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WILL: Samsara is very natural-sounding. You recorded it at [New Orleans’ famous] Kingsway studios. Did you record with the Squirrel Nut Zippers there as well? This recording sounds more live and dynamic.
TOM MAXWELL: Do you know how hard it is to get something to sound "natural?" Yeah, I did all the records with the Zippers [at] Kingsway, which is closed now. It had great-sounding rooms, and I had enough good sense to pull together people who were great musicians and thus was able to record mostly live. And you can’t really fake that. Most people track now, which means that everybody plays their part individually, and they try to get it note-perfect. And everybody’s divvied up and thus you don’t get that kind of interplay that you get during a live performance, because in a live performance somebody will play something that will set you off and you might change your thing a little bit to add to that, tempos tend to shift a little bit, there can be slight intonation problems (laughs). You know what I’m saying? But that’s great! I love that. I really go for that. I think that’s a perfect performance: a performance that tends to capture the spirit of the song, as opposed to some sort of clinical reproduction of the correct notes. And I’d been working for years with the Zips to understand not only what I wanted but how to get it in terms of what microphones go with what instruments and just the nuts and bolts of how to capture these kind of sounds, so my record is sort of state-of-the-art as far as [what] I and Ken Mosher and mostly Mike Napolitano had kind of figured out. Thanks, man, I appreciate it.
W: You can kind of hear that there’s fun going on, and that’s a really nice thing to hear in a record.
TM: Oh, yes sir.
W: Was the sudden yelling of "Shut up!" on "Sixes and Sevens to Me" spontaneous?
TM: I told Chris P., the drummer, that he had a solo in that song. I said "you have a vocal solo." When I demo-ed the song I was really thinking about what would be a nutty thing to put in there. I listen to Ray Charles all the time, and, when you hear the "What I’d Say" single, on one part of it he stops playing and then all the musicians and backup singers, they...it sounds almost like an argument. It’s not an argument, but they’re just getting him to play the song again or go back into the riff, and there’s this huge hubbub, and I thought that was a pretty neat kind of breakdown. So I just told Chris P. to just tell me to clam up somehow. We did a couple of takes of the song and I had taught Duke Heitger that song in that room before the take, so people were still kind of getting their groove on, and by the time we got to that take Chris P. was good to go, and he let that fly and I was like "Oh man, this is such a keeper!"
W: In one of the interviews with you that I read, you described the writing of the song "Some Born Singing;" you took a Chinese opera that was hundreds of years old and sung in Cantonese and you transliterated the words, writing new English words that mirrored the way the Cantonese words sounded to you. How close to the sounds was your transliteration?
TM: You know, sometimes it’s astonishingly close to what it sounds like they’re saying. There were some lines in that song where, honest to God, it sounds like this woman is singing that song in English. And there are other lines, of course, that I just made up out of whole cloth.
I tried to impose a theme on that song; I was going to write a story about the night the Buddha attained Buddhahood, where he’s under the Bo tree and Lord Death, who’s also known as Lord Desire, comes after him with this entire arsenal, which is either astonishing babes or just horrible arrows and spears and stuff. Anyway, that was just a dismal failure, because the meter and rhyme scheme - or non-meter and non-rhyme scheme - of the original was so specific. There was no way that I could come up with words that fit that and still have it be some kind of narrative. So I thought "You know, I bet if I just copied down the lines that it sounds like she’s singing, some theme will make itself apparent." And, sure enough, it did, and then I was able to expound on that in the lines where it was just garbled or there was no apparent transliterative text. It was a good exercise for me, anyway, because it was so alien to the way I write a lyric, and I think it fit much better.
W: I like it because it’s almost such an overly simplistic, blockheaded way of doing things that it’s kind of brilliant. Instead of trying to get within the whole thing you actually decide to use your own ears, that are tuned to English, to get those words.
TM: Yeah. So much of performing and songwriting, and so much of being alive, is the extinction of Self, to me. The whole thing is like "Well, I understand that there’s this thing that’s so much bigger than I am, so I’m just going to attenuate myself to this thing and be a good antenna," as opposed to "I know what’s best." And that’s kind of what I did on that song.
That song is profound for a couple of reasons to me. One is that the theme that kind of appeared was in fact the death of Stacy Guess, who was the Zippers’ first trumpet player, who tragically overdosed and passed away while we were on our first European tour in the late winter of ’98. And, of course, we had given him the boot a couple of weeks before we went in to record Hot. And Holly [Harding Baddour], who sang ["Some Born Singing"], actually went out with Stacy for years and years. So that was pretty intense. The other [reason] is I was so curious as to what [the original] was actually about, even though I didn’t want to know when I was doing my own take on it. I got a copy of the artwork for the record, which was, you know, straight-up Chinese, and I sent it to a Professor at the University at Chapel Hill to just kind of give me an idea of where it was coming from and what it was about and he said that the opera was called "According to One’s Heart’s Desire," which I thought was really amazing, because "heart’s desire" and "one’s desire" is kind of what the whole theme of the record is, and that opera is actually about betting on horses and horseracing and gambling. And the protagonist is just down on their luck and trying to "hit it big" through gambling or, basically, the lottery, which I think is very much a kind of a thing that still has this culture in its thrall. And I think it’s pretty much entirely central to the whole idea of Samsara itself.
W: When did your interest in Buddism and Eastern philosophy begin?
TM: Well, when I was in college I took a course on Taoism, and I had a very passing knowledge of it, but it seemed very interesting to me, and what I got out of that class was fascinating. And then, when I got out of school, I read a lot of Joseph Campbell books, where he was basically saying "let’s just talk about mythology and Oriental and Occidental religions and even pre-historical faith and mythology. This is what these things have in common..." And he opened my eyes to a lot of stuff. So it’s always sort of been there. But I read a definition of samsara in an article in Harper’s magazine, of all things – this was right at the time that I was putting the material together for this record, or when I knew I was going to make this record, and I was just like "damn, that’s a good working theme!" Because you can pretty much do whatever you want to do, musically. In fact, because there’s a unifying theme, you can really go hog wild in terms of what sort of musical gestures you incorporate. Basically I just wanted to explore different aspects of this one idea, and therefore I could just do whatever the hell I wanted to. If it’s a George Jones song or it’s Chinese Opera, it’s all basically operating or referring to the same principle.
W: In that Hal Hartley film "Simple Men" a character says "there’s no adventure, there’s no romance. All there is is trouble and desire."
TM: Desire is pretty much fundamental to how we operate. It’s not necessarily always bad, but it can be a terrible minefield. It’s kind of like quicksand, in a way. You can really get stuck in it. It’s not something that necessarily allows you to rise above. I think that desire for status or person or object is different from desire to be a loving human being or the desire to have one’s eyes opened, so it’s not always bad.
W: You’re self-releasing Samsara, going heavy on internet promotion.
TM: Yeah, that was where I started. Most of the push, though, is on the old school off-line channels, because that’s just really the way things operate. The internet’s really cool, and it’s full of possibility, and it’s certainly a lot more dialed in now than it used to be, but you cannot work a record solely by the internet, I don’t think. Yet. Of course, things change weekly.
W: You stated in your keynote speech at the CMJ ChangeMusic conference, about internet filtering, that "It will ultimately take the place of full-on promotion and in-your-face flag waving by guiding the listener to what he or she wants to hear." How do you picture that coming about?
TM: Boy, if I knew that I’d be a fucking millionaire. Seriously : that’s the million dollar question. Right now you have this very primitive program where you go to Amazon.com and they’re like "we have some suggestions for you." And it kind of creeps me out, really, because they’re trying to get inside your mind based solely on information: "Well, he bought this or she bought this, so we’re going to take a gamble." It’s fascinating to me that Amazon.com has yet to recommend my own record to me. You know what I’m saying?
It kind of creeps me out a little bit, but on the other hand I can also see where, ultimately, you’re going to eliminate the idiot middleman. But it’s just a long and intricate process, and ultimately it’s going to take a certain responsibility on the part of the consumer as much as it’s going to take responsibility on the part of the artist to forego the idea of the jackpot or the get-rich-quick or the stardom thing, which is hooey and illusion, man, total illusion, and just get down to the brass tacks of "I want a career and I’m just going to go about the business of taking responsibility for having that career and doing things in a much more thoughtful and measured kind of way." Instead of waiting on somebody to show up and hand you a big fat sack of cash.
W: Yeah, which never happens ever.
TM: Well, when it does, there are huge strings attached.
W: Like the joke dollar that you pull back with the string.
TM: (Laughs) Yeah, man! Especially for the artist. There’s a lot of people making a mighty good living in the music industry, but virtually none of them are artists. The artist is the mule that pulls the plow.
W: Do you think that major labels will always have a stranglehold on the pop market because they can basically bribe everybody into getting their way?
TM: I don’t want to say "always," because I feel like I’m an optimist. And I think things are so homogenous and stultified now and so kind of pathetic that we’re heading for a change. However, these people have all the money. And they are also the bottleneck, or the idiot gatekeepers, and their power lies just as much in what they choose not to show you as what they’re forcing down your throat. I think the internet is very scary for them, because they don’t have any more control over it than anybody else. Which is, I think, great. Phenomenal. But things will change very slowly and they’re going to try to keep their hooks in the process as long as possible.
AG: Sometimes I wonder if, with things getting so bad musically and one-hit wonders being the standard, and popular music being so inane and emotionally unsatisfying, people are just going to get terminally fed up.
TM: That’s how I feel about it. What are you getting now but an innappropriate response to an inappropriate environment, people feeling a certain kind of infantile sense of entitlement, represented by Napster, where people are like "fuck it! I deserve whatever I want for free!", or people rioting or trashing or basically just wanting to destroy, Woodstock-‘99-style. Because I think people are really fed up and feel like their options are profoundly limited, that they’re just given this lifestyle: "Okay, this is the way you’re supposed to act and dress and this is what you’re supposed to consume." I think that bugs people and they want something else, but they don’t know how to get it so the response from them tends to be sort of anarchic.
But I do believe that things are so shitty now, in terms of this industry - not that bad music is being made, great music is always being made – but just the fact there’s such a stranglehold, and it’s so dismal and so planned-out and homogenous and run by bean-counters, that things are at their nadir. Not that they can’t get worse, but everything is a wheel [that] spins, and I can’t help but feel that this wheel is going to take another spin.
W: I always think, with regard to mp3 sharing, that intentionally disposable music is the stuff that’s going to suffer sales losses the most if people can get it for free. You want to pay for a record that you know you’re going to love, and, with a bubblegum single, if you can get if for free, why not?
Yeah. I saw an interview on TV [with] this one guy, a teenager, and he’s like "there’s only one good song on a record, so I just want to get that song. And I don’t want to fool with the rest of it, ‘cause the rest of it’s always crap." And that basically illuminated the entire modus operandi of the major label industry, which is "variety and diversity is anathema." If something works, they want you to do it again and again and again, and the most easily manipulated or controlled bands, at least in terms of marketing, are the ones who basically do the same song over and over and over.
I got into a huge head-butting contest with the label when I was in the Zippers; when Perennial Favorites came out, they wanted to work my calypso ["Trou Macacq"] that was on that record. Well, I had written and recorded that song before "Hell" was ever a hit. It was just something I did: to me, calypso was more or less blues and it was a way for you to write a cool song. But I said "look, y’all, no fucking way. I’m going to pull this from the record." And they didn’t work it. I suspect that it potentially could have shifted some units had we come back with a calypso, but I knew in my heart that it would have rendered us completely obsolete.
W: Was that a difficult decision to make?
Oh, it wasn’t difficult for me, ‘cause I’m such a bone-headed obstinate type guy. I was like "fuck you!" I mixed it in such a way as to drive them crazy, by putting all the vocals over on one side of the speakers and stuff. I was just like "I don’t want this as a single. There’s so much more good stuff coming out of this band." I really thought, at least at the time, that we had the chance of being known and appreciated as what we were as opposed to how we were perceived by most people. Ha ha. Whatever.
W: I think that lots of music fans resented the artificiality of the "Swing Revival," but I bet no one understands more than you what was so skewed about that. Even though I’m sure you’ve weighed in on this a gajillion times I was hoping you could tell me what it felt like as one of the bands that got unfairly treated by a manufactured "movement."
Well, what’s sad about it is that I was seen as a malcontent and a whiner. People would say "why are you biting the hand that feeds you? People would kill to have a trend." And a lot of those [other "swing revival"] bands completely [took] advantage of the most two-dimensional and artistically bankrupt aspects of this thing. And, of course, that’s what you ended up hearing the most. But my response was "I can feed myself." I don’t buy into this bullshit. When the Gap ad came out, I was like "Well, it’s over. It’s so fucking over."
Major labels like trends. Why? Because they pass away. They are co-opted and subverted. The industry’s main goal is to hold up a mirror to whatever they think people are enjoying, but they also have to make it harmless, toothless and nonthreatening. Thus, this thing had to be turned into a trend. In order to be rendered harmless it had to be kind of a dress-up game, where you had to look a certain way and act a certain way. Artistically, only the most boring and pathetic elements were held out the most, which was basically the Gene Krupa sing-sing-sing backbeat with some kind of lame-ass Kansas City jump blues. And then you had a certain uniform you had to wear.
W: And martinis and cigars.
Martinis and cigars. And I knew, pretty much out of the gate, that this was bad for business in terms of being in what I thought was a really good, diverse, thoughtful and kind of strange band. When "Hell" hit, I was like "this is a bolt of lightning. This could actually introduce some diversity into a highly stultified marketplace." But instead it turned into a particularly lame-ass fad, which was, I think, dead on arrival artistically. After about 478 interviews of "what kind of clothes do you wear?" and "do you smoke cigars and drink martinis?" and "what other swing bands do you listen to?" my answers became almost as pedantic and perverse as the questions. Although it didn’t seem to really make any difference at all. We ultimately became known as "the swing band who didn’t want to be known as a swing band." It was bizarre.
W: As a music fan who was entirely removed from your experience but saw it happening, when I first heard "Hell," I also hoped that it might signal a new kind of diversity in pop radio.
Well, that’s an artists’ way of thinking. And, I have to say, it was profoundly naïve. It really took me a few months to figure out what was going on. Although, when The Inevitable [the Squirrel Nut Zippers first album for mammoth records, released in 1995] came out, everybody called us a lounge band, because, if you remember, there was sort of a tiny puff of smoke that was "the lounge scene," which was equally useless. Then, of course, it turned into swing, but a lot of the associated iconography was still the same.
None of that, to me, had anything to do with music. At all. And I just didn’t want to play that game. But, as a result, the Zippers were incapable or unwilling to cash in on something that a lot of other people gladly did on our behalf. I’m sure a lot of people thought we, and me in particular, were just idiots...
I’ll tell you what: this is a hard slog for me, and I’m in no way complaining, because I changed my environment.
The numbers are easy: after [the Squirrel Nut Zippers] went multiplatinum and renegociated our contract, we as a band cleared maybe 1.50 a unit, which then had to be divided seven ways after we paid off whatever number of agents and lawyers were on the payroll. I’m clearing 7.50 a unit, and therefore do not need to sell hundreds of thousands of records to maybe see any money.
But I’m kind of old news, I think. When the Zips came out, we were very left-field and not really a lot was happening that sounded like that. Now I’m a former Zipper and the Zippers, for good or ill, were entirely aligned, in the public’s eye, with the "swing" movement, which, like I said, is now a moldering corpse.
W: Was the use of all those different styles on Samsara an attempt to say "It’s not about swing, it’s about rock being played out?"
Yeah. You’re exactly right. I think Time Out New York said that my record was "aggressive brush-clearing of my new estate," which I totally agree with. I was freed from the bonds of a "band," in other words a set number of people who played a set number of instruments – although the Zips played a lot of instruments [there were] finite resources. So I was like "what do I want to do? I want a fucking pipe organ on this record, and I’m gonna get it." And also I think it was a kind of reaction on my part, to say "look, music is music, and diversity is strength, and I refuse to be pigeonholed into one specific mode of expression." Because, Goddamn, music is so, so powerful. You can’t contain it. You catch fire. And I think that’s something that the industry is very scared of. They very much want to control that fire. And, of course, they can’t. They can try, and they can succeed to a certain extent, but they really cannot. And there’s always somebody who does catch that fire, and who ultimately comes forward. But yeah, I think I was subconsciously trying to go "what are you going to say about this?"
W: In the office this morning we were talking about people who say "Oh, I like all kinds of music, from Britney Spears to Limp Bizkit." A friend of mine pointed out to me once that if you think of all music as a pie, that would be a pretty small slice.
But it’s what’s been put on their plate, and they think that that represents the banquet. They don’t have a clue!
Years and years ago I was hosting a show on WXYC in Chapel Hill. It was college radio and we did some interview stuff, and I interviewed Frank Zappa. I didn’t really know that much about him. And it was a good interview, but at one point he goes – and this was awhile ago, this was at least ten years ago – he goes "you know, most of the best music being made will never be heard." And at the time I thought "well, you’re bitter!" Or cynical. You know. I felt that the cream will inevitably sort of rise to the top. Now of course I know he was exactly right. There’s a very tight rein on what’s even presented to people. And now it’s just a joke. There’s like four bands that are getting any kind of airplay, and they sound astonishingly alike.
[But] people who enjoy music and who love to listen to music and who like to be moved by music and who like to really internalize it will ultimately find what they want to hear. It’s out there.
W: How do you like listening to your newest record compared to the Zippers’ records?
Well, I like listening to it. I’m the kind of guy who’s going to compile a list about what I perceive my shortcomings to be: "wow, this could have been better!" In fact, I cannot listen to "Hell." Not because it was horribly overplayed - it was - but because I don’t think I was up to snuff on it as a vocalist. That’s the way I feel about almost everything I did in the Zippers except for a few lucky strikes. I didn’t think I got a good vocal take down until "My Evergreen" on the Christmas record [Christmas Caravan], which was the last thing I ever did with that band. But I actually am able to listen to Samsara and sort of thoroughly enjoy it. Not that I don’t have a list of things that could be better (laughs), because I do, but, shit, if I didn’t I should retire. I’ll probably never totally nail it, and, in a way, that’s beautiful. And if you ever do nail it, you’re just like "well, cool, now I have to do something better than that!"
There’s just a lot of stuff on there that I just sort of like listening to, because I made the record I wanted to make. Of course I could listen to Holly [Harding Baddour, the singer on "Samsara"] all day long, because she’s gifted. And a lot of the musicians on that record are supremely talented. It’s just a good time.
W: That must be a nice way to have your cake and eat it too – listening to someone else sing one of your songs.
Oh yeah, big time. Exactly. What’s funny about it is "Sixes and Sevens to Me" and "The Uptown Stomp" I wrote for Bette Midler, for crying out loud. She asked me to write songs for her for what was going to be the Bathhouse Betty record, although she didn’t record them. I just kind of cranked ‘em out, and then when it came time to do my record I was like "ah, what the hell!" I didn’t really have too much emotional investment in those songs, but I think I got pretty killer arrangements out of them and they’re pleasing to listen to, although they don’t stand as what I consider to be my best work as a songwriter, because if I wrote something that I though was my best work I couldn’t give it to anybody else. I’d be like "well, I’m just gonna keep this one."
[Samsara] told me something that I probably had already suspected subconsciously: that it was time to move on. That I did have the ability to be responsible for an entire record on my own. And it gave me the guts, I think, to quit the Zippers. Even at the time that I left the band, it could be perceived as a kind of career suicide. I mean, I’d worked for years to establish a brand name with this band and a certain amount of recognition, and thus a certain amount of guaranteed unit sales, and none of that was really important to me, at least when it was compared to what I realized I was onto with this record, which I consider a really good record, and if I were hit by a bus I would be content to let it stand as my last artistic statement, but I only see it as a bare beginning of what I’m up to now.
Listen to an mp3 by Tom Maxwell (from Audiogalaxy.com):
Roll Them Bones
Samsara
Sixes and Sevens to Me
The Uptown Stompinterview used by permission of Audiogalaxy.com
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