Walkabouts Interviews, 2002

I interviewed Chris and Carla for the fourth time February 17, 2002. They were playing in Sweden at a club in Malmö called KB (Kulturbolaget)--probably the best place for amplified music in the entire country! I wanted to get their view on what had happened since 'Trail of Stars'. As usual, they were very talkative and friendly, discussing the ups and downs of the Walkabouts in recent years.

But I also wanted to go one step further and have a chat with Terri Moeller and Glenn Slater, the two other core members since more than decade. Most often, interviewers focus on Chris and Carla, and it's easy to forget that Terri and Glenn are very important contributors to the sound and development of the Walkaboúts.

The interviews were originally set up for Swedish music magazine La Musik, and published in #1 in June 2002.

As usual, I'd like to thank the members of the band for their patience with me and their kind support and helpfulness during the interviews and otherwise. It's always a great pleasure to meet them!

CHRIS & CARLA

interviewed by Peter Sjöblom

It seems to me that 'Ended Up A Stranger' is a kind of a summary of the last years from 'Trail of Stars' up to now, musically and lyrically. Would you agree to that?

CE: I think that musically it goes even back farther than that. I think it even has stuff that we could have done… We wouldn't have done it in the same style, but I think with the same sort of execution maybe. But I think there are stylistic things that go even farther back.

CT: Like 'See It in the Dark' or something.

CE: It could have been on 'Nighttown'. 'Ended Up a Stranger' could have been on 'Setting the Woods on Fire' but we would have played it much differently; somehow with not the same kind of groove to it, but its chord construction and the kind of song it is could have been on a record like that. The main thing is that we didn't think so much what we were going to do this time. We just didn't want to make a… you know, I've said this in the things I wrote, but I say it again, we didn't want to make a concept record, like some of the last ones. Even 'Train Leaves at Eight' is a concept record, very much a concept record. And so, I think, this time the criteria was just write songs and then sort of filter through them and just pick the ones we like the best. So we had about twenty songs with the band in our rehearsals and I had about ten others beside of that. We really not wanted to feel constrained by the idea of trying to make a coherent record. I just wanted to make a record with a bunch of songs we liked.

CT: You can do a concept album and then there's very much a lot of freedom within that, because you know you're boundaries. But when you kinda bust that open again it's a bit freeing and… no restrictions. You know, sometimes you worry a little bit whether you can sequence the album, whether somehow you can still make a nice ride for a listener, but this album was so easy to sequence.

CE: Somehow it was put together quite quickly.

It's funny because I think 'Ended Up a Stranger' is a musically more coherent album than 'Train Leaves at Eight'.

CE: Well, yeah, I mean 'Train Leaves at Eight' was never going to be a very musically cohesive record, because what we were trying to do was a sort of musical path. The material was so widely different that it was no way that it was going to be put together with any coherence.

CT: We had no idea how we were gonna make those songs fit, and basically we just did it geographical.

CE: That only came later. We came up with that solution when we had the album done.

CT: But we thought, you know, we'd start with gypsyish… a little more traditional songs and get weirder, so we went from the South to the North. That was a nice ride I thought.

CE: But the end of the record and the beginning of it really have nothing to do with each other. But I still think it works. But you know, that was a very difficult project, there's no doubt about it. The mark we set very high of what we had to achieve with that. I think we did a very good job considering how ambitious it really was. There was a lot to take on.

CT: We had no idea really that the translations would take the most amount of time to get them right and get them good and to be able to get them singable.

CE: It's one thing to translate, it's another thing to actually put in some sort of musical vocabulary. It's a wholly different story. That was very difficult.

Do the lyrics follow the original version?

CE: Well, hopefully. You know, they're interpretations, I mean any translation is an interpretation. At some point you have to abandon the original. You hold on to the original for as long as you can but there's a point where you really just have to go in a whole other zone that is creative to sort of having to make things work.

CT: But we did hear from some of the artists, the songwriters, and everyone was very pleased with the translations except one.

Who?

CE: Blumfeld. Yeah, he hated it. But I think he more hated the fact that we chopped his song.

CT: Eight minutes down to three minutes.

CE: He thought every word was absolutely fundamental. But I mean, our thing was just like how we normally do covers. I think our job is… we have a certain reverence for the artist or the song, but when we start working with it, that reverence more or less disappears to a certain extent. We have to be a little egotistical about what you do with the song. or else it ends up sounding like the original. At some point you have to take a jumping off point for your own obsessions. And our thing with his song was that we felt like… The reason we chose it was it was long and repetitive and I thought in a way it sort of was striving to be a pop song but it was not really succeeding at all. Our take on it was actually trying to help it become a pop song. Not that our version is better, it's just like a different take on it.

CT: Yeah, we just made it a love song and took the politics out, and he didn't like that either.

It's hard to translate political issues.

CE: Yeah. He writes in a kind of a very dense and very surrealistic and…

CT: Double meanings.

CE: … in lots of very cultural metaphors and I think a lot of that we missed along the way somewhere.

CT: It's so funny when you hear the original song again. My approach is, 'they sure did it different than we did it!'

Did you have certain approach to these songs since they are European, other than you've had before with American songs?

CE: I don't think so. With 'Satisfied Mind' I think we looked at the source material and took some clues from it in terms of how they were originally presented. So some of the instruments we chose to use like mandolin and pedal steel that didn't show up on earlier Walkabouts records in any larger way. We used not only the… let's say, the…

CT: Instrumentation?

CE: We did use the instrumentation, we didn't just use the song and the moods of songs, but we also took some clues from the way the songs were originally recorded too. I think we did pretty much the same thing with this record. To an extent we tried to incorporate a certain kind of musical aesthetic. When we were putting the record together I had a very early vision of what I wanted the band to be. I knew exactly what I wanted the band should be. Since we're a seven piece band with Anne-Marie on violin, and Elaine DeFalco mainly on accordion, I thought that this would give us… OK, you still have the five member rock band in amidst of it, but we had these more kind of folkish instruments, like the accordion shows up in European music from Norway to Greece, so that's one kind of instrument that usually navigate over these borders. The violin is the same, you know, the European traditional folk instrument. It shows up in various different contexts, from gypsy music to even French chansons, Virtually any of these traditions use violin somehow. So I thought that would give it a continuity. I really felt like let's try to have eight or nine of the songs revolving around that core sound, and then we can try to go off in diversions from there.

CT: We had about 70… of all selections… it's a long list of choices to about 75 songs and we had quite of few of those translated because we liked the music. But as soon as we got the translations we couldn't… we didn't like the lyrics or we didn't like the sentiment. So we had all that worked out too, they just fell by the wayside. Lyrically we had to be able to stand behind it. 'Cause you have to if you in case you want to sing them later on and be proud of the lyrics.

CE: Like that one song that Elaine brought, the German one… not Kurt Weill, it was like… oh yeah, Eisler!

CT: It was something about the soldiers.

CE: Yeah, the words were not really that interesting

CT: No, we didn't like the sentiment. It was almost like …

CE: It was one of these anti-war songs that sound like a war song. It was ironic.

But if you translate it---

CE: ---it would easily get lost, yeah. It was a Brecht composition, it was very ironic. It was talking against war but it was also playing up all these events of war.

That's the problem with taking especially older stuff from a very specific cultural context.

CE: It was from that cabaret context where it's all about, you know, irony, like, saying the opposite of what you really mean because it's very politically subversive to do it.

CT. Actually, in one of the songs we didn't like the sentiment towards the gypsies, so we kind of empowered the gypsies a little bit. By just choosing the right words, we made them a little bit more powerful.

CE: I think it came out of a language thing too, because what it meant in Slovenia is much different in a way translated.

CT: True, but of the two translations that we did get…

CE: Yeah, but again, you lose the shading of the language very quickly. It becomes slightly complicated to certain degree, you lose track of it very quickly.

Did working with European material and traditions reveal anything to you, both as a performer and a songwriter, that you hadn't been aware of before working with mainly American material?

CE: I think that you learned that there is a lot of ways American song tradition, a lot of it comes from Europe. It's not really that far apart. I think there's probably more similarities than differences, I mean, even in subjects. Songs, particularly more traditional songs we did with a kind of a subject matter, it's the same everywhere. It's the same kind.

CT: Protest songs.

CE: Protest songs, ordinary people tragedy songs, it kinda carries over to American country and blues. Portuguese fado, the wellspring is from the same place. So I don't think… maybe that was actually even something I didn't know before we started the record. It could possibly be something we learned. It seems obvious to me now that maybe I didn't really know that so much before that. I think stylistically we maybe incorporated a few things. I don't know, it's really hard to say, because sometimes the influences you feel from things are not always directed towards the next project you do. Maybe they take a whole other project. to get down.

CT: I do though remember like doing the French song, 'Everyone Kisses a Stranger', when I sing that song I feel totally French. And I don't know why. It has that kind of lilt to it. It's a waltz. I mean, not that we haven't done waltzes, but…

CE: But it has a different emphasis to it.

The lyrics of both 'Trail of Stars' and 'Ended Up a Stranger' are very personal. I figure a lot of it has to do with your previous relationship?

CT: Some of it are still kind of hard to sing… from 'Trail of Stars'.

CE: I would say 'Trail of Stars' more than this record. I mean, you can look at any of the songs from our fifteen years, and there's always a love lost and regret and all kinds of things. I think that's just a certain mode of songwriting. But certainly, your personal emotions and experiences for sure push you in directions. But I think 'Ended Up A Stranger' is a very autobiographical song, but it has nothing to do with Carla's and my relationship really directly. I would really say that that song is just something that I felt and I think everyone in our band has felt; it's more like a situation not just from being on the road, but we grew up in a town that has completely changed its face. Not just because we travel and tend to come back to it, but even our own peers don't know what this place means to them anymore because it's got so ludicrously expensive to live and a lot of people have prospered and others have not and those who have not are sort of considered second class society. Seattle used to be this kind of empowering place for people who didn't have a lot of money and chose to live an alternative lifestyle but that has really really changed.

CT: And the skyline changes. New buildings going up and… you drive into a neighborhood and you haven't been there for three weeks and it can quite easily be a wholly new building there. And that was standing all vacant. Bad times finally hit Seattle that we probably won't recover from. And some of us are glad.

CE: I think the most autobiographical record that Carla and I have ever done was 'Swinger 500'. Without a doubt, there seems to be some autobiographical issues involved there. But I don't really…

CT: Or like 'Gold'!

CE: Yeah, 'Trail of Stars', there's some stuff, there's some stuff on 'Trail Of Stars', but I don't think all of those… like 'Last Tears of the Century' or 'Crime Story'. But with this record I didn't feel in any omnipresent way or upfront way that this is about that. I think I've tried to write lyrics that _appear_ to be more personal. I just want them to be very vivid characters. I think I'm relying less on very indirect metaphors that I ever have. I'm trying to write in an 'OK, this is the present, this is now' way but I don't think it's always me. Some of these songs, I don't know really who they are. like 'More Heat Than Light', I don't know what the song is about.

CT: Or 'Lest We Forget'.

CE: Yeah, these are very fictional. No doubt about it, it's clearly fiction. 'Climb', very fiction.

Maybe it's the vocal delivery on 'Trail of Stars'.

CE: Yeah. That's just a matter of putting yourself in that world, you know. That's a certain maturity; whether it's autobiographical or not, no matter what you sing, cover songs or songs that I write, or songs that Carla and I write together, the idea is to make it sound as personal as possible. That's what you try to accomplish as a singer. You try to give an intimate viewpoint to something that may not be you.

CT: It seems in a strange way that there was a couple of new songs on this new album that wrote themselves. I had very little to do with the melody. Like 'Winslow Place' and 'Lest We Forget' are way out of what I brought to the party. I felt like in a way they were already written. They came so complete, so fast.

Sometimes it's as if some songs are waiting to be completed, as if you begun writing them ten years ago, and click, then they're there.

CE: Sure. I don't quite have _that_ patience, but…

CT: [laugh]

You don't know you're writing them!

CE: Yeah yeah right, that's very true. There are some that were finished two years later to make sense. Others were really fresh, dating back not more than a year from now even. Maybe I started late fall of 2000. I really worked on writing stuff in the fall of 2000 in Seattle, I really wasn't going real far. There are a few little ideas on this record, but most of the songs from that time I didn't end up using.

CT: In the middle of the last tour a few of us went to Prague to celebrate Chris' birthday in 2000. I purposely stayed there and tried to write songs. I'm gonna start writing more songs. But one of them made it onto this album, the music at least. That was written in Prague.

So you write a lot more now?

CT: Yeah. I'm going to try harder.

So Carla, when's your solo album coming?

CT: Uhm, got some ideas…

CE: She should do a solo record.

Like a reply to 'A Janela'!

CT: 'Door'!

CE: 'The Window', 'The Door'. A lot of the Doors probably sell a lot of the catalogue. Actually, didn't someone once said that Lambchop called their album 'Thriller' 'cause they figured they would at least be a couple of thousand extra nominal sales? The Doors, they still sell.

I think the working title for R.E.M's 'Fables of the Reconstruction' was 'R.E.M. Speedwagon', but they didn't have the courage to carry it through.

CT: Maybe I should have the courage!

Many people might think that 'Ended Up A Stranger' is a darker album than 'Trail of Stars', but I think it's a much lighter album.

CE: It's quite the opposite. You are probably one of the few people that ever said that. Carla and I were really shocked when we went out and did interviews on this three week promotion tour, and I was really amazed that people almost uniformly said that this record was darker. OK, I mean, the title track is dark, there's no doubt about it, so maybe that is the problem because the album is named after that particular track and it's the last track of the album, that's what's left when you're done with it. But I think songs like 'Climb' and 'See It in the Dark' and 'Radiant'…

I thought when I heard it that, although you said that 'Trail of Stars' isn't as autobiographical as I thought it was---

CE: Well, I'm not saying it's not, but maybe not as autobiographical as people think it is. I think there's autobiography in anything you write, but when it comes to calling something autobiographical, you sit down and say, 'OK, my life is this and I'm going to write it down'.

Diary songs.

CE: Exactly. It's clearly not that. Maybe like you said Carla the song 'Gold' but even that is some kind of fictional with the strange arcade and all these surrealistic images. There is always little pieces in there. I think the only truly autobiographical song I ever did was 'A Janela', where I really sat down and being very specific about a very specific time, a very specific place. That record is very dark and it clearly refers to Carla's and my relationship in some places. But I'm not trying to hide behind this kind of mysterious thing, but I just know what's going through my mind when I write things, and I don't try to consciously say, 'I'm gonna document my life, piece by piece, this month, this year'. It's not the way I write songs. It's not the type of songwriting I'm interested in really. You cannot help but it to be part of you, but I try to always think of more universal ways. We've talked about it before, I walk around with a little notebook and just collect scraps. And this album was very much made like that. Songs like 'Lazarus Heart' and 'More Heat Than Light' are basically just pieces of napkin writing just strung together. There's nothing particularly coherent about them what's being said, but I really like the way those lyrics work and I'm really proud, probably most proud of those two songs, lyrically. Because they _don't_ have an A-B-C kind of evolvement, they sort of push and pull and retreat and move forward. In some ways, it's a much harder way to write to get something satisfying out of it. It took me a long time to write those songs, to get right down to the words but also to make it seem like it literally comes out of someone's mouth, unconnected. What seems like an easy way to write is actually quite difficult. If you wanna do it in a more measured way I think it's very hard. In the other part, a lot of it goes really fast when you write like that, but finishing it is nearly impossible, because then you really have to sort out 'what am I trying to do with this'. The last, like, 25% is really, really the hard part. But I interrupted you, I'm sorry.

I think of 'Trail of Stars' as 'the problem', and 'Ended Up a Stranger' as 'the solution' or 'the reconciliation'.

CE: 'Trail of Stars' was a difficult time. i don't wanna […] this relationship thing, you can read what you want into that. but I think also with Baker. We recorded that album two weeks after Baker died. It was incredibly difficult. Maybe it's three weeks actually by the time we got to the studio, but… we were certainly… I mean, even Fred felt strange about that record, the bass player…

CT: Kind of the replacement…

CE: Yeah… we'd been to this funeral, and this shock and… we really had these great arguments with the band after Baker left because things were really quite difficult. And when we played with Fred we thought that musically we sort of pushing in some directions and it seemed like a pretty good relationship and then this Baker thing happened three weeks before the album. And then suddenly we were literally up in this mountain village making the record completely in isolation. And it was _not_ a celebratory time by any means! I think the way that you feel it, you feel it in the grooves, you feel it… I like the songs, the record, just because of that. I think it's really something there. I'm not sure it's a very insular record. It's not really like a 'looking out at the world' kind of record.

[Tape runs out]

CT: Then we got to work with Larry Crane.

CE: He's an engineer and a producer.

CT: Yeah. We knew him and he had been in rock bands so he knew most of us except Joe. So he just was really friendly in the studio with everyone and kind of as eager as we were to get it all recorded.

CE: We wanted to make it a little bit rougher. A lot of the stuff we recorded real live. A lot of my guitars are absolutely what happened. There's so much of my guitars in the drum mics that we kept the originals. We just didn't go back and replaced everything. We tried to keep that sort of freshness, kind of a little more rough to the basic tracks. A strange thing about 'Ended Up A Stranger' is it's also the record we spent the longest on on any record. We recorded 75% of it quite fast but the last 25% took us forever. We worked almost five weeks just in our home studio just doing all the little things. But it was never a matter of let's replace the drums or replace the rhythm guitar or the leads. It was more just strange atmospheric sounds. We spent a long time on the vocals, a lot of time to sing and then re-sing and come back and try it a wholly different way.

CT: Just the two of us. Nobody was there watching.

CE: Carla and I worked for a full month just the two of us, no engineer. We engineered it all ourselves. It's very exhausting but extremely satisfying. Carla and I […] had discussed it so we really find how much time other band members could spare. Glenn's great to work with for example. It didn't work out 'cause Glenn was in his studio working.

CT: On the string arrangements.

CE: So it was sort of like going back and forth. It wasn't like we locked Glenn out, he could have come anytime if he wanted, but he was quite busy himself. But the main thing I find often with engineers is that their ideas… you know, 'I don't have the time to explain, I just wanna do it'. So when you're engineering yourself it's _very_ exhausting.

I think the new album has a lot in common with 'Swinger 500' with the rough sounds versus the clean sounds.

CE: Yeah, yeah. The way we did it was very much like it. It was pretty much the prototype for how we worked on this record. Because for 'Swinger 500' we had no idea where we wanted to direct the sound. We did it two weeks, but we really made it up in the studio. 'Ended Up A Stranger' was quite the same thing. The songs were written, we knew what the basic rhythm tracks were gonna sound like and everything else was more or less made up as we did it.

CT: When we get to spend that much time on details, those details become as important as almost the whole band when you leave room for them. It's just little things but sometimes little things took four hours to design and finally get just right. We had our new Mac 24 track hard disk recorder at home.

Oh no, you've turned modern!

CE: All the basic tracks are analogue. When we mixed we went up with all the analogue 24 track…

CT: When we mixed we went back into the studio and doubled the bass, doubled the drums.

CE: All the original pianos and all the original organs from the studio they're all still on 24 track analogue, we never took them off of that. I don't wanna do a fully digital project. It did go right. I think that this kinda thing provided us a lot of flexibility and…

CT: Time.

CE: Time, yeah. You could use the sort of digital editing idea approach to things. I felt like a really good way because the parameters were quite drawn and we weren't gonna fuck with the drums and we weren't gonna change a lot of the stuff. But like Carla just said, it was a lot easier to design sounds, crossfade and reconstruct them, you know, just sit there for hours just working with them.

CT: We did some recordings with quarter inch reel-to-reel, my grandfather had this old recorder. We took some sounds that I recorded in Prague, put them on the reel-to-reel quarter inch, 'cause it had a very interesting funny little condenser mic, an ancient mike, and then we recorded that from that reel-to-reel. So we had time to do that kind of stuff. But that took about five hours! [laugh] And that's in 'Ended Up A Stranger'.

It pays off well. It's a very interesting album to listen to. It's three dimensional. Actually kind of four dimensional, since there's like something behind everything that you want to reach into.

CE: Because we had so much time to do these things, we also edited a lot before it even went to the mix. We really knew what needed to be there and what didn't need to be there. So even if we overdubbed an enormous amount of stuff, before we got to the mix, we got rid of a lot of it. We just said, 'OK, this is it'. And then, thankfully, this guy we've been working with, Phill Brown, he came in and added the perfect finishing touch, cause at that point we were really exhausted.

CT: We just handed it over.

CE: He's brilliant, his mixes are just so dare I say classic. He's been working with so many people. He just knows what he's doing.

CT: And he made a lot to work.

CE: He can make sense out of a lot of stuff.

CT: He didn't even know who had done what instruments.

CE: And we didn't even want him to know. It was like, 'you figure out where you want stuff'. Cause he's great getting this sort of depth and dimension.

I think that it's an emotionally and spiritually psychedelic record in a way, and at the same time an erotic record. It's both physical and mental.

CT: Cool!

I think it's the best one since, well, at least 'Nighttown'.

CE: It's my favourite since then for sure. No doubt.

It sounds so vital, more so than 'Trail of Stars'.

CE: I think 'Trail of Stars' sounds very insular. But I still stand by it just for that reason. Because it has a very very specific sound to it. I'm quite proud of the sound we achieved to that, because frankly, it's actually the sound we wanted to do. I can think of no record that we ever set out to do where we more realized what we were going for than that record. Whether that's successful for someone's taste, that's another question, but I really don't think there's any record… maybe with exception for 'Swinger 500' and _possibly_ 'Nighttown' to some extent, but even that I think ran away from us at some point, but 'Trail of Stars' is clearly the way it was envisioned to sound.

CT: And we knew exactly where everything was gonna be in the speakers, and we left it there in the same position.

CE: Nothing moves in that record. If the piano is in the right-hand speaker it's gonna be there on every single song.

It's a lot more sophisticated album than 'Ended Up A Stranger'.

CE: It's a cold record, it's clearly cold.

I think it's detached. It's one the albums I've had most trouble with getting into.

CE: I think it probably is very detached. I think it probably reflects the state of mind we were in then. i think it was very detached. The musical context we were working in were somehow colder than what, let's say, we were working with on this record. It doesn't mean I like them less though. Not that I'm trying to defend my own children, I just think it kind of works in its own weird way. But I much prefer what we're doing now..

CT: I'm also just remembering the technical problems we had up there on 'Trail of Stars'.

What about the line-up changes around the time of 'Trail of Stars'?

CE: Well, Fred had already told us he was going to do only one album, so this was no surprise to anyone.

CT: He just prefers a little more avant-garde music and jazz.

CE: Yeah, this was not his bag from the beginning.

CT: He said he had never been in a band where the audience was singing the words! [laugh]

Maybe there were no words to begin with!

CE: They were in Mongolian or something! [laugh] We learned so much though. I don't think we could even have done 'Train Leaves at Eight' with the same level of... the kind of discipline it took to do that record. I think a lot of that came from Fred even though he wasn't there. He taught us a lot about just...You know, maybe 'Ended Up A Stranger' been sort of a reaction against that kind of discipline for sure. But it's still there. I learned a lot about musical theory and all kinds of stuff that I had never given much thought to. But Terri I think, she was just exhausted. I think she just wanted to see if there was another way to live the life. I mean, she's been in the Walkabouts for almost her entire adult life. I think she also feared that.. 'Satisfied Mind'. isn't a drummer's record. It's not an record that a drummer would stand on his head.... I think she really feared that 'Train Leaves at Eight' was going to be somehow monochromatic rhythmically as that was.

I think the album where Terri plays least good is 'Satisfied Mind'. She plays a lot more rigid than on other albums.

CE: I don't think it's her best record either, but I think it's also just we were learning how to play that kind of stuff. I don't think any of us came from much backup on how to play any better.

CT: That was the first time we realized that again what we set off to do was gonna be a lot more difficult than it was, because it's much quieter and everything is recorded so you have to be spot on and that was hard for us.

CE: I noticed when we did that record that I had basically been hiding behind distortion for a good ten years. And my guitar was like, 'Jesus! It sounds horrible!'

CT: I mean. you can't even lift your fingers off the strings sometimes without making that noise...

CE: We were way off our heads on that record. It's remarkable that people love that record so much.

CT: Well, we picked good songs at least.

I think the live versions of the songs are better.

CE: Yeah, they're more free. I don't think the band was particularly great on that one. I'm always amazed when people say that's their favorite one of ours, and I kind of, 'errr, you're really not very smart, are you?'

CT/PS: [laugh]

CE: Maybe you shouldn't publish that... [laugh] Or maybe you should actually! But I think she feared we were gonna go down that road with the European songs. I think she would have tired anyway.

CT: She also lost her father. None of us has lost a parent so we didn't really even know what she was going through.

It wasn't a good time to be a Walkabout then.

CE: It was a rough year. It was a rough couple of years. But somehow I think, maybe even stupidly, we trudged on. I think we just really thought, something in the back of our minds, that we could get back to a place where we needed to get back to.

CT: Certainly Brian Young couldn't go on tour when his wife was pregnant. When he couldn't go touring with us, we asked if she wanted us back. She didn't even hesitate, 'cause she had missed the lifestyle. And that's what I think.

CE:: I think it's very clear, probably not even disrespectful to say this too, but I think she also felt quite like her and Fred didn't really work together in some kind of perfect way. This was a problem for her too. And when Fred was quitting and not with us anymore that also helped. I think it made her decision a lot easier. But you could ask her about that.

What about your solo album, Chris? What did the rest of the band think? I took it as, 'uh-oh, no more Walkabouts...'

CE: See. that's why I did it as a mailorder, for precisely that reason, because I was clear I didn't want that presumption. [To Carla:] You can answer that, let me just give a little picture. I started recording that in the fall of '98. mainly because we were just not doing anything. We thought that we possibly were gonna do a third record for Virgin. I don't think we _really_ believed it would happen, but we were at least proceeding forward as though it was gonna happen. We made some demos, they clearly flat out rejected the demos, and we said, 'alright, then fuck it, we're not gonna continue down this road'.

Were these demos for 'Trail of Stars'?

CE: They were all the songs on 'Trail of Stars' actually. At that point, it looked as if it was gonna be five or six months 'til we got into the studio with the Walkabouts. I had an enormous amount of songs from Lisbon, and there were definitely a pile of them that seemed to be very specifically Lisbon kind of songs. They were about this, with street names and blah-blah-blah. I just started it more... just a... like a weekend. I went down to Portland with Larry Crane and we just recorded songs over two days. I didn't really know what it was going to be. But I never wanted it to give the... I was very touchy from the beginning, 'cause I never really wanted to give the impression that this meant that the Walkabouts was over. Reinhard wanted to put it out as a normal release, and I said, 'absolutely not, you have to do it as a mailorder only'. I just didn't want it to be as any sort of sign.

So what did the rest of you guys think?

CT: Well, I know that Chris likes to work to stay busy, and him spending that time in Portugal was outside of my road, so he could do whatever he wanted with that part of his life. I like the album. But I didn't really wanna be on it. He asked me, but I thought, 'let's just keep that clear cut for now'. You know, we work a lot together.

CE: Yeah. I didn't even want to have the Walkabouts on it just for that reason. I mean even the Chris & Carla records ended up being Walkabouts records somehow... I thought it was just important... I did the record really really fast and the only person I think from the Walkabouts is Anne Marie. She played on one track. And she wasn't in the Walkabouts at that moment. I'm glad I did it.. It seemed like an important thing somehow for myself at the time. But really, it's not an exaggeration to say that I really had to be begged to release it. Reinhard really caught wind of it and then kept bothering me like every two and half months like another long e-mail, 'I'd like to do that!' And he hadn't even heard it! So I think it's really his fault that it came out.

CT: [laugh]

CE: You know, I did end up releasing it in--and this is probably the thing I'm most proud of about the whole thing--I ended up releasing it in Portugal. Only in Portugal. That was cool.

As an official release?

CE: Well, yeah, I guess you can say that. We distributed it there through a distributor. Well actually, that's not really the entire truth, because we only released it through one record chain. But still, it's a small country. And that was kind of more of an acknowledgement to my friends there.

CT: I hope that Glenn could do some kinda solo thing too. He's surely good. He has a lot of material that no-one ever hears.

CE: You should question him, because he really has a so amazing backlog of really compelling unfinished stuff. Even the song on the album, 'Mary Edwards', he brought that to us and specifically me to write lyrics for it. I worked with it for a couple of weeks and I really came up with some things, but I just kept listening to it and was going, 'this is an instrumental'. I could have written lyrics for it, but we would have recorded it differently if I had written lyrics for it. But I think that was the point, it came to me... The way we play it, we added some stuff, but it's more or less based on the demo he gave to us originally. It really felt like it was a solo piece where we sort of was his back-up band on the record. It's really the way it ended up going down. In a really good way, 'cause he had some very strong, very specific ideas about how a lot of it should piece together. I was just like, 'why do we need to burn this with lyrics?' It works on its own, it tells its own story just fine by itself.

CT: One of our reasons for buying our own Mac computer was to give ourselves one more tool to get some more work done, be it solo, film soundtracks ...

CE: All these little weird things that come to you.

CT: We've already finished some unfinished songs from years past and put them on this new [1]'B' sides. Even those that was never finished ever was finished with the Mac.

Is there anything that can't be done under the Walkabouts banner?

CE: Sure. I think there's a lot of things that can't be done.

Such as?

CE: I don't know, I just think there's a lot of things. I think more now than probably ever, and maybe that's part of these last records, but I actually recognize that we have a style to some degree. There are parameters to what we can do. We worked very hard to get to a point where we could a certain type of music or style or whatever you wanna call it in a fairly successful way. I just don't wanna delude it with endless digressions to uncharted territory. I don't think that's the right approach to it either. Not that I'm trying to live up to anyone else's expectations, but more that there's something that happened. I think we've noticed it _really_ this time after we had a long time off. Well certainly working with Terri--it was more than two years since we had been in the studio with her when we started to put stuff together with 'Ended Up A Stranger'. Especially with her, even more than so with Bryan. It was very successful working on the 'Train Leaves at Eight' stuff with him, but it was something outside of ourselves anyway. When it came to do these original songs, you know there's just something that happens when we get into the room together. It sounds like music. For us it sounds like music when we get together. We have even tried to playing with other people which doesn't have... it's something that just happens. You can't excite it. We don't have to talk to each other. It's remarkable how little we communicate when we're in the rehearsal studio.

And you've been together for, what is it, 17 years?

CE: Yeah! Carla and I gave been together for 17 years, with Glenn and Terri for 12 years. We don't talk about concept, we don't talk about what direction that the project's gonna go. You know, we bring the songs and people make their contributions. We all make suggestions to each other but nobody walks around the room. I think sometimes people have this idea that Carla or I walk around the room, point at the kick drum and say, 'play this'. I mean, there's conversations but no more so than what _they_ say to us. It moves around the room but even that is very, very little said.

Which might explain how you can be together for so long.

CE: At this time we just trust each other. I also think we're conscious that there's a thing called the Walkabouts and that not any one of us should interfere with what that is. It's bigger than us!

CT: Yeah, exactly. I'm surprised all the time with stuff Glenn pull out of the bag or what Terri's suddenly doing. I look over going, 'wow! that's new!' It's really fun being able to do that after so many years. To be surprised by each other.

CE: I'm constantly amazed how little some people get the fact, you know, some people say to us, 'but this 'Swinger 500' sounds like the Walkabouts!' 'No-no no-no, it really doesn't'. OK, from the outside there's much more similarities than differences, because it's a similar songwriter, the same two vocalists, there's a lot of classic points where you can say, 'OK, this is the same artist', you know, we don't just change our hats completely. But on the other hand, from the inside, knowing how the records are put together and what goes into making a Walkabouts record versus a Chris & Carla, they're really so far apart.

It's like when I've made Walkabouts tapes for friends and I can't fit Chris & Carla songs into it. Something happens, it's a different thing.

CE: It's completely different!

I can't explain what it is.

CE: What it is, is Glenn and Terri and whoever the bass player is, that's kind of a revolving door [laugh]. You know, it's Glenn and Terri. That's the element. And dare I say the unrecognized elements. It gets a little tiresome after a while when people say, 'you're line-up's shifting all the time'. Well, is it really? Our bass players are shifting, but the core of the band is very, very constant. It's quite easy for a new bass player--well, easy is not the thing--but easier for a bass player with the four of us together, you know, one thing can come and go every once in a while without rocking the boat completely.

CT: But not _any_ bass player. For a lot of bass players we're just simply too weird. [laugh].

If you look back on your career, is there anything you think you have lost that you had in the beginning that you still wish you had in the band?

CE: I think we've lost things around certain periods, but I think frankly I feel we got a lot of them back again in the last year or so, to me. Some of the things we sort of misplaced slightly we have started to find again. I'm really feeling it on the road. you know on stage. I really felt like some of our live shows had become quite stilted and we didn't know exactly how to present what we were trying to do. We had a sort of stupid confidence about that early on; we went out and just BOOOM! playing with maybe far too much energy at times...

Those early shows are fun!

CE: Yeah, they're really crazy and wacky and wild and loud and really fast.

And with five minute pauses between songs...

CT: [laugh]

CE: Yeah, tuning for five minutes! But our music clearly has, for better or worse, got more sophisticated and then I think we're really challenged how to present that. You know. how round to make everything, you know, detailed and how much should we think about all of that as we put it on the stage. I think we kind of carried a weight with us about that for a few years. To rock out or not to rock out, to play the slowest stuff we had or not to play the slowest stuff. Probably to our credit I think we said, 'look. we're going to try to put out what we're actually doing on record on the stage'. I think at times that was quite difficult.

CT: Thank God we could afford more professional sound people that would help us do that.

CE: It wouldn't have been possible without that.

CT: I think it's a little easier because we do have a little more help now. We have a roadie. The bus helps us stay somewhat healthy [laugh]. We get enough sleep and all that. I don't know what my point is, but...

It's more comfortable playing now.

CE: I think so, yeah.

CT: I think it's like... we _should_ be doing what we are doing. You know, sometimes you go through life and you go, 'oh, I'm turning 40, maybe I shouldn't be in a rock band anymore...' or you wonder how to make it all still work financially and stuff.

CE: When you're 44 you don't have any options, so you'd better enjoy it and have a good time!

CT: [laugh]

CE: You'd better stop angsting about it and get on with doing it the right way!

CT: Yeah, get on with it.

CE: I think we wrestled with a lot of things. I can't say tonight will be a great show, you never know, but we've got really great shows night after night on this tour just because we're having fun playing, if nothing else. It feels like a privilege to be together again.

I think it was evident even on the soundcheck today. It had a certain push to it. The 'Trail of Stars' show I saw hadn't that kind of tension.

CT: That was a heavy tour.

CE: A lot of stuff going on. I'm not ashamed of that tour, but I think there's a kind of a lightness that has come back in the way we all just do it. That only can help when you're playing live music. But yeah, you lose something, we'll never have that same kind of brashness we once did have. You want to lose some of that, some of that is just a lot of misplaced energy. I think we're much more efficient with our energy now. We know where to put it.

I think it's called youth.

CE: Yeah, it's youth, and it's nothing wrong with that, but I don't want to go back to that. I feel kinda privileged to have got to the place we've got to where we can play like we play now. I don't ever wanna return to what we had before.

CT: Sometimes we still have that [energy] but you get it through finesse instead of just cruel punishment of your body and your instrument. We would just mangle our fingers the way we used to strum away on guitars and stuff. Now you can do it but you have to have more finesse or you won't make it through the night.

CE: We also search for it. Our set is about trying to find it and we eventually hope to get there but it's not that we start out with it. It's also down to the material. I don't want to just present the rock songs when we go out and play. But I think we're less ashamed of the rock songs probably on this tour than we have been. I think there was a time when we really cut off that part of what we were trying to do just because it was the only way we were going to get to another place was to sort of act like it never happened. I think that was a real conscious decision on our part. We didn't wanna play 'Like A Hurricane' again, we didn't wanna play stuff from 'Setting the Woods on Fire', we didn't want to do a lot of things. 'Jack Candy', we didn't wanna play that again. We had done that. To get to the kind of music we were doing on 'Nighttown' and starting with 'Devil's Road', we had to make a real conscious shift in our minds about what we wanted to be as a band. I know this left a lot of people on the wayside that were real fans of us but there was no way that we were going to continue down that same road. I just couldn't do it anymore. It wasn't honest to what I wanted to do.

It was becoming rather boring to hear yet another 'Bordertown'...

CE: Yeah yeah, exactly!

It's a good song, but…

CE: It's a good song, but we really had to move away from that material. I think starting around 'Nighttown' we actually did a lot of material that didn't exist. That was a really important thing. Like even on this tour we're playing 'Grand Theft Auto' by the end of the night and it's fun. It kind of reminds me what it was like playing it in 1993, and this time I'm not really ashamed about it. It's like, 'fuck, that was us then so it can be us tonight too'.

CT: I can't believe that there's some people in the audience that are singing those words!

CE: There's still always those people that always yell out for these.

Well, you know, some of us still play it... Perhaps you don't, but we do! [laugh]

CE: I don't even listen to 'Trail of Stars'

Should we talk about '22 Disasters'?

CE & CT: [laugh]

CE: Well, that's one we don't have to...

I hate it. It sucks. Badly.

CE: Well, it's not a good record! It's funny, because the demos we did before that, we did a session like about three months before that which actually should have been the record. It's a whole different set of songs actually.

Is that the mysterious early tape?

CE: There's another... this tape I don't even think anyone has ever even talked about. It's got a version of 'For What It's Worth'.

CT: That's the song we should have done.

The Buffalo Springfield song?

CT: Yeah.

CE: There's a version of 'Beginning to See the Light' by the Velvet Underground, and about four different originals. I don't even know where that is. I've been listening to it, the last was about ten years ago, but I remember _clearly_ just listening to it... We did it on an 8 track, really budget but cool.

We haven't talked much about the days before the Walkabouts. Chris, I know you were in a band with Ben Thompson.

CE: No, I wasn't in a band with Ben Thompson. Well, I played one night with Ben Thompson. He sat in with my band because the... It was a really strange... I was in this sort of punk rock band for lack of a better word, but it was quite.. pop punk. We did like Clash covers, the Jam and we had Buzzcocks tunes, things like that. It was in 1979 I guess, '79 or '80. And we got a gig at the--well there was one sort of punk rock club in Seattle and we actually got booked there for two nights. Our singer had some job at a factory and he put a staple into the back of his foot, and the drummer suddenly got a job on the day of our gig, and it was a night job. And so we had this gig and no drummer, no singer.

CT: Was this at the Guerrilla Room?

CE: Yeah, the Guerrilla Room. So, me and the bass player sang and Ben Thompson was the drummer for the two nights then. He had never played drums. He played like coffee cans in his bedroom. Actually I was at Ben's house just before the tour started and he gave me a copy of the original demo of the band, not with him playing drums, but the real drummer playing drums. It was pretty funny to hear again.

Carla, do you have any skeletons in the closet?

CT: I played with a couple of Americans in the streets when I lived in Freiburg. That was '78 to '80. I did coffee shops and busking. We called ourselves Squeaky Clean. We did like 'Beat on the Brat' and some bluegrass, and some folk and some rock.

CE: Sounds like 'Rattlesnake Gardens' actually...

CT: We used to make good money though in those years. I don't know if there's still good money in Europe. I think the policemen pretty much trying to stop it. It's too bad. It's a good way for people to start their careers, and learn how to sing strong and stuff.

CE: Maybe I should try that!

What are you going to do after this?

CE: We're gonna tour this summer. I think we're pretty much gonna split apart up until, I shouldn't say summer, but even then there's a possibility of one project. There's a rather famous Austrian singer named Andre Heller, he's also a film actor and film maker and various things. He hasn't made an album in like ten years---

CT: Twelve years.

CE: He wants to put a band together for an album. We have been talking to his record company and they've talked to us. They've approached us to possibly record some tracks with him in his villa in northern Italy. It sounds just crazy enough a thing that we might even do it.

CT: I hope this happens because he has done some very good music for four decades. Very interesting arrangements.

CE: He started out doing kind of chansons, like Jacques Brel, that kind of thing. He's very left-wing, he's a very political, austere songwriter and a kind of general impresario. He designs museums, he does big strange installation art conceptual projects. He probably had the most talked about film at the current Berlin film festival. It was a documentary where he interviewed Hitler's secretary. So he's really all over the place. But we haven't met him yet. So far our people--which is us!-- have just talked to his people. But this could actually happen before summer. If it's going to happen, it has to happen before summer.

CT: And then we'll maybe try to think of another album in the Fall.

A Chris & Carla one?

CE: Well, yeah... I don't know if we'll finish it this year. I don't think so, because I've got to write songs. It _may_ happen in say December or something like that.

CT: But I can write more and you just have to do less.

CE: Yeah! I'd like to split it in half if we could. But I'm not in a hurry to do it.

CT: We won't do it unless there's a new idea. You kinda wait for that idea.

CE: I don't wanna just make a Chris & Carla record because I'm still really a strong believer in the last one. It sounds new to me, and I really want to protect that one. Making another one just deludes it unless it's on the same level of inspiration. That last one really worked.

CT: It has to be better than that one.

CE: Or something completely different.

How about a box set?

CE: We actually have enough Chris & Carla tracks to do a 'B' sides album!

What about 'Weights & Rivers' in its full form?

CE: No, I don't think it will ever happen. I don't think it deserves it. It's documented enough on this 'Rattlesnake Gardens thing. It's the best tracks. Maybe there are one or two others that are OK. Somehow, it was never finished in my mind. We basically threw it together in the end because somebody said they wanted to put it out, and I didn't even feel like it was really done.

CT: There was even a tape before '22 Disasters'...

CE: That's the one I was talking about.

No, the 'legendary tape EP'.

CE: Aw, that's horrible!

CT: That was OK!

CE: It was actually better than '22 Disasters'.

CT: Definitely yeah! But we do sound like Mickey and Minnie Mouse!

Is there anything you wish that you had done in a different way during your career?

CE: I don't spend a lot of time wrestling with regret or trying to reconstruct the past. Maybe I should do more of that, but frankly I am usually lost in whatever new project I am involved with. To be honest, any regrets that I do have are fairly shallow. When I look at old publicity photos of ours, I am sometimes horrified. There are times we could have certainly used a stylist.

Is it at this point possible for you to picture a life without the Walkabouts?

CE: In the year before we did 'Trail of Stars', I considered this question a lot. We had left Virgin, there was a lot of personal and personnel chaos, and frankly I wondered if we would be able to patch it all back together. I think I really came to peace with the thought, that life goes on without this band that I love so much. After we put out 'Trail', and now two albums since then, I really believe that there is probably no point in us ever breaking up. There might be longer gaps between the albums, there might be shorter tours, but I'm fairly confident The Walkabouts will make music for a long time to come.

Terri Moeller

interviewed by Peter Sjöblom

What were you doing before you joined the Walkabouts?

TM: Playing in bands in Seattle and just working jobs here and there, a lot of restaurant work.

Any known bands?

TM: No. not really, just bands in Seattle pretty much.

Around which time?

TM: I started playing with the Walkabouts in 1992, so that would have been prior to that. I've been playing in bands pretty much my whole life since I was like 14.

What made you choose the drums as your instrument?

TM: [laugh] Oh, they were when I was growing up. I'm from large family and it did happen to be a drum there. I wanted to play an instrument. I played piano before that but I didn't really like it, and then went on to play the snare drum and then stuck with it. So I got a drum set after that.

How did you happen to become a Walkabouts member?

TM: I lived with Chris & Carla. I met Michael Wells, the previous bass player. We worked together in a restaurant and met Chris and Carla through him and ended up moving in with them. When Grant had left they approached me and asked if I want to play drums, and I said yes.

And then you stuck.

TM: Yeah, yeah.

But you did leave for a while.

TM: Yeah, for 'Train Leaves at Eight' in I think it was 2000 from January to that summer tour in July. I just needed a break. I mean, I lost my father like six months ago. He died right before the 'Trail of Stars' tour. I just needed a break, and didn't really think I would come back to play with the Walkabouts. I thought that was it. Then I ended up doing the tour. And here I am! [laugh]

You have lifetime membership!

TM: Yeah, exactly! I'm waiting for the gold watch after ten years! The scary thing is I renewed my passport, I had to renew it before this tour, cause it expired it in ten years. I got that passport for the Walkabouts when I first started touring!

You should have kept the old one!

TM: Yeah, but they confiscate them. All those stamps and the stickers from when we went to Poland.

You could have Xeroxed it.

TM It's too late, the government already has it back! [laugh]

Do you think the band has changed over the years?

TM: Oh, definitely, yeah! It's gone through some different phases. We consciously tried things different artistically which has been the best thing for me as a drummer. Like during the 'Setting the Woods' and 'New West Motel' time it was more of a rock thing. And 'Satisfied Mind' brought it down a little bit in a more folk/country way. With 'Nighttown' and 'Trail of Stars', those two records in particular, I had to really do interesting things and to get the best tone I could get. And learn to play along with loops and stuff which is pretty hard to do on the drums.

Why?

TM: Because it's a thing that's set. I had to learn how to play with it and make it move, if that makes sense. So it's exact, but there's room on either side whatever, be it a tambourine or...

That's where the swing is?

TM: Yes, exactly. It's really creative to find where that sets in. I really like learning now for those records.

Has the creative process changed in some way, for the band?

TM: It feels like we're all just locked in more and in tune with one another more creatively. Almost instinctively if that makes any sense. That's weird because we haven't had that discussion. We didn't like sit down and plan any of this. Yeah, I feel like more tuned in. And more spontaneous in the way that if I hear somebody play something I'll play off of it or with them in a way that I ordinarily wouldn't have done like three or four years ago, right before i decided I wasn't gonna be in the Walkabouts. I think it just feels more creative and more energized. Particularly for me with adding Joe. I really liked all the people we've played with, the bass players I've got to play with have all been just outstanding, like Joe. He comes from a place where he is like a good relaxed bass player in a lot of the ways Fred Chalenor was--and I really admire the way that he plays. But Joe comes from a rock background too.

Fred was more avantgarde.

TM Yeah, he's amazing, but I really don't come from that world. Idealwise he and I were the best match, but Joe, we kinda speak the same language, so it makes it a lot easier.

What kind of drummers do you appreciate? I think you have a very distinctive language so to speak.

TM: Wow!

In many ways you'rr my favourite kind of rock drummer, very sparse but with a distinctive beat, very melodic in a way.

TM: Wow! Thank you!

I don't know if you understand what I'm talking about...

TM: I do actually. I like melodic drumming and I know what you mean by that. I like Butch [Norton] from the Eels a lot, I think he's really cool, and Matt Chamberlain a lot, he's a studio guy.

Who has he played with?

TM Oh, he's played with Fiona Apple and Macy Gray and.... He lives in Seattle now. He's got a really beautiful groove, he plays great and a lot of weird stuff. He's pretty out there.

Moe Tucker?

TM: Yeah, I do like Moe Tucker a lot actually! You don't see many women play drums. At home I have a drum student that's a 12 year old girl. I will probably get another one when I get home. I really like that because when I was 12 or 10, there wasn't really anyone for me to look up to in that way.

There was Moe.

TM: Yeah, but I honestly didn't know about the Velvet Underground until I was like 15 or 16 or 17. At 10 I was listening to the Rolling Stones and the Kinks. That kind of thing. I do have a Moe Tucker poster in my room. It's framed and everything! It's one of the only things I have that I really like. Besides that it's like my monk that my sister got me. (laugh). But anyway...

How much freedom do you have as a 'back-up musician', and I don't mean it to be derogatory in any way.

TM Oh, I know that. But you know, the truth is that people really do go to, in any band--it is for me when I listen to music about the vocals first, and the songs. I do like and appreciate good drums, but even when I was little kid I wouldn't listen to music that was like the drum fest. I was never into that kind of thing. So I don't take being a back-up musician as an insult, It's a compliment, because it means letting the song do its thing and letting Chris and Carla really sing and express themselves in the context of the song. I do have a lot of freedom creatively. People have ideas about what the drums can do and stuff or, well, from time to time say, 'can you try something like this?' I'm willing to try pretty much anything [laugh] because some of the best ideas are from people who don't play the drums really.

I love your drumming on 'Jack Candy' on 'To Hell and Back'.

TM: That was definitely the more rocking era. On this tour I actually play a lot harder. That's been really fun. I like that, kinda getting off way and hitting and....

Terri Bonham!

TM: [laugh] Although if you've seen footage of him play, he doesn't have a lot of armstroke. He's very very tight wrist swing and arm swing. I'm thinking of the 'The Song Remains the Same' film. If you watch some people play, like I play when I'm rocking, the stick arch go pretty high, whereas Bonham's arch was a lot tighter. He's probably got a little more weight to work within his arms than I have. [laugh]

Maybe you should do work-out.

TM: I don't know, I've tried lifting weights and stuff but I just can never keep it up, like an exercise program. It does get boring. I'm like somebody who's really good when they start and be great at it for three weeks and then I start to get bored and rather read three books in the afternoon. Watch movies... [laugh]

If you were free to choose whatever direction you wanted the Walkabouts to go in, what would that be?

TM: Oh my god, that's a hard question. I don't know. With every little turn the band has taken, there have always been things that have worked better than other things, that I like better than other things. But I honestly haven't thought about that. I think I would... uhm... [long pause] I don't know. I've no idea. I like the weird Glenn sound thing so I do that. I probably.... let the songs do whatever they do I mean, I just love Chris' writing and I love what he and Carla do with the vocals. Other than that I think I would do like a few less strings maybe, I don't know. I like all the guitars a lot and I love the keyboards. And I like Anne-Marie's violin playing... I'm not being very specific, am I? I guess I don't know. I don't know what I would do.

Maybe you would do what you're doing in Transmissionary Six?

TM: Uhm, in a way they're so different. The cool things about the Walkabouts is the dense thing, you know, it's such a dense thing. And what I like about the Transmissionary Six is that it's so sparse and simple. I guess I could talk about that, what I would do with Transmissionary Six more. And then it would be like bring some of the songs out, write a few more lyrics. I think develop the rhythm section parts a little bit more, develop the drums. We did this all really fast, the drums and bass thing.

It is supposed to become a stable unit, isn't it?

TM: We are gone write more songs and I would like to make another record. I'm pretty sure Paul would like us to do because he talks about that quite a lot.

Glenn Slater

interviewed by Peter Sjöblom

What did you do before you joined the Walkabouts? I remember something called Cyborg Rembrandt...

GS: Wow! Amazing! That band turned into Melting Fish with my brother. We were the first drum machine band in Seattle. We didn't know what we were doing. We just wanted to play and do something different. We had drum machine and he would play guitar and guitar synthesizer. He played the synth parts on the guitar and I would try to play some simple bass parts on the synthesizer and we'd sing in Japanese.

Japanese?!

GS: Yes, through effects, you know. We did this fake kabuki kinda style. We did that for quite a while. I think we decided to stop... that was kinda coming to an end I was starting to work with the Walkabouts to help on their album and just stuck around.

When did you start playing music from the very beginning?

GS: When I was 15 I was very interested in the synthesizer. I had no piano background, no classical training. It was in 1975 when they were just starting to come out and I was so amazed with that instrument. I promised myself that I would save my money secretly for a year. And at the end of the year, if I still wanted to do it I figured i would really be serious, and I did. And I did what I could to save the money from my job. I did not tell my parents

that I had bought this thing. It had no presets, you had to do everything from scratch. Just switches, no chords, no presets. It really taught me how to do it 'cause you had to do each sound separately and only one note at a time. I got jamming with a drummer and a guitar player.

Like the Silver Apples in the 60's.

GS: Yep. There's actually a few bands like that that were experimenting. You see I'm still very much into prog rock. The first band I saw was the original Mahavishnu Orchestra. I really liked the synthesizer. For the first couple of years I just made noises and weird things. Then I started to learn more about music to play in bands. Someone said, 'you need to do this chord!', so I had to find out what it was. In '81 or '82 I began study with this very fantastic improv teacher. And in the States, they have these books for everything, but we never looked at music sheets but we still... he was at outer space. He had taught one of Diana Ross' piano players. He had worked with all these great players, but he was _nuts_. Weird jazz stuff. I learned a lot from him about weird concepts. He would teach you in terms of shapes and chords. He would just play with you and tell you to do this. In school I took some theory classes to get the language down. I never really had the classical ability or anything like that. Sometimes I wish I did because it could become handy. I was trying to play really bad fusion stuff in the beginning that I couldn't play. The whole band couldn't play! That's where I first met Matt Cameron who went off to Soundgarden. He was in one of my first bands. He could really play, fantastic. I remember he used to do... we had this band where he would come out from behind the drums and sing 'Five Years' by David Bowie.

Do you still have any of this avant-garde thing when you play with the Walkabouts? Did any of it survive?

GS: I think so more than ever. I've learned a lot from Chris in terms thinking for the song. That's just going all over the place and then thinking of the part. But I have a new resurgence of that kinda avant-garde thing. I like using the mellotron sound a lot. That's an instrument from the 70's that had the tapes in loops you know. Very eerie sounds. I like a lot of the sounds from that and I still love the synthesizer. I have a collection at home. You know, this next tour I'm thinking of bringing one of my real synths. I think it's time to be adventurous 'cause people like that.

[Tape runs out]

GS: Technology is getting more interesting again. I think in the 80's and 90's, technology got stupid. Companies just wanted to make things cheap. So they took off knobs off the keyboards and gave you a little window and one knob. Now they've realized even electronic people want to have real synthesizer.

More physical stuff.

GS: Yes, very physical creation. Now there's like 35 companies in the world building old synthesizers again. It's amazing! Because that's what I was in the beginning, I was a synth player. I wasn't a piano player, that was my instrument. And I still love the synthesizer. I've got two mini-moogs, they're as classic as an old violin. But they're not easy to play, you know, use the wheels and get the pitch right. It's not automatic, you have to do it by ear and know where to hit it and where to bring it back.

Almost like a string instrument.

GS: It is. It really is. The technique I'm working out right now is instead of using the vibrato from the oscillator, you try to do the vibrato on the wheel. It's difficult, it will take me a long time but it sounds good.

Did you know that Roger McGuinn ordered one of the first mini-moogs?

GS: Really?

Yeah. When he got it, he didn't get any manual for it, so he contacted Robert Moog and said, 'how do you work this thing?' And Moog told him that, 'you're supposed to know how to work it before you order it!' ''But it's one of the first you ever made!' 'Well, that's your problem...'

GS: He's a temperamental guy. Well, he's rebuilt the mini-moog now. He's releasing it in the spring. It's expensive but I think it will be really good. It's gonna have real wood, like the old one. And it still only play one note!

To go back to the Walkabouts for a second, and 'Trail of Stars'. I realize that it was a tough time for the band. It seems that you pretty much became the centre of the group. The album is pretty much built around your sounds.

GS: I didn't know that at the time. They say that, but I still don't sense that. They said that but it still doesn't seem like that to me. Well, I did play a lot on it, but Chris played piano on it too. It was definitely a change. I was going through crazy times too. My wife left me and then Baker had died. It all happened at once and we were all just stunned.

It's amazing that the band survived _and_ had an album out at the time!

GS: It really is! Phill Brown helped a lot. I think he kinda taught us that we could work in a different way. You know, there was a lot of emotional things. I remember Chris coming out after doing a track... my memory's so bad... but Chris was in tears and I could tell it was almost like an exorcism for him, coming out after singing that part 'the day I stopped caring'. He would sing that and came out and... woah! I wasn't aware of it at the time, but I was doing more, I was writing more string arrangements and things. Maybe I wasn't aware of it 'cause it was such a freaky fucked-up time. We went out of Seattle to Paradise Recordings which is up in the mountains. And why, I don't know but I came home for the first time and my wife was with somebody else now and it was just horrible. It was not all her fault of course, but I came home from tour homeless. Of course I could have stayed with Chris and Carla or whatever, no-one was turning me away, but I found an artist place of 3 meters by 3 meters, put my keyboard in and built a bed above it and lived there for two and a half years.. You had to go outside to go to the bathroom. I think it was good for me. It helped me focus back on the music. There was nothing to disturb me. And that's when we did that album. I remember I moved a lot of the stuff out of that box to the studio. I was in my world, I was in my box. I wouldn't write or anything to anybody, just closed down.

That can be very healthy at times.

GS: Yeah, I think it was. Otherwise I would have gone crazy. I mean, I couldn't commit suicide 'cause I have a daughter. Now, once you have a kid, that's not an option anymore [laugh].

Yeah, I have a daughter myself.

GS: You have?

Yeah. She lives with her mother.

GS: Well, if you don't have a kid, you don't know what it's like, right.. People can say 'oh, I understand'--they don't understand unless they're a parent! Well, it's a crazy life.

Yeah, it's like the first moog, there's no manual!

GS: [laugh] That's very good--there's no manual!