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JOHN VANDERSLICE: Definitely I got really, really interested in Elephant 6 stuff, especially two bands: Of Montreal and...
W: Neutral Milk Hotel? (The title is a Neutral Milk Hotel reference)
JV: Yeah. Full-on. Day and night. The Of Montreal stuff, in a way, is actually as realized and perfect pop as I could even imagine in my brain. That stuff is actually a little bit too well done to take from. It’s almost too perfect. It has the most complicated song structures of anyone right now. The Neutral Milk Hotel [was an influence] in the very direct narrative confessional style that’s just wacked out and fucked up. And also the use of distortion - recording-wise, that textural use of distorted acoustic and distorted drums is actually going to show up more on the next record I’m doing. I’ve found out really interesting ways of overdriving instruments, and it has to do with using different pre-amps in parallel, like a combination of Calrec solid state amps and Ampex tube amps. And I’ve dialed in this really beautiful distortion. So, sonically, the influence of Elephant 6 stuff might even show up more later on, but, in the overall vibe, certainly; I steal from those guys as much as I can. And there’s other bands on the periphery: Elf Power, I got interested in, and the Minders I like I lot.
The other thing, the split that you probably hear, is that I was in a band called MK Ultra and we did some tours with Sunny Day Real Estate. I wasn’t really familiar with them before we went out on tour with them, but we saw them so much and we played with them so much that we actually started getting a little bit of that dripping, two-guitar Emo - driving, dirgey stuff - into our own music. You definitely hear that in "Bill Gates Must Die," you hear that a little bit in "Speed Lab," maybe a little bit in "Big Man Star." So those were the two strains that were going on in that record.
W: "Bill Gates Must Die" is a great song. It’s very complicated, because you actually have to look at the lyrics carefully to find out what’s going on, and when you get it, that it’s this rant to the effect of "save my from myself!" written from the point of a pedophile shocked by his own ability to get child porn, it’s kind of a treat.
JV: And there’s a dearth of songs about child pornography. (Laughs)
W: Is the first song ("Confusion Boats") a reference to "My Back Pages?"
JV: Absolutely, and that’s another 100% obsession. Bob Dylan.
W: I figured that, because the line with "tattooed fish" reminds me of "ships with tattooed sails" (from "Gates of Eden").
JV: That’s exactly it. "Ships with tattooed sails." I can’t hear those songs without really wanting to emulate that energy that he had in those years, ‘61-65. I don’t think he could have done any wrong – even all the B-sides and the Biograph stuff from that time is just remarkable.
W: Yeah, it’s funny how there are some things that you’d feel ashamed to imitate and there are others that you’d proudly rip off and even crow from the highest rooftop that you are ripping them off.
JV: Definitely. Well, Dylan’s one of those things, although none of my friends or people in my circle share my obsession with Bob Dylan. I’ve definitely tried to convince a lot of people about those early records. It’s not a tough sell, but a lot of people are resistant to anything with a folk or country tinge.
W: My tough sell is the Incredible String Band. That’s the band I terrorize my friends with.
JV: I don’t know them.
W: They were contemporaries of Dylan – they kind of came out of that same Joe Boyd Island Records folk scene of the 60s that Nick Drake came out of. In fact, Nick Drake used to open for them. I think that Jeff Mangum from Neutral Milk Hotel has probably listened to a lot of that band. They were psychedelic folk, and the song structures were so complicated and weird – they’d have 12 minute songs that would change from unbelievably serious to totally silly, almost throwing away the song by putting in all these silly parts, but ultimately making it more complicated. A lot of Middle Eastern and Eastern bending of the notes added onto British Isles folk.
JV: All right, I’m on Amazon, I’m looking them up right now. I’m going to buy it. They got Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, 5,000 Spirits….
W: Buy Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter.
JV: Oh, it’s only 14 dollars. I’ll just buy it.
W: So, back to the interview. "Bill Gates Must Die" and "Speed Lab" are written from the point of view of characters. Is that usually what you do?
JV: With a lot of MK Ultra stuff it was a narrator. Definitely. There are fourteen songs on the last MK Ultra record, and seven or eight or nine of those are from other narrators. Sometimes it’s not certain: people just assume that I’m talking about my own life, but it’s usually a helpful tool to not exhaust your own limited biographical material. I mean, I grew up in the suburbs. I grew up in Maryland. I don’t really have a lot to write about as far as personal experience. Although "Big Band Stars," the song on the new record about these kids climbing up radio towers, is actually a true story.
W: I like that a lot about Bright Eyes, the way he totally blurs the line between autobiography and fiction. So much of that is clearly autobiographical, and it’s also obvious that he’s throwing in total fictions, and not differentiating between the two. I think that’s a really sophisticated and fascinating way to work.
JV: I think that’s the richest place to come from, because you’re going to run out of [personal] material, and [fictional writing] is limitless. And it’s funny because I’ve read interviews with Conor [Oberst of Bright Eyes] and people say "Did your brother really drown in a bathtub?" And he’s like "Uh…"
I’ve had people be very angry with me. I wrote a song about abortion, and my mother was very angry with me about it, because she just assumed that I was speaking my mind and it wasn’t a narrator. It’s also a great way to absolve responsibily for statements, too. (Laughs)
W: Awhile ago, you parlayed"Bill Gates Must Die" into a rather impressive media hoax campaign in which you claimed Microsoft had not only issued a cease and desist order over the song but was perhaps tapping your phone and causing your NT server to crash. So, were you trying to prove a point about media fact-checking?
JV: Definitely not. We were just like little kids in the nursery school trying to get the teacher to pay attention cause we didn’t get enough at home or something.
I have kind of a unique position on this stuff: a lot of bands like to pretend that they don’t have publicists and that they don’t care about stuff like this, but I’m exactly the opposite. My mother owns a public relations company, so I grew up with this kind of crafting of story and of courting the media. It was a very straightforward thing. We did this with MK Ultra all the time, and they never got above the radar, but there’s a lot of stuff on the John Vanderslice site, if you go there, a lot of hoaxes. I think we got the San Francisco Weekly four times in a row on hoaxes. And the Weekly here is a pretty big paper. We had them writing about buying Brian Wilson’s mixing deck. It just went on and on. We started feeding things to Bandmagazine about the CIA and they would print it! We didn’t want to hurt the SF Weekly but we thought we might as well torture Band cause it’s just some cheesy mag.
But it definitely wasn’t done [to make fun of press]. A lot of my friends here are writers: I love writers and feel as much affinity with writers as I do with musicians. I love to review records, and I love to interview bands. But, just like using an outside narrator, if a band doesn’t augment its own story or create its own story it’s going to be really boring. I mean, nothing happens to bands. We’re not in Chelsea in ’67. The only thing I could talk about that’s happening now is maybe some internet stuff, and your eyes would glaze over.
So part of it is being interesting, [and] part of it is that I’ve always been a prankster. When I was in seventh grade I invented this fake character that was running for class president, Otis Baxter. I made up these signs with my friend Sean Hollihan and they said "Vote For Ote!" and we started putting them around classrooms. Lo and behold, this got to be so serious - I went to a very large Junior High School, it was maybe 1200 people - it got so big, this hoax, that the principle, who we despised, got on the loudspeaker and said "There is no candidate named Otis Baxter. You are not allowed to write in Otis Baxter." We had literally four or five slogans. "Vote for Ote!" was the one that stuck. I mean, come on, "Vote for Ote!"? Otis Baxter was some precocious, pretend candidate. Ever since then I've been absolutely addicted to the idea of doing a hoax. Ever since then I’ve been absolutely addicted to the idea of doing a prank or a hoax. There’s a lot of love in it, you know, we definetely don’t do it to hurt anyone. And one of my best friends is my publicist, so it makes it easy. We went so much farther on the Bill Gates thing, and we actually ended up ending it because we got sick of it. We had all kinds of websites planned, and some other bands that had been sued by Microsoft, another band suing us because they had a song called "Bill Gates Must Die..." It just went on and on.
W: Another cool thing about"Bill Gates Must Die" is that, in addition to being one of the only songs about child pornography, it’s one of the few songs about the internet, which is funny because I assume lots of indie rock musicians are working at dot-coms as their day jobs, so you’d think that would come up. Maybe they just don’t want to admit that they have everyday jobs or are familiar with the internet.
JV: Well it’s also not in the archetypal memory of the rock writer. You know - trains and rivers… It’s just not there yet, and these things take a long time to come up. It’s amazing, if you analyse Neutral Milk Hotel’s language, how old it is. The words he uses and the vibe and the settings are, like, turn of the century.
W: You also use www.tinytelephone.com, your studio’s web site, as kind of an Indie Rock mp3 hub, where you actually pre-released Mass Suicide Occult Figurines online. How did that promotion technique work for you?
JV: It’s funny: just the act of doing it has gotten us a lot of visibility. I did an interview with Wired yesterday. There was a really good article in the SF Weekly last week about the future of the Artist, and there’s another one this week, and both of them are covering the release. You know, I’m under the radar. I need to do as much stuff as I can on my own because I don’t have that infrastructure. Basically it’s part of the hoax thing, generating your own story.
When I committed to doing it, there was a huge question about whether free mp3 downloads were impacting sales, and there was that whole RIAA-funded survey that stated that CD sales were down on college campuses, and then they went back and found out that they weren’t adding online sales, and when they added those online sales the numbers went up. This is one of the reasons that David Boies, who eviscerated Microsoft, got that stay of execution for Napster, because of these surveys, I think there were six surveys, that stated that CD sales were up on college campuses. So I think now it seems a lot safer than when I committed to doing it. When I committed to doing it people really thought I was a fool. (Laughs).
The reasons I wanted to do it are that: One, it’s interesting. No one has ever done a full release in three resolutions while being on a label. I’ve never seen it. I’ve never seen high-resolution mp3s, [except those that have been] burned by a home enthusiast and thrown up on their server or their ftp hotline site or Napster. And: Two, I thought "well, if people hear it, a percentage of them are gonna dig it and they’re gonna buy it."
I’m open source. I’m into stuff being free. I think art should be free. It’s not like, when people download it, I’m lacking anything. I’m just sitting on my ass, I’m not doing anything.
W: How do you think mp3 technology - because I think the universal consensus is that, regardless of the fate of Napster, it’s not going to go away - is going to affect music in the future?
JV: Well, it’s interesting – emusic just went to a subscription – I still think they’re going to go down, but….I think that the internet drives prices down to free (laughs) for content. The price pressure for content online is immense. I think that…some kind of automatic browser payment like microcash, where your browser OK’s a payment of 10 or 15 cents or a dollar for a click and you have a secure server and it’s…hooked up to your account, which I know a lot of people are working on – that’s the easiest and by far the most believable future for this kind of thing. Literally, you go to a band’s website and it says "10 cents a download" and then you can get a record for $1.40…But putting in your credit card is a joke. It’s never, ever going to work. That’s become a huge barrier for purchasing even simple things like CDs and buzzsaws and whatever else Amazon sells.
So, I think that once there’s an easy way to transfer money it’s going to become a lot more interesting for labels to sell downloads. But...majors are going to continue to shrink and independents are going to come up online. I think that what independents are going to start doing is really looking at the music itself as a loss leader. Like the music is given away and you can buy a hard copy of the record, and bands are really going to have to go out of their way to make that CD package be interesting.
W: I like that idea a lot. I think that’s one of the special advantages indie music has; indie fans like to have records. They like to have nice-looking records. There’s always going to be a small core of people who are going to want to own the record, and with indie music you can afford to have just a small core of people buying your record.
JV: Definitely. We were even laughing about this yesterday – we were thinking about the idea, when all-in-one CD burners are the rage, which is probably going to be two years from now, that the record company would just sell you an empty CD container with the booklet.
But, in all truth, CD sales are never going to go away, because there’s only a small percentage of people who want to deal with burning a CD. As someone who does this shit in the studio all the time – man, it take a lot of time. And I really don’t think that it’s going to [have a major] impact, even when there are unlimited downloads.
[But] there’s going to have to be a price correction – the face value of a CD cannot be $18.98. That’s deeply offensive, and that’s why the RIAA is in hot water. They know there’s a lot of gouging going on. It’s totally their fault. CDs should be capped at 10 dollars.
Listen to mp3s by John Vanderslice (from Audiogalaxy.com):
from Mass Suicide Occult Figurines
Foothills of My Mind
Bill Gates Must Die
Confusion Boats
Speed Lab
Gruesome Detailinterview used by permission of Audiogalaxy.com
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