The Bill Doss Interview

WILL: I'm just calling to interview you about the Sunshine Fix and Olivia Tremor Control. Were you just down in the studio?

BD: Yeah. A friend of mine came over to pick up some stuff that he'd left over here.

BD: Right now I've got a 1-inch 16 track and this little British mixing console that I just got that I like a lot. So far I've just had a Mackie, which is great, but it's really nice when you actualy get something which has some character, which I've never had before.

W: It's always been about trying to put character in there instead of something that naturally has character?

W: Is the Sunshine Fix a separate band or is it just a name for your solo recordings?

BD: It’s just a project right now. It might eventually turn into a band, but right now it’s not. I put together something for the Kindercore festival but that was just something to do for fun. It was a little too soon, too.

BD: Yeah, we didn’t really have it together. But it was fun, and that’s what it was all about.

W: You recently contributed a song to the “Powerpuff Girls” CD. How did you feel having a chance to do something with more of a mainstream high profile?

BD: I think it’s fine. I think as long as you get to do whatever you want to do, [it doesn’t matter if it’s] “mainstream” vs. “indie” or “alternative” or whatever the buzzword is for the week. I think it’s great. It’s good to have a lot of people get a chance to listen to your music and decide if they like it for themselves.

W: I always kind of liked the artists who would get mainstream exposure but be just as weird or as individual as they always had been. Some people might think it’s strange, but for the people out there who get it and wouldn’t have had a chance to hear it otherwise it’s a really great thing.

BD: Exactly. I hate this whole thing where people say “Oh, if a lot of people hear your music then your music must suck!” I’ve never understood that rationale. And a lot of people have it. A lot of people think that if you’ve sold a million records you must be terrible. Of course, it is true in a lot of cases that a lot of bands that sell that many records are not that good.

W: Singles and Beyond is a re-release of some of the earliest Olivia Tremor Control stuff. Do you still have unrecorded songs from that time that you might end up working on someday?

BD: No. Anything that we have that we owned, that we were able to do what we wanted with without getting permission from somebody, and that was releasable we put on that, so that’s why there’s like 20 songs on there.

W: When you were putting the record together did you work on the sequencing to make it cohere as an album or did you put it out exactly as-is?

BD: Yeah, we tried as much as we could, but since it was such a compilation of stuff it was hard to [do]. We tried to make it flow as well as we could. Because it’s always better, I think, when something flows well, even if it’s not a real record.

W: Well, it sounds whole like a real record. I think it’s probably the fact that it was all on EPs together.
How has the Olivia Tremor Control changed from the time you originally recorded that stuff?

BD: Well, we became a legitimate band. It started off as just me and Will [Cullen Hart] recording a lot of that stuff, and Jeff [Mangum] from Neutral Milk Hotel was involved with a lot of it too. And then after Jeff left to go do his thing we sort of became a band, and we weren’t before that. Like I said, it was just me and Will and then John [Fernandes] came along and then Eric [Harris] came along and then Pete [Erchick] came along. So I think that’s probably how we’ve changed the most: we’ve actually become a band.

W: One of the things I like the most about Olivia Tremor Control records is the way they try to paint a picture in your head, often almost literally, with certain sounds being used like colors. I’ve always been really interested in that synaesthetic aspect of sound – for me, certain organ sounds are pink. Accordion is green. Pedal steel is definitely red and sounds like a house.

BD: Yeah, like an old house, or a farmhouse. It’s so inherently country. This friend of mine who was actually over here playing pedal steel the other day, he said that – somebody had one of those things that makes that “Clint Eastwood sound,” like “pprrrrrrrr!”

BD: Yeah. I was playing around with that and he said that they called that “the skull” because every time in a movie where they’d show a skull they’d [hit] that. So as he was playing I actually had a porcelain skull from when I was in college in some art class, so I sneaked around where he couldn’t see me as he was doing the pedal steel thing and I stuck the skull in front of him and went “pprrrrrrrr!” [Laughs]. He had to stop the take cause he was laughing.

W: It’s so funny how things like that get so overdone. Like the empty ghost town bluesy electric guitar line.

W: A lot of the ambient sounds on this recording not only give me specifically personal mental images but also make me wonder about their actual origins. Do you remember, for example, where the birds and church bells of “Christmas with William s.” were recorded?

BD: Yeah, actually, I do. It was behind my house, when I lived on…[laughs] I was going to say the street, but like that would mean anything. Actually, it was the house that the B-52’s first played in, like in 1976 or something, when they first got together. I think they played at a party in that house, in the very apartment that I lived in. And there was a church behind the house, and that’s where the bells came from. And the birds were, obviously, up in the trees.

BD: That was a piece I really liked, because to me it actually had a movement. It takes you from inside the kitchen where I started it, out the screen door, through the leaves, into the church, and that’s where all the sounds get crazy, cause it’s supposed to be a church of electronic sounds, or electronified sounds. You’re hearing the bells, and then once you get inside the bells get strange and they change into all the sounds, which were actually Christmas songs cut up and then re-arranged so that hopefully you couldn’t tell what Christmas songs they were but they still gave you the feeling of Christmas. And then after you hear all the sounds and it gets all freaky – you know, “freaky, man!” – you go back to the house. So you hear the walking back through the leaves and then the screen door again. So it’s like a journey.

W: Brian, our producer, once recorded an album for the guy who painted his house as payment for the house painting. This guy lives down the street, so at the middle of the record you just hear him walking down the street to Brian's house, in exactly the amount of time it takes to go from one place to the other. So you listen to it and you feel like you're walking down a sunny street.

BD: I love that, whenever people put a really simple situation [on a record]. Like walking down the street. It can really, really be powerful. It can work really well.

BD: Oh, William S. Burroughs. That’s why we called it that, cause it was a collage and he worked with collage, doing sound collage and…visual art collage…We called it that ‘cause it was supposed to be a Christmas track. At the time somebody had just given me a record of William S. Burroughs’ stuff and it was all chopped-up stuff. It just seemed perfect.

W: I have to ask because this band is an obsession to me: Is anybody in the Olivia Tremor Control a fan of the Incredible String Band?

BD: You know, it's weird - a lot of people ask that. And I don't know their stuff very well, and I don't think anybody else in the band does either.

W: Really? I like their music so much that I wanted to believe that there were fans ensconced in the band.

BD: I like what I've heard, but the stuff that I heard seemed a little too "tra-la-la"-ey. You know what I mean? I little too "skipping through the forest." Which I like, but sometimes it can be a little too much.

W: My interest in the music of Elephant Six bands led me to pursue films that were like the images these bands gave me in my head. I found that the work of surrealist animators like Jan Svankmajer, the Brothers Quay, and Ladislaw Starewicz really matched well. Are you a fan of any of those filmmakers?

BD: Actually I am. Some of those that you mention I don't know and really should, but a lot of the 60s surrealists [were] amazing. At the time that people were really being experimental with music they were also doing it with film and books and all kinds of stuff. There's a lot of that stuff that I really like, but probably a lot of it that I should see but I haven't.

W: I just got voracious about it, and it really did have to do with wanting to see the songs. I love Jan Svankmajer.

BD: Yeah, we have this friend that makes films for us when we go on the road sometimes, and I'll have to ask him about [Svankmajer], cause he knows all about that stuff. He's really cool about introducing us to different filmmakers that are really amazing.

W: Svankmajer, for me, is a real obsession. He really taps into the potential for darkness and surrealism in animation. He made a film called "Alice," which is kind of a subterranean re-telling of Alice in Wonderland, with the inherent darkness of it played up. He incorporates things like raw meat and glass eyes and false teeth into his animation models, and paints a picture of Alice as a little kid equally driven by the desire to inflict violence and cause destruction as she is by a desire to be kind. I think that's a part of everybody.

BD: Yeah, I can see that. That's something we try to suppress. That's an interesting take on it: to play up the evil aspects of it.

BD: I'll do that. I'll ask my friend Joey about him: he's probably got stuff on video already. He collects stuff like that.

BD: He makes his own stuff and shows that. It's interesting stuff - a lot of it is video collage and…I want to say "soundscapes," but it's not sound. It's stuff to go along with the soundscape. So it will just be a montage of things: there'll be clouds and then he'll have a fan spinning overlaying that, and then he'll have a tree overlaying that, and somebody walking overlaying that, and he'll build these collages up. It's really cool stuff, I like it. When I did the Sunshine Fix show he made some films, and I gave him a tape of the songs we were going to play so he could actually make films to go along with the songs.

W: Do you find that your live playing changes when there are accompanying films?

BD: It didn’t for this last [Sunshine Fix] show because it happened so fast and it was such a ramshackle thing, but with the Olivia stuff it does. I think whenever there’s more films we tend to go off in a more experimental direction as opposed to just being in some rock club with one microphone and one monitor and no films, [where] we just play the rock songs. There’s always that: “Do we play the rock songs tonight, or do we get experimental on ‘em?” and I think the films definitely help [us] get experimental, cause then you can watch the films and you don’t really care too much about the fact that there’s an audience sitting there.

W: Some of my favorite shows I’ve seen are those in which it seems like the performers have forgotten to get worried about the audience.

BD: Exactly. You still want to play a good show and you want to entertain people, but, at the same time, you don’t want to get too caught up in the fact that there’s people standing there watching you, cause if you do it can drive you crazy sometimes.

W: Yeah, and if there are films then they’re probably watching the films and not you.

BD: Yeah, exactly. [Laughs] That was the whole idea when we first did it; so people wouldn’t look at us. The art was definitely there along with it, but that was one of the main reasons: “Well, how can we make people not look at us and still be onstage?”

BD: Exactly. [Laughs] Put yourself on display but hope that people don’t look at you.

BD: He makes his own stuff and shows that. It’s interesting stuff – a lot of it is video collage and…I want to say “soundscapes,” but it’s not sound. It’s stuff to go along with the soundscape. So it will just be a montage of things: there’ll be clouds and then he’ll have a fan spinning overlaying that, and then he’ll have a tree overlaying that, and somebody walking overlaying that, and he’ll build these collages up. It’s really cool stuff, I like it. When I did the Sunshine Fix show he made some films, and I gave him a tape of the songs we were going to play so he could actually make films to go along with the songs.

W: You’ve stated that you try to record CDs with the concept of album sides in mind. Do you have any general rules about what you think the ideal structure of an album side should be?

BD: Hmmm…Not really, because there are no rules, of course, but we do look at it that way, like “ooh, this song would definitely start side two,” or “this song definitely seems like it would start side one.” [Pauses] I guess maybe we do go about it with some rules; I guess the catchiest song we try to put either first or third. I remember when I was growing up [with] records, the single was always third for some reason, it was third on side one. And so I guess we do that, and then we try to end side one with something that’s sort of an ending but not a final ending, because it’s side one and you want it to be able to lead right into side two. And it’s weird now with CDs cause you have to think about that. Before it was just like “start side one, end side one,” and then you flipped the record over and you start all over, and now you have to make it so it ends side one if it’s on vinyl, [but] if it’s on CD it’s gotta flow right in to the next one. All the rules are changing!

W: I’ve noticed that on CDs there’s something about track 7. It’s this point where the band has definitely either impressed you or failed to impress you, and they bring out something that’s kind of catchy but more subtle.

BD: I don’t think there was a track seven on my EP. There’s only six songs! Maybe track seven will be the album.

W: I was told that you guys named Neutral Milk Hotel and they named you. Is that true?

BD: I think that is true. Yeah. I think Jeff had a song called “Olivia Tremor Control” a long time ago and I think Will named Neutral Milk Hotel, if I’m not mistaken. I think he had this drawing that he had made and it had a hotel on it and it was a glass of milk or something, and they laughed about it and said “oh, isn’t that funny, it looks like a milk hotel!” You know how things go: you say it again a few times and then you change it around and then it ends up being that. But I think that is what happened. It’s hard to remember. Long time ago.

W: This is another long ago question: You came to Athens to join Olivia Tremor Control right out of the National Guard, is that true?

BD: Yeah. But it wasn’t actually Olivia then. ‘Cause we’d all played together in Ruston [Lousiana], and then Will ended up moving out here by way of the Virgin Islands, and then after he got here Jeff and I would come out and visit him. And since I was still in the military I just stayed in school and Jeff decided he wanted to move out here too, so he did. And then they started Synthetic Flying Machine. Of course, they couldn’t use that name because of James Taylor’s band. [Laughs] So I eventually moved out here when I got out, and at the time it was still Synthetic Flying Machine, and it was like “well, we can’t use this, let’s use something else.” We all agreed that we couldn’t use that name so we picked that name of Jeff’s.

W: Was there a point at which you decided to fully immerse yourself in music, or was it always kind of there?

BD: Well, it was always there, but when you're growing up you listen to what people tell you a lot of times and you hear "well, when you get out of school, then you go to college, and you have more school. And when you get out of that, you wanna get your doctoral degree and you'll have more school! And then you wanna get married and have kids! This is what you want to do!" So you kind of live that life for awhile until finally one day you realize "wait a minute! This is not what I want!" What I wanted I realized when I was eight years old; I wanted to be a musician. But of course something you decide on when you're eight doesn't seem like a life-making decision. So it was definitely always there, but whenever I finally got out of the military is when I decided to stop doing school, stop trying to build some sort of weird career in something that I didn't really want to do anyway, and just go play music. And if I become a success at at, that's great. If I don't, well, at least I'll be happy.

BD: Oh, yeah. For sure. There’s no more forms of security. There’s nothing that seems secure anymore, except for the fact that I’m really happy doing what I’m doing.

BD: Yeah, pretty much all of them. Well, Will hasn’t had a job in ten years, and I don’t know how he’s done it, but the rest of us have had to have jobs.

BD: No. The last thing I did was I was a janitor at one of the clubs here in town, and before that I was a dishwasher. You know, the basic, run-of-the-mill musician jobs. Eric is a bartender right now, John works at Wuxtry, you know, the record store, and I don’t know what Pete’s doing right now. He was doing carpentry work, but I don’t think he is right now.

BD: No, Jeff hasn’t had a job in, like, fifteen years. [Laughs] I don’t know how he’s done it, either. I think he makes money from the band, somehow. I know everybody else in his band has jobs. But he doesn’t. So there’s something there, but I don’t know.

W: It seems like the independent press has seized on the Elephant 6 recording company partially because, as a writer, it’s easy to talk about a story with a hook. Were you guys aware of the potential for media attention way back when you were starting Elephant 6?

BD: Not at all. I think we kind of thought that it would probably happen, but that’s just because growing up you see bands and that’s what happens, if you hear about them. All the bands you don’t hear about are the ones that aren’t getting any [media attention]. So of course you don’t hear about those and it doesn’t seem real. I think we were thinking that it would happen but not really expecting it. And so when it did happen it was kind of weird.

BD: It was first good, and then I think it got bad, which is one of the reasons we’re taking a break right now. Some people in the band didn’t like the attention. They got kind of freaked out about it. It’s not like we were really getting any attention, I mean, in the “indie” world we were – like that’s really any kind of “attention” to speak of, or especially to freak out about – but it was a little too much for some people, so we decided to take a break.

W: I’ve always felt that certain “movements,” like psychedelia, punk, and surrealism, were never really invented so much as they were always kind of in the air and part of a running human dialogue.

BD: I think that’s true about everything. I mean, I don’t want to sound too academic, but there’s this thing that I really like that Plato said about his realm of ideals: how everything exists in this ideal world and it’s just there to be plucked. People say “does it bother you that you have this descending chord progression that sounds like the Beatles?” and it’s like “well, no, it didn’t bother them when they ripped of the Shirelles, and it didn’t bother the Shirelles when they ripped off some old blues guy.” Those things are just there to be taken. I think that’s true of a lot of stuff.

W: And people try to place surrealism’s “creation” in time, but Bosch painted fully realized surrealist paintings hundreds of years before Dali.

BD: Oh, yeah. In fact, I’ve got a Bosch painting hanging on the wall right here…There’s even things in Dali’s work where you can look and it’s directly taken from [Bosch]. There’s one thing in particular – that big thing with the nose with a little mustache under it – Dali took it directly out of this painting. Just like taking some backwards harmony that the Beatles would use.

W: And a lot of old American folk music sounds, to me, really damn psychedelic. Like the Carter family singing “I’ll twine with my mingles and waving black hair” on “Wildwood Flower.”

BD: I don’t know those lines but I love the Carter Family stuff. I have an 8-track that I got at a garage sale that was like “The Incredible and Great Carter Family – with Autoharp!” [Laughs] I had to have it. It was an 8-track, so it cost all of 50 cents. “With Autoharp!”

W: I love all that really old music where the ties between then and now are kind of tenuous, so a lot of it really just sounds strange.

BD: It does! Some of it sounds really creepy: they bring that real weird, creepy sound out of all of those little spirituals…

W: And there’s something about the way they sing, singing these really emotional songs in a way that’s very removed and unemotional.

BD: I know what you mean. It seems real straight, and that does make it creepy. It seems like all the creepiest characters in history always have straight faces. You know, they just sit there and look at you without any emotion…I’m gonna have to pull that eight-track out now and listen to it.

BD: Lately it’s been mostly soul music: Curtis Mayfield and Sly and the Family Stone.

BD: That’s the last one I’ve just gotten. It’s wonderful. That’s what I’m trying to do right now: trying to make everything sound like that. Not trying to write songs like that, cause I can’t, but make everything have that sound, that real warm, pillowy, 1971 sound.

BD: Yeah. It brings you in, like a warm comforter. It’s very inviting, it’s like “come, play with me!”

W: You can really hear that influence on the first track of the Sunshine Fix e.p. In a great way.

BD: Yeah, that was definitely influenced by my recent infatuation with soul music.

W: Some of that record also reminds me of that song, “Spaced Cowboy,” on There’s a Riot Goin’ On, that melds funk and country in this seamless way.

W: Yeah, it sounds like he’s singing into some kind of distorted bullet mike or something.

BD: Yep. I notice that on some of those early ‘70s Stevie Wonder records, too. When the vocal comes in it just seems way too loud. It’s just like “goddamn, I would have turned that down!” But it’s so great that he didn’t.
It’s hard to get that sound and not have it too overdriven, cause you can take it too far. Derek Almstead, who plays in Of Montreal and the Summer Hymns and Great Lakes, and pretty much every band in town, he and I are recording bands right now for Kindercore, and that’s something that we’re having fun with: playing around with the sounds, listening to records and trying to emulate certain sounds. And we’ve been having a good time with that. So that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently.

BD: I did this band from Sweden called the Sleeping Flies, which were kind of Brit-Poppy Trance/Dance stuff, which was kind of strange, but they love the Incredible String Band. That’s where I heard most of the Incredible String Band that I’ve heard - from those guys. And the band that we’re doing right now, in fact, Derek came over just a few minutes ago, is this band from California called C.A.R. And they’re sort of like the Dionne Warwick/Burt Bacharach combination, you know, the old “Walk On By,” kind of white soul funky [sound]. And the musicianship is incredible. It’s three girls and two guys and they’re amazing musicians. The vocals are just wonderful: this girl sings like Astrud Gilberto, she has this soothing, sultry voice that you just don’t find around right now…We could have put a Radio Shack mike on her vocals and it would have sounded incredible.