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Moderated
by Dean Kuipers of RAYGUN magazine
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woman named Rachel Benbow Murdy (whom those who have bought Soul Coughing's
first record may know as the woman who sings over the answering machine
on the song "Janine") and I used to listen to Rickie Lee Jones' song "Ghost
Train" over and over again. We lived in a building overlooking Sheridan
Square in New York, relied on Vietnamese delivery for subsistence, smoked
to excess. Our experience of the world was mostly through repeated watchings
of the final sequence of Goodfellas and in the incredibly dark, overwhelmingly
chilling world of that song, in which a woman gets on a bus and goes to
hell. We were youthful hipster wannabes. I think Rachel may have gone to
a mirror with Rickie's first record cover, a couple of times, and may have
attempted to dangle her cigarette from her mouth in a similar fashion. |
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| Anyhow.
Criminally, Rickie is remembered - at least by my small and most unscientific
sample of friends - as the singer of Chuck E.'s In Love. In truth, she is
a formidable poet. And, after a brief couple of hours of conversation, I
find myself kind of sad that I don't live in a day where artists are allowed
to be artists - fickle, unreliable, half-crazed, and entirely unaware of
the machinations of promotion and publicity. I was amazed to find that,
having spent the last two years shaking hands with retail people and taking
photographs, someone for whom I have tremendous respect - a youthful idol
and model - actually heard a record I made, and listened to it. - M. Doughty
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| Dean
Kuipers (Ray Gun Magazine): Both of your musics are very different experiments
moving away from - or (to Doughty) in your case, maybe moving toward - the
pop song. |
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| Rickie
Lee Jones: It's so hard when you work with definitions like that. Everything
transcends them if it's of quality, and when you use them as the basis that
you're working from, it's so small. Because there are great pop songs. Look
at the Beatles. People like them. And if they don't like them, they're art. |
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| M. Doughty:
Yeah, POP being "popular. |
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| DK: Making
your album (Ghostyhead), did you feel like you were making art? |
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| Rickie:
Oh, I was afraid Id set myself up for that. |
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| Doughty:
(laughing) We'll have to take a brief poll of the patrons here before you
answer that question. Using your paradigm of - like equals pop - not like
equals art. |
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| Rickie:
Well, according to, uh, sales I think it's art. |
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| Doughty:
(guffaws) There's a new SoundScan feature, when they run it over the bar
code and the scanner thing, there's like an Art Meter. It's like, "Oh, in
Baton Rouge. We got 5,000 art in Baton Rouge, man." |
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| Rickie:
What do you think, is it art? |
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| (Daisy,
Rickie's huge bulldog, comes up to the table, panting wildly, and worries
a bagel lying there.) Doughty: Daisy definitely believes it to be art. However,
to Daisy, the bagel is a pop song. |
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| Rickie:
(chuckling) I heard this quote from Norman Mailer. He said, "Precedence
is the essence of mediocrity." So whenever you try to have a conversation
with people you don't know, in order to get started you're always going
to base it on what's come before and what you think of it, and it's really
hard to get started. |
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| Doughty:
So, what's the first hip-hop song you ever heard? |
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| Rickie:
I have a lot of trouble with definitions, because I don't know where it
crossed from rap to hip-hop, from 1980 to 1990. Where does that take place? |
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| Doughty:
I don't think there is a difference between rap and hip-hop. |
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| Rickie:
Well, it got a little shuffle in it. It was chut-chut-chut, then it started
going, chut-chut-ka-chut-chut. |
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| Doughty:
Right, I mean, it's basically the difference between programming a drum
machine and using a James Brown loop. Do you remember the first thing that
you heard that got you? |
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| Rickie:
During the course of the conversation, I might. Oh, no - Ice! Ice! One of
the ices! Ice-T! |
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| Doughty:
(chuckling) Yeah? One of the ices the Ice Brothers! Back in the days of
Vaudeville. The Ice Brothers. There was Gummo Ice, and ? |
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| Rickie:
It was a really angry record, and he used all of these really - "da bitches"
- and the general sexual tone was really evil, but his point of view was
important, and I liked it. It was intelligent. I think that Walter Becker
[of Steely Dan] sat and played me that Ice-T record. I went, "You're letting
your kid listen to? What's the matter with you?" But it made a big impression,
good and bad. I think that was it. 1989. |
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| Doughty:
I always find the whole - "Well, okay, so it's degrading to women, but it's
a really important point of view… |
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| Rickie:
No, it wasn't that part that was important. What was important was, culturally,
I am, and we are so isolated. Black culture is so isolated from white culture,
and vice-versa. I am, anyway. So when I listen to a point of view that says,
as angry as it was, "I wanna rise up, I wanna teach people, I'm gonna complain,"
but somewhere in the midst of his complaining and anger was this sense of
a self that could triumph and conquer. And I heard that, in spite of all
the bullshit that he was saying and the oppressive learned cultural stuff.
So it wasn't important for what he was parroting, there was something in
there that was saying, "I can overcome it." |
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| Doughty-
When I listen to "Deep Cover" - Snoop Doggy Dog or Dr. Dre - I hear a Scorsese
movie. It's just an intensely compelling, menacing narrative in the first
person. About this totally amoral character. And the constant problem with
hip-hop is that the guy's got to keep coming out there and saying, "This
is real. This is me. This is my life" As if Martin Scorsese had to get up
there and say, "Yo, I really lived this shit, and I was really in the mob." |
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| DK: (to
Rickie) How is it that you came to use these rhythms? |
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| Rickie-
No, it's not the rhythms, because it's easy to put a shuffle in anything.
But what I liked in the last few years is the use of loops and mechanical
sounds to their advantage, rather than to their disadvantage. Because when
it first started, it didn't sound very good. When they have a sample and
they cut if off mid stream and attach something else to it, it's just such
a non-organic way of thinking, such a different way of thinking for me,
that it's really exciting. I like it. So that's how I came to do it, because
it's different than the way I think, and what I know. So I'm attracted to
it. |
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| Doughty-
"Ghost Train" was basically a blues. Isn't that basically the same thing'
It's saying, "I'm gonna take this form" - isn't taking a loop basically
a more technological form of taking a form? |
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| Rickie:
But it involves machines. |
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| Doughty:
Is an electric guitar not a machine? |
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| Rickie:
Oh, I don't think so. I think it's still just an instrument. |
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| DK: Why,
because you don't have to stop the flow once you are actually "playing"
the thing? |
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| Rickie:
Yeah, I guess that's what it is. For me, the gap between stopping the way
I flow to go to the machine stops the way I work. |
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| Doughty:
Right, but, see Id like somebody to find for me what actually "playing7
means. If at some time it becomes possible to stick an electrode into a
composer's mind, and they go (makes a face) and there's the piece, does
the removal of all the difficulty of the process mean that it is not actually
being played? Basically, I think that 4000 years ago, there was some guy
bangin' on a rock. And then somebody hollowed out a piece of wood and put
an animal skin over it, and somebody started hittin' that, and it sounded
a little better and was a little bit more efficient than banging on a rock
And the guy banging on the rock turned to the guy banging on the piece of
wood and said, "Hey, man, you gotta go and hollow that thing out, man- I'm
bangin' a rock. That's the real shit. This wood is some technology; whatever." |
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| Rickie:
Well, exactly. But for me, it doesn't happen that way. From the time when
I learned to play, this is what I learned. So this is in my being to do
things this way. As a matter of fact, I did not ever plug in my guitar.
Ha! I did not extend myself into any machine whatsoever, you know? And it's
something that I've only learned in the last few years, to turn the knobs. |
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| Doughty:
I'm a guitar player and a vocalist, basically, and I have a sampler player
in my band and there's a drummer who's basically doing live grooves. But
I just recently got an ASR-10, which is a very simple kind of sampler. And
all the parts that I rewind on records- - It's just like, "Oh, yeah, that
line." And you rewind it and listen to it again and again- - You just put
it in the sampler. I'm into listening to pop songs and kinda going for a
nerve. So this is just a really efficient way of going for the nerve - |
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| Rickie:
That's a great discipline. |
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| Doughty:
And you just find the thing, and you just go over and over and over again.
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| Rickie:
I've lost that discipline. If we were going to define "pop" and "non-pop"
that's the discipline of pop, is to find that thread and exploit it. I am
so interested in what happens right now, and only in what happens right
now, that it's really hard for me to have the discipline to make the song
right now, and go, "Oh, that was really good, let's do it again'" and repeat
that moment. |
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| Doughty:
Well, that's totally the beauty of a sequencer, right there. You're going
along, and you get it, and then you hit the button and boom! There it is.
And that moment is there forever. |
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| Rickie:
That's right. I like it. And that's the big difference between an organic
groove, where you're trying to repeat what you did by the 15th take… |
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