see your way through some of these things. That’s what Slow Fear means. I’m not saying that this person did or didn’t get abducted, but I think these fears have to take a shape or a form. You either meet them head on, or they take over your life. That concept of an alien coming in sort of symbolized that to me. I was talking about earlier about music being a way to escape from reality. And it is that when you are a certain age. But as you get older, hopefully as you escape it begins to open up doors inside yourself that you didn’t even know you had.

Hopefully those doors open up and reveal things about yourself. Like for instance, all throughout my adult life, I had tended to have relationships with women, and be attracted to women that I really didn’t get along with. For some reason that was attractive to me. These combative, not like we were beating each other, but these combative relationships. You’re a young guy, and you think I really don’t get along with her, we just don’t get along, and then it happens a few years later with somebody else again, and eventually as you get older you think there’s a common thread through all of these experiences, and it’s me. It’s not about these girls, it’s about why am I choosing to have relationships with people that I don’t get along with. With me, what I realized about myself at the age of about 35, I was in the middle of a really bad relationship with somebody, and it broke up right before I got with Katie, and a lot of this happened with being with Katie and someone who could really understand me and like help you, I began to realize it was me and the choices I was making. I realized growing up in an alcoholic home where my parents were fighting all the time, but my parents loved each other. Through all of it I realized that I had equated conflict with passion. I was afraid literally afraid, Slow Fear, that’s what it was to me, to have a relationship with someone that I did get along with because I was afraid that that couldn’t last. That fear was ruling my life, and dooming every relationship I had up until that point. When I finally realized that, and faced that fear in the eyes, and looked at it, and stopped trying to hide from it, that’s when I finally had something with somebody that was very different, and we’ve been together eighteen years, since that point. So that’s what Slow Fear really represents to me. That little thing about the alien creeping in and taking over became a symbolic thing about how these fears inside somebody can take a shape and form that will rule and control your life in a way that you are not even aware of, you have to stop looking at yourself as a victim, and start looking at yourself as the perpetrator of your own problems if you want to have the power to change them.

LK: For a younger musician, somebody who is trying to become a musician, or trying to learn an instrument, what advice would you give to them.

GP: I think it’s really important to realize that you can get things from other people, you can learn things from other people, but no one can tell you what’s really right inside yourself. You have to have faith in your own ability, even if you have no ability. No perceptible ability. Ultimately, any form of creative expression comes down to you being unafraid to step into the darkness. To open up a door, and walk into a dark room, even if there is no floor there, and step into it. That’s about going inside yourself and letting these things out that you feel. It all becomes about making choices. We were talking about the simple line, the line drawing, “Do I want this line like this or do I want it like this?” Somebody else will tell you, “This is the correct way to make the line, and this is how the rules go.” It’s okay to learn the rules, but ultimately only as a shortcut to get to what you want to get to. You have to make your own decision. I’ve given guitar lessons for years, I can show somebody how to play chords, and notes, and what the guitar does, but whether you want it on the front pickup or the back pickup, somebody can show you which is which, but they can’t tell you which is the right one. You have to just do that yourself. Ultimately any creative process is about being unafraid to make decisions. Those decisions, if you believe in yourself, and have an image of yourself that you are valid as a person, and as important of a person as anybody else is, that’s the only way you are going to make that decision. It’s the only way you’ll make the right one. No one can tell you what the right decision is. So there is nothing wrong with getting help from people on how a guitar works or how to play it, or how an amp works, all those things, but it has to serve your purpose and not theirs.