HEAVY METAL BE-BOP

#6: BILL LASWELL

[Abridged version hosted by Invisible Oranges; longer cut below.]

You can’t really call Bill Laswell a jazz musician, and it doesn’t make sense to label him “metal” either. But when it comes to the murky territory between these two styles, the bassist-producer is an unavoidable presence.

Last Exit (pictured)—Laswell’s mid-to-late-’80s collaboration with saxist Peter Brötzmann, guitarist Sonny Sharrock and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson—was the definitive noise-jazz band, an improvising quartet that reveled in sweat, volume and ugly machismo. Last Exit weren’t playing metal, but the parallel was clear; Painkiller, a trio with experimental saxophonist John Zorn and Napalm Death drummer Mick Harris, connected the dots with their grindcore-and-dub-fueled free jazz. (In Bladerunner, a later Zorn/Laswell group, Slayer’s Dave Lombardo took over the drum throne.)

Laswell also pursued mutant-metal hybrids with Praxis—whose diverse cast included Parliament-Funkadelic keyboardist Bernie Worrell and Primus/Guns N’ Roses/Godflesh drummer Brain—and Arcana, which paired jazz drum legend Tony Williams with masked guitar fiend Buckethead. On the production side, Laswell has worked with bands ranging from Motörhead (Orgasmatron) and White Zombie (Make Them Die Slowly) to the avant-hardcore power trio Blind Idiot God.

Bill Laswell and I met in Manhattan in June of 2011 to talk about jazz and metal.

When we spoke on the phone prior to this interview and I mentioned the topic of jazz and metal, the first thing you brought up was the Tony Williams Lifetime. What impressed you about that band?

Well, at first the band was a trio. It was Tony, Larry Young and John McLaughlin, and they had all come out of Miles Davis. Miles had just made In a Silent Way, which was really nothing to do with rock, and Tony had the idea that he wanted to make, in his mind, a rock band, but using musicians like Larry Young, who came from a jazz background. My first impression was buying the record, Emergency!, which I bought immediately, probably the day it came out. I was probably 15.

And then within six months, I saw the band play live at the Newport Jazz Festival, and that was when Jack Bruce had joined the band. So that legitimized the concept of it having a rock element. Because even though Jack came from a jazz background, he was in a substantial rock band, Cream, previous to that. And to me, that sealed it, that this was really jazz-rock, because Tony having a background in—I don’t use the word “jazz” too much, but his background was in that genre; Larry Young the same. In that first band, the concept was like an organ trio, where you don’t have a bass but the organ covers it. I think Tony had a lot of experience as a kid playing in that format. But I thought that was the first band that utilized rock elements: distortion, volume, repetition and exaggerated improv, but aggressively done, in a band context, with people who had the skill to be jazz musicians but also had the volume and the distortion and all these elements that would go along with rock. When Jack joined that band, it legitimized it and sealed it.

Lifetime didn’t last very long, because it wasn’t the proper management and it wasn’t the proper production; the recordings were done badly. And it’s unfortunate, because that was the real statement. After that, bands got more and more sophisticated, and what was supposed to be jazz-rock became fusion. Fusion turned into more of a collegiate aesthetic; it was more about virtuosity and slickness. To me, there’s no rock elements in any of those things. Just because a guy puts a little distortion on his guitar doesn’t make it metal. It’s not the same energy that you get from rock musicians. So I thought Lifetime was the one and only band that really captured that concept, when people say jazz-rock.

Did Mahavishnu Orchestra strike you as legitimate, or falling more into that fusion camp?

It was beginning to open up into fusion. I thought the first record, Inner Mounting Flame, was [John McLaughlin’s] best guitar sound, and it was a very clear, thick guitar sound, which you could relate to early Eric Clapton or Leslie West, people that had big sounds. And I thought that was a very good element, and it was a great statement. Again, with Billy Cobham and Jan Hammer and people, it started to really develop what became fusion—to me, nothing to do with rock. A lot to do with funk and fusion, but not so much rock. It was slicker and cleaner. But Inner Mounting Flame is a great statement. I thought after that the sound got thinner, the playing got busier and busier and lost that element of jazz-rock. Then it became fusion.
 
To flash ahead to your collaboration with Tony Williams in Arcana, were you trying to pick up the thread of rock aggression that he had moved away from?

I was pretty sure that he could adapt to most any situation, and for that reason, I experimented with him on records that were rock records, like Public Image Limited; he plays on a song called “Rise”, which was a semi-hit song, with the singer being John Lydon. So that’s Tony Williams, and he’s playing rock music there with Steve Vai, and Johnny Rotten is the singer. It’s got absolutely nothing to do with jazz. I thought with Tony you could do a very heavy rock-oriented type record, and that’s what we were trying to do.

In the early stages, we got very little support from labels, almost none, and to survive, he had to go back to doing his job, which was being a jazz drummer. So he had to stick with that. He also was developing as a [composer], and he was always developing his skills. But he didn’t get the shot to do the rock thing. He tried his own stuff with Ronnie Montrose, who was in Montrose. There’s some elements there that relate to the jazz-rock concept. I’m not sure much of it’s released; there are some demos floating around, and there’s a record that wasn’t released by Columbia, which uses Montrose playing pretty heavy riffs. That’s a good example, but no one’s heard it.

I did a [project] called Arcana. The second one, Arc of the Testimony, with Pharoah and Buckethead and everybody, that’s what I was trying to do, and we never really got the chance to develop it or to do live stuff. And it would have happened. I talked to Tony probably a week before he died, and [his death] was a surprise. It wasn’t like he was sick; it was an operation. But yeah, we never got a chance to develop it, nor did he get the chance to prove that statement. That initial impact of Lifetime to me, that was the initiation of all this. Because when you say “jazz,” that has to bring something as well, and most of the people that dabble with extending the rock format progressively, whether it’s in noise or some punk stuff or the avant-garde, it’s very rarely people that have a very strong jazz background. There are very few jazz players that can actually pull that off. Pat Metheny tries to do noise stuff, but noise is a language; it’s not just something you do when you’re not playing jazz. There’s no school; it’s a natural language.

I’ve read so much about Tony Williams’s encyclopedic approach to jazz drumming, like he would go to his teacher and say, “I can play the solo on ‘Take 5.’ ” Did he approach rock the same way? I had heard that he was into John Bonham and players like that. What was his interest in hard rock?

I’m not sure he studied it the way he would have to study the jazz idiom. And I know he studied the jazz thing, and he knew all about it, and he could play pretty much anything. In terms of rock, I know he liked Keith Moon a lot, because Keith Moon played a lot. If you listen to that stuff, he’s playing quite a bit of drums. I’m positive he must have liked Bonham; I never talked to him about it. I know he liked Hendrix; he liked Cream; he liked Ginger Baker. And Ginger didn’t come from a rock background. He’s alive and to this day, he doesn’t consider himself a rock drummer; he thinks he’s a jazz drummer.

Having worked in more high-volume situations with Painkiller and Last Exit and things like that, did you feel like Tony Williams was really bashing like a rock drummer when you were in the room with him? Because sometimes when the chops are there, the aggression isn’t and vice versa.

Yeah, in his way of doing that. It’s a little different; it’s hard to put into words. But in his way, he was giving that same amount of energy, impact and power. I see that in percussionists like Zakir Hussain. Sometimes, if you say, “This is a rock audience; it’s not an Indian-classical gig,” Zakir tends to play incredibly violent and aggressively, and it translates as the same kind of energy that you get out of what the best rock music should be. The best rock music to me is visceral; it’s not all worked out. People that love the Stooges for that kind of cacophony, they wouldn’t be interested in formatted metal necessarily, or clean punk.

It’s that raw… It’s energy music not so different from the dissonant music of Coltrane. It has that transient communication going on: Random harmonics and just this other orchestra going on outside the actual notes. I think Lifetime had a little bit of that too because of the overdrive of the organ and just the dissonance of the guitar, and the aggression of it. And a lot of times, it’s the malfunctioning aspects of volume that create interest, especially in bands like Blue Cheer or the Stooges, where you might not be totally in tune, and it’s so loud that every harmonic’s being picked up and thrown out, and you get this whole other music going. It’s the really well-tuned and perfectly arranged and perfectly orchestrated things that become complacent, and I think that’s what fusion was, and I think that’s what really clean, formatted metal is.

We’ve touched on the Stooges, and I’ve read that you were into the MC5 growing up in Michigan. What were your other early touchstones in terms of hard rock and punk?

I guess I started hearing the Stooges and MC5, a lot of the Michigan bands. I saw Blue Cheer, which was really loud and really… not dissonant, but there were a lot of transient harmonics and clashes with that kind of volume. And also remember that these are tube amplifiers, and over a period of gigs, tubes start to react. That was also back in the day where the backline wasn’t as together as it is these days, so there wasn’t a guy changing the tubes for every gig. So tubes start to hum and have their own vibration and send out different vibrations as well. You have amps breaking down and a crazy amount of different harmonic information coming out. Some of it’s random; some of it’s planned. And nobody knows which is which. But [I was hearing] those kind of bands, and at the same time hearing [players] from the free-jazz side, which had its own kind of different… If you hear Coltrane’s denser music, like what’s the one with everybody playing all together?

Ascension?

Ascension, I think—yeah. That one and Ornette Coleman had one, Free Jazz. Just piles of horns and people playing pretty much freely. So I got to hear some of that stuff live: Archie Shepp. Live was always the key, I think. I never saw Coltrane or Albert Ayler play live, but I was lucky enough to see some of the others, and I connected that with the rock stuff, as did people like John Sinclair in Ann Arbor, where they’d write books about the connection between the real rock music and the real free music, played by these guys with a jazz background. But you hardly ever refer to it as jazz. I’m sure Miles Davis after the late ’60s would never use that word, and rightfully so; he wasn’t really playing jazz. Coming from that background, he understood phrasing and harmonics, and he had a good sense of how to interpret a melody. And you could say, so did Louis Armstrong, but Miles was taking the foundation somewhere else.

You were mentioning bands like Blue Cheer, which are still in sort of a ’60s hard-rock vein. Do you remember when metal per se came on your radar?

Well, Ted Nugent to me was metal, Mahogany Rush. You hadn’t really gotten to the big riff things yet. Zeppelin kind of brought that. I saw them on their first tour.

What do you remember about that?

Well, Hendrix was the big thing for me, because I was 14 or 15. It was in Detroit, and I saw him twice, two years in a row. It was kind of mythical: Because you’re young, it’s kind of hard to pinpoint and say, “Great gig.” It was out; it was weird. I remember I went with a friend who was a black guitar player, and we sat in the balcony. I think it was Cobo Hall, which is a huge place in Detroit. Hendrix came out and he was tuning up, and my friend yelled at him and said, “Jimi, louder!” And Jimi looked up at the guy and went, “Louder? Alright.” And he went over and looked like he turned up his amps; I’m pretty sure they were already cranked up. And then they started to play. It was not an experience where you say, “Yeah, I went to a gig and I saw music.” It was something else, because at that age, it’s too much.

I saw Cream around that same time. And then later Zeppelin wasn’t really a big name yet. We thought of them as the Yardbirds, and they had just started calling themselves Led Zeppelin and put out their first record. But that hadn’t really blown up yet. It was the Grande Ballroom in Detroit, which was a small theater—probably 1,000 people, maybe less. You’d have to go really early and wait in line, and I remember I got really close. I remember I didn’t like the singing. I wasn’t crazy about the guitar; I thought it was very scratchy in comparison to the more fluid things that I liked, which were Hendrix, and at that time Clapton, Jeff Beck. But I really liked the drums and bass, and that’s kind of stayed with me to this day. If I have to comment on something like Zeppelin, I always say I really like the drums and bass. Even now, I can listen to it and say, “That’s interesting.” It’s a good idea, still.

And with Hendrix, I liked the guitar and the drumming. If you listen to Mitch Mitchell, that’s an example of somebody who’s totally a jazz drummer, obviously influenced by Elvin Jones and Tony, and clearly playing jazz. Again that word, but that’s where he came from. The bass was nonexistent. But Mitch Mitchell clearly was playing progressive drums.

What about Sabbath?

Well, that’s more when you get into the heavy riffs, which I like. But it’s all about the riff, and that’s the beginning, to me, of metal, where you have those monstrous riffs, like “Iron Man.” And then from there, the floodgates open: You have endless generic metal. And very rarely something pops up that’s unique, or song-oriented, whereas those early Black Sabbath [pieces] were songs—a great riff, and then a song came together inside of it. “Sunshine of Your Love”—it’s just a riff. A lot of Zeppelin hits are riffs. Then later on, it got very interesting. It all started with these big riffs. Mountain [was] the same—big riffs.

You mentioned the floodgates opening. What were some of the later touchstones for you in terms of metal progressing?

Well, I don’t know if it was progressing. You were hearing it. AC/DC wasn’t long after that, Motörhead, Def Leppard—that got more pop. It all starts to move in its direction. But you could make a list of 1,000 bands—we know who they are. You forget them as you’re saying it. A lot of them, it’s pretty linear; they don’t say much. Here’s a band, they sound like this; you could probably play two songs and sum up their whole existence, unfortunately. Not in the case of a Cream or a Hendrix or a Zeppelin. I don’t have a lot of good examples of bands that came later that could actually say that. Even Black Sabbath, it’s just down to those few songs, few riffs.

I thought it was interesting when you spoke about noise as a language. I’ve been thinking about aggression and volume as an X factor in an improvisational situation. it seems to me that Last Exit was coming out of something like that. Can you tell me what the concept or the goals for the band were at the outset?

It wasn’t set. The way it happened was, there was some work in Europe, and I had met Peter Brötzmann in New York; we’d done an improv thing, really improv, in a loft, and I knew his background and thought he was interesting. Again, not a virtuoso jazz player at all, just a sound generator. But I liked him, and he said, “Let’s do something in Europe; let’s play.” We had plans to do a short tour, and I think Fred Frith and Anton Fier were the musicians; we were going to do this four-piece band, and it would just be improv. Somehow it didn’t work out for Fred, and Anton was in a rock band at the time, his own band, and out of nowhere—I had been playing with Shannon Jackson and Sonny Sharrock—and I said, “I got an idea; I’ll just bring some people.” And we showed up somewhere in Switzerland; I think that was the first one. And when we played, I just immediately went with the drums, for a more aggressive sound, and it was very shocking to the audience, because we played pretty loud, pretty raggedy and very high-energy.

It was bad news for the groups on those festivals, because everybody was pretty quiet and sort of boring, and this thing came out. We stuck to it for about four years on and off, doing about two or three short tours every year. Never more than two weeks; we’d have killed ourselves. And then we did Japan a little bit, and a couple things here. It lasted for about four years, but not consistently. But it was always fun, and we said when it stopped being interesting, we’d stop doing it, so I guess that’s maybe what happened and everybody went in different directions after that. Sonny Sharrock died not long after, and there were many times people wanted to make a gig and put that quartet back together, but you can’t do it without the guitar.

His record Ask the Ages, it’s not a rock record, but it’s a good example of real playing, using a little bit of the jazz reference and having a slightly bigger sound with the guitar, and the overall band sound. It’s mixed like a rock record.

Right, and that song “Many Mansions” is almost like a doom-metal riff.

Yeah, it’s in there. I play that for kids now that don’t know much else of metal, and they get it. That’s an example of a statement.

And there’s a weight to Elvin Jones’s playing.

There’s always a pulse. Even if he’s playing totally free, somewhere in there, you find this repetition. It’s like African music, almost. I never saw Elvin as a light jazz drummer; it’s more like tribal music. It’s always got that dark pulse.

Milford Graves has that quality too.

Milford can do that too, and he can play very hard and aggressive too.

Yeah, I saw that clip of you playing with Milford Graves, John Zorn and Mick Barr.

Yeah, Mick Barr… it was at Tonic.

Do you have any recollections of that?

I was really sick during those gigs, but I remember people liked them a lot. Me and Milford did a lot of duet stuff too. We did one in London [where I played] eight-string bass, and it was really loud. It was about ten minutes. I don’t think that was recorded, but that was interesting, and he played very aggressively. We did one with Bill Frisell too, where Frisell played more aggressively, and one with Braxton. We kind of layed back more on that, but Milford’s capable of doing stuff like that, and he’s open to it. And he comes from that world: Albert Ayler.

Now you said you were playing with Sonny Sharrock and Ronald Shannon Jackson before Last Exit.

Yeah, because Shannon, we would record stuff and we would do the occasional gig here and there. We were talking about trying to do something like a band, but we hadn’t really been able to do it. Sonny, I had met, and I invited him on some, for lack of a better word, rock gigs, and we played at punk clubs. I had Material; Fred Maher was the drummer. Fred was really young, like 15 or 16 years old, and he wasn’t a virtuoso drummer; he was just banging on the drums. So I used to invite Sonny to play on these things.

And then I met Stu Martin, who was an American drummer with a jazz background who had played a lot in Europe with Barre Phillips and John Surman. And Stu actually played on a Duke Ellington record. And I always thought, Stu’s this incredible… like a real jazz guy, sort of a jazz version of Ginger Baker. And we had this idea to do a trio with me, him and Sonny. I was going to be the foundation, and Sonny could go crazy—they could both go crazy, and I would just create this rock foundation. And Stu died right in the middle of that, and that’s around the time that I started putting Sonny on the rock gigs, the Material thing. And then not long after was when… I think Last Exit was ‘86, so it was a while after. I lost touch with Sonny for a few years; I started to do more production stuff. And then that thing came up with Fred, because I was working with Fred from the beginning. That was nothing to do with jazz—definitely noise. More prog rock mixed with noise. That was Massacre.

You were playing with Philip Wilson around this time too, right?

Philip was in another group called Deadline, which was more funky and bluesy, but jazz-related. We used a lot of horn players: Olu Dara was in that band, Henry Threadgill, Billy Bang. That’s mostly what I did with Philip, and some recordings. Philip came from more of a blues-rock background; he played in the Butterfield Blues Band. He was a real good blues drummer, but it’s not real heavy.

You mentioned prog rock when you were talking about Massacre. Were you into bands like Yes and Rush during that early formative period?

I wasn’t when it came out, because I was more absorbed in getting an idea of how music feels, and phrasing, and I was influenced by people like Duck Dunn and Chuck Rainey. I was listening to, not so much Motown, but Stax and stuff like that, so it was little tough to get interested in Yes and stuff. And then I heard a few things of King Crimson that I thought were really interesting, and then I started to meet people coming from Europe, and when that happened, I didn’t leave behind this idea of low end, like what I was hearing in African music and reggae and Stax and this repetition music, blues and country; I didn’t leave any of that back, but I put some effort into figuring out the European thing.

So Magma, I found out there were amazing bass ideas there, and you hear all kinds of stuff coming off the bass, like Wagner and Bartok, things you would never hear from an American. And then I realized Chris Squire in Yes was playing really interesting stuff and phrasing and complicated things, with an interesting sound, not the sound that I would imagine. I thought the guy in Wishbone Ash had a great sound, and again, I didn’t know much about the the band. But his sound, and the figures he used and the arrangement of things, I thought was really interesting. Later on, King Crimson’s Starless and Bible Black. An incredibly minimal rhythm section, but I thought one of the most overlooked rhythm-section ideas, because to me it was very influential, but very simple. Simple in the way that Bitches Brew is simple; just this one thing, but they did it with a kind of sincerity that translated. Soft Machine, the early stages—I guess you’d say jazz-rock, but with jazz in it, with those elements. Hatfield and the North, bands like that. Henry Cow, then it got more complicated. That’s how I met Fred, because he was coming out of Henry Cow. None of those guys have a jazz background, but they have a big respect for the top people in that world, like Ornette and Coltrane.

So do you feel like Massacre was melding that prog sensibility with punk, in a way?

Yeah, with random energy and aggression and volume. I didn’t have a jazz background, so I can say that whatever Fred was bringing from the avant-garde, progressive music, classical music, I was supplying more of a rock element, a rock element that had began to get an understanding of these other genres, like blues and country, which leads into R&B, which is a whole other world. Then you mutate that back into noise stuff, and you start to get new music out of this.

As we discussed, you had a strong background in hard rock, seeing Hendrix and Zeppelin and things like that. What was the hard rock or metal awareness of the other members of Last Exit?

Someone like Sonny Sharrock, I’m not sure he was super interested in metal, or those kinds of guitar players. But I’d just done a record with Motörhead around the time we started Last Exit. When I went to Sonny, I said, “You know, I’m working with this band, and they use three stacks of amplification for just the guitars. They’re Marshall amps that Hendrix used, and we should try that.” So he started looking into using these big walls of amps, more so than the bands themselves. Sonny’s not going to sit down and listen to Motörhead, but he liked that idea of this wall of amps, and that’s a direct influence of me telling him about Motörhead.

But would he sit down and listen to them? Probably not. I doubt he listened much to Hendrix; I think he listened more to Coltrane, or Miles Davis. Probably not so much to guitar, even. But the others, Peter Brötzmann, was he interested in rock? Probably not at all. Shannon, yeah, because he played blues. To him, Jimmy Reed and Van Halen is probably the same thing.

You talked about how noise and aggression were starting to become factors in something like Lifetime, but Last Exit brought that to a different level. It seemed to be taking things to a level of provocation. Was that something you set out to do?

Something like Lifetime has layers of history and education and virtuosity and training and perspectives that change, and I think with Last Exit, everybody was closer to a rawness. We would’ve reached that much quicker with something like Last Exit, because there’s less things to strip away from it. If you want to get to the heart and the rawness of it, it’s kind of there, and it wasn’t based on any heavy, formatted training and respectful notion of music. Punk is not a bad call on that. If you look at the background of those people, they come from a pretty raw background. Nobody’s pristine and perfect and trying to emulate someone else. It’s more art as opposed to musicality. It’s macho, visceral.

It’s interesting that you mention “macho,” because that also touches on the multimedia aspect of Brötzmann’s aesthetics, both visually and the the titles of his records—Nipples, Balls, etc.—and Sonny’s aesthetics, with songs like “Dick Dogs.” And Shannon obviously has that element. Did you feel like all of that was fueling the music in a conscious way?

Probably, but without verbally talking about it. But you felt that these guys in a minute, they would have a hard time sitting down with Kenny G and being serious. They’d be more likely to be at festivals goofing on people or messing around—grown men acting stupid… you know, ignorant. It’s ignorant, basically, which we didn’t mind. You can’t do it forever, but you have moments. It was kind of a punk attitude for grown men, who should’ve been doing something else. Brötzmann really came out of that whole FMP thing—free jazz, Euro, Germany: Willem Breuker, Han Bennink. Brötzmann’s serious in another way. He was more interested in women and drinking, and the music was the soundtrack to this lifestyle, as it should be. Some people that put the music first just spend their whole life practicing and not living.

It seems like Painkiller was tapping into something similar, but with a whole different set of influences.

Yeah, Painkiller came right after. The last things of Last Exit would’ve been about ‘89, and Painkiller came right in, in ‘90/’91. And that was Zorn. We’d been going to Japan a lot; we’d been buying tons of vinyl of Japanese hardcore. Pretty brutal stuff, mostly pretty badly recorded so you could hardly hear anything. It was just this wall of sound, just noise and people screaming. And it was incredibly energetic and reckless. And by just getting into that more and more, Zorn had a connection with Mick Harris, who was just at that moment coming out of Napalm Death. We liked Napalm Death because in the beginning, it was pretty eccentric: Guys doing 30-second songs and stuff like that. I thought that was interesting, for whatever reason. It seemed like a cool thing to do, so we just started working with Mick.

And again, Mick’s not a virtuoso drummer, not somebody you really talk about rhythms or backgrounds of people with. He was interested in dub and the beginnings of mutant hip-hop when I met him. That didn’t translate in Painkiller; it was still coming out of Napalm. That was Zorn’s call. It was very loud, extremely loud, and we did manage to end up doing short pieces and stuff. Painkiller kind of still exists, but later on with different drummers. The last time we saw Mick was probably two years ago in France, and I think that was with other musicians: Fred Frith or Marc Ribot. We used Tatsuya Yoshida, who was in the Ruins, which was really interesting. Ruins, again, that’s another one. Nothing to do with jazz, but heavily influenced by prog rock and fusion. We used him and a few different drummers: Milford. They were going to get Terry Bozzio at one time, which would’ve been interesting, but his backline and his whole set-up scared everybody off. It’s pretty complicated and serious, but that would’ve been interesting.

With Zorn, you were talking about shopping for hardcore records with him in Japan. When you came together, was there an interest in metal coming from both sides?

Yeah, I think he came into it through the hardcore in Japan; I have a feeling that’s where it started. And then that maybe led him to Napalm Death and that stuff, and I had already had this background in rock, so it’s inevitable that you find all these different variables, hybrid rock things. That’s gonna happen. I think we came to it from different points, but we definitely came to it. I remember distinctly buying tons of vinyl; it was before CDs were fashionable. Just piles of hardcore stuff, which I lost all of. It’s not the kind of thing you would listen to more than once; you just put it on and say, “What are they doing?” None of those bands exist now, that I know of, and they were all pretty young.

And you met Zorn just by being around New York?

We started around the same time, and I would end up in the Village playing in places like CBGBs, wherever you could play. And he’d started doing his strange gigs, like he would do stuff at his house, small places; he would do [gigs] where he would just move objects. He was influenced by Jack Smith, that world, and he gradually built it up to playing in bigger lofts and playing his game pieces, and I got on a couple of those things. We didn’t really play a lot together, just in the game pieces a couple of times.

He would call me to do these things that would be duets. I remember one at Roulette where John Cage came and sat in the front and I played a duet with Fred Frith. That’s the night that I met Brötzmann, was at that gig; I think I played with him also, and we started talking about doing stuff. Years later was when Last Exit started. But Zorn, we were coming at exactly the same time, coming from different places. And it’s still the same. We’re doing duet stuff now, which is good; we’re going to try to do more.

I’m curious about your transition from Last Exit to Painkiller, especially as a bass player, because in Last Exit, you had Shannon always rooting it in these bluesy, backbeat grooves, but in Painkiller, it’s a whole different rhythmic language. What was it like to move from one to the other?

Well, it was a transition. No way it’s the same thing. With Shannon Jackson, he’s addressing rhythms, and you hear something you recall as a country song or blues and you relate to that. That’s not going to happen with Mick Harris. You’re going to get the blast-beat concept, and the quick, fast-as-possible, which is interesting; you have to learn how to adapt to it. I was into it, so it wasn’t a stretch. And I think it was interesting for Zorn, because I would read these reviews that would say, “John Zorn is now playing with real rock musicians.” Because I had just done Motörhead and the Ramones and stuff like that and was interested in rock, clearly, and Mick was in Napalm Death, so Zorn had positioned himself in a real rock context, playing the way he plays. And still in that context, you hear Lee Konitz, or you hear Ornette Coleman, so there’s a jazz element for sure, and also the klezmer and all that stuff. Whatever his cross-referencing language is, you hear it.

Yeah, what I really like about Buried Secrets is there are some tracks where it slows down and what Zorn is playing is really lyrical. It’s a nice contrast.

Yeah, when it was really working, it was about the contrast: this dark, humongous, stupid thing crawling along and then this guy playing something nice on top of it. It did work sometimes, and a lot of times, it was just exhaust, just blowing out—you never know what’s going to happen. There were whole gigs where we didn’t have a clue what happened; it was just like [Imitates static], noise the whole time.

Your playing is so oriented around dub and funk, and so it must be very challenging to play with blast beats. That kind of drumming really has nothing to do with groove.

You have to think differently, and you have to forget that other stuff. In fact, if you bring that in, you’re a little out of context. You have think differently playing with some people. Like Derek Bailey, you couldn’t do that either, and that’s guitar, but you just couldn’t do it. You have to find another world to go into. There’s a few examples like that.

You mentioned that people said that Painkiller was Zorn playing with real rock musicians. And I’ve been thinking about this in terms of Naked City…

Yeah, Naked City was right before that. I had Last Exit at exactly the time he had Naked City; we even did some shows together. I had another band right before Last Exit—I had a band with Blood Ulmer and Shannon, a trio. That was starting to get… It was never going to be heavy rock, but the blues thing was starting to get a little out of control. I remember doing a gig with that band with Naked City somewhere in Europe, and I think we came off pretty heavy. It was more like a nasty blues thing, but it was getting heavier, and Shannon was starting to play more of the heavier stuff.

I think what’s really interesting about something like Naked City is that it’s jazz musicians playing metal, like Joey Baron playing blast beats with traditional drum grip.

Yeah, he can do it, though. See these are guys that can play pretty much anything you put in front of them, and I guess Last Exit is not that at all. There’s nothing in front of them; it’s all just feel, and it’s raw, and in those days, fairly intoxicated, and just out, and fairly ignorant, probably. If you put ignorant in front of someone who can play anything, they write “ignorant”’ and they read it and they play it. Joey and those guys can pretty much playing anything. That was Frisell, Fred Frith played bass, and Wayne Horvitz and Zorn. Sometimes Patton would scream. But that was a really organized, worked-out music—very arranged and calculated. And what Last Exit was doing at the time was completely the opposite.

It just strikes me that there’s a very big difference between, say, Joey Baron doing metal and Mick Harris doing metal.

There is. With Mick, it’s Mick—nothing between you and what he’s telling you. It’s just raw; that’s what it is. And he’s living it; he’s going for it, and he’s ready to kill himself doing it. And this is a guy who didn’t get the chance to practice a lot, so when you play like that, you have to really build up your hands and everything. You can kill yourself playing. And I remember gigs where, if he hadn’t been able to go practice his drums, there would be blood everywhere. It just cuts through your hands if you haven’t built up the callouses.

I wanted to talk about Shannon’s Red Warrior album, which you produced. That one is really pushing toward metal.

Yeah, he was conscious of it then, for sure, and I was working with a guy called Stevie Salas. Stevie had a kind of pseudo-Hendrix, slick thing, and he was signed to Island, but he had this rock sound. The other guy was called Jef Johnson, and he had a little bit of… sort of like what Vernon [Reid] was doing at the time. And I think we just stacked up the guitars and thought, “Let’s try to make a bigger, rockier-sounding [record].” And I worked with Jason Corsaro, and Jason is the one who recorded Tony Thompson on those records like Power Station, where they recorded the drums with this huge room sound and gated it. So everybody got the impression that John Bonham had returned. In fact, Page and Plant went and hired Tony after they heard that record; they said, “This is the closest thing we’ve heard.” And it wasn’t Tony; it was more Jason.

But I think for that record, Shannon was more conscious of that himself. He thought he was making this metal kind of thing. Again, not that he would go back and study metal or anything; he wanted a heavier sound. It’s no different than when Miles Davis started dressing differently and playing simple bass lines. It’s just somebody telling him, “You should do some stuff that could sell,” or “You should do something that’s more rock, or more different.” I think Shannon was feeling that maybe if he didn’t do jazz-related stuff and did stuff that more young people were interested in, something heavier, it might be a breath of fresh air; it might change the climate a little bit. It doesn’t always work like that; in fact, it rarely does. I think it’s healthy. At least you’re not stuck playing the same music your whole life.

Well, if the personality behind it is strong enough, like with Shannon on Red Warrior, then you end up with something’s that’s not really jazz or metal.

No, hopefully people are playing their life, and giving you that experience back. Shannon’s seasoned enough to know how to address that without words. He puts himself into it pretty heavily.

Reviewing your work, I started thinking about the connection between dub and metal. You mentioned that Mick Harris shared those interests, and earlier, Bad Brains had combined those two currents. Then, you worked with Blind Idiot God who drew on those traditions, and obviously, that duality was all over Painkiller. Where does that connection come from?

Well, obviously I got into the whole dub thing early on. Before I got into reggae, I got into dub. Because of my background with rhythm sections, I heard this really minimal, stripped-down music that focused more on bass and drums, so that was immediately interesting to me. I realized also that the size of the bass was unusual, that it was much lower and much bigger and much more out front than it is in, say, R&B, or anything I had heard. So I started transferring that idea into everything I did. So even if it was so-called pop music, I would still have this element. It would be too much for most people. I would always try to drag that into it: the low end and the dub. And to this day, it’s hard to shake that. Anything that I do, that comes along with it.

But I saw it fit well with the darker stuff because it is dark. If a song stands up, the shadow it casts is dub—it’s dark. And the low end is there, and it can be very haunting-sounding. And I think it has a place in darker music, especially on the slower things. Like when Godflesh came out, I thought, “This could be dub.” When you have a drum machine playing double time and the guitar ideas are half time; it sounds like a dub idea to me. Then it turns out that as with punk, a lot of those guys were listening to dub: John Lydon and those guys. And Jah Wobble, who I met later and got to work with, he brought a lot of that into punk. So I thought it was something that fit with the heavier stuff.

And if you think about it, back in the early days of metal, there was no bass; you couldn’t hear any low end at all. Now you hear it on everything, but in the early stuff, the bass could’ve just been another guitar part, almost. That’s changed a lot in the last 20 years.

There’s also a connection between funk and metal. I was checking out that Zillatron record that you worked on with Bootsy Collins, and I know there’s some of that in Parliament.

Yeah, it’s not quite as heavy, but Eddie Hazel was really the rock element in Funkadelic and Parliament. I started working with him too. He was, everyone thought, trying to be sort of a Hendrix guitar player, but he was much more original than that. He liked playing loud and was good at emulating a rock guitarist—he was a rock guitarist. And Bernie Worrell brought in this sort of gothic, weird classical stuff. Bernie could fit into a metal thing in two second: Yngwie Malmsteen, or something. He could do it. He hears it; he could just go and do it. But Funkadelic, they were lucky to have those kind of people. And Bootsy, I always tried to push him to play more distortion, more aggressive, more just playing, as opposed to James Brown stuff, where he’s playing two notes, repetition—to solo and do stuff. He’s hardly playing the instrument now, but I did try a little bit to push him.

And was Bootsy into aggression and noise?

When he got into it, he was. And also Buckethead around that time, and he played loud and aggressive and complicated. And I think that pushed Bootsy to think in that direction a little bit.

This brings me to the Praxis project that some of these people were involved in. I was thinking about the distinction between a musician like Mick Harris, who comes from a straight-ahead metal place, and Buckethead, who has a metal aesthetic, but it’s not the same.

No, it’s warped. It’s like taking Randy Rhoads and putting it through Disneyland, or Paganini, or something. You mix all that up and you get this mutation, like a Buckethead. You can’t come up with that, really; he’d have to be the one to do it. It’s whimsical, and sometimes it’s powerful. When he decides to play and emulate something memorable that he values, it comes out. And Brain is more of an advanced hip-hop drummer than anything else. That’s what he loves; he plays that the best. He does a lot of rock stuff, but I think it’s boring for him. He likes this kind of bounce. When he was in Godflesh, that’s all he was listening to, all day long. That was interesting. I think he’s on the record where they have the statue from Brazil on the cover.

Usually funk when it incorporates metal is normally fairly cheesy, and it’s usually appalling to rock people, I find—and myself. I mean, I can tolerate it; I’ve done it. I’ve dealt with it. But I know what people mean when it’s just cheese-metal over funk stuff; it’s pretty lame. And there’s a lot of that.

Let’s talk about Praxis a little bit. I’ve been checking out Sacrifist a lot, which I really like.

Yeah, that’s one of the nastier ones. I like that one; it’s a little grimier than most of them.                                         

Some of it’s just block riffs over guitar solos, little structures. Sacrifist, I remember, we were right in the middle of starting to deal with screamers. Mick Harris was doing vocals then, and Kevin Sharp from a band called Brutal Truth. He used to come in and go crazy. Eye from the Boredoms sometimes. We were hearing that energy thing.

And Rammellzee was around in that time; I had a bunch of tracks that I made for Rammellzee that I made with chainsaws and we looped them and then we would play on top of them. But I lost the tape; it’s one of the tapes that got away. It was really good, but really nasty. Tear your head off. Really bright. Tons of bottom, but really piercing. That was urgent, a crazy time for energy, that moment. You go through these phases. After that, I went through a long ambient phase; I didn’t touch anything aggressive. There’s a Painkiller record where one disc is all ambient.

Right, Execution Ground.

Exactly. Mick was really into ambient. He was into everything. We were buying the craziest shit, like in Japan: Thomas Köner and stuff, where you put the record on and when it’s over, you think you’re still listening to it. We couldn’t just stay in one place; it was always pretty extreme. Like if you got into the noise thing, you had to get all the way into it; if you got into the ambient, you just had to go all the way.

You mentioned the screaming thing, with Eye…

Zorn used to do it too; he used to scream. Mick was good; he used to stick the whole mic in his mouth and just go berzerk.

And did you check out a lot of death metal, where the vocal style is more guttural?

I did. I like that. I don’t know how they do it for more than five seconds. There were those early bands on Earache, like Entombed or Fudge Tunnel, Bolt Thrower. I wrote liner notes for a Bolt Thrower record in Japan. I had only heard one record [Laughs].

Do you remember what you said about them?

No, I was just making up stuff. It’s in Japanese, so they’re going to write it all wrong anyway! I used to like all those bands. But again, it’s not something you’d listen to over and over again, and you’d put it on now. You’d go through these phases and you’d kind of log it, so that what you retain of it is in your background. It’s not something you’d keep up with. It doesn’t even keep up with itself.

And lately, there was a phase in the last few years, like Earth and Sunn O))) and Boris. I like those bands. I go through phases like that occasionally. And then [these bands] change. Bands like Earth started out big and distorted, and it seems like after the Dead Man soundtrack, everybody decided to go country. That must have had an impact on quite a few bands.

Speaking of Earth, I was listening to that record by Azonic.

Right, Andy Hawkins [from Blind Idiot God].

I hadn’t heard that before. Hearing it now, though, it seems very related to Earth.

It is, yeah. It was a long time ago. I think Earth existed then, though.

Yeah, it was right around the same time. I was just surprised that Azonic is not really known.

It’s not known at all. It’s good, and also, it’s really clear. Andy Hawkins is a nut, a perfectionist for his amplification and the guitar, and we recorded it right. Every detail is there. He’s obsessive. We just did a new one, Blind Idiot God. Half of it’s dub, and half of it’s their version of hardcore. It’s probably the best thing they’ve done. The dub stuff goes a little out, in different directions, but the heavy stuff is their best, i think.

And this is with Tim Wyskida on drums?

I think, yeah. It’s not the original guy. It’s not quite as heavy as Ted Epstein, but the guitar is really heavy.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with Khanate, the band that Tim Wyskida was in.

I know the name. I’ve never heard them.

That’s something I’d be interested in getting your impression of. It seems to take the most extreme, almost ambient parts of Painkiller and stretch them out.

I heard good things about them. I hardly ever listen to anything, but stuff like that, I would hear. Another guy that did volume and heavy stuff with no jazz reference whatsoever was Keiji Haino. We did stuff with Rashied and Tatsuya Nakamura. Nakamura’s really a punk drummer from Japan, and through us, he discovered Miles Davis and stuff. But he really came out of a punk background. Somebody just put out a whole book on him. We did a trio record: me, him and Zorn. And we were kind of conscious of this fusion idea, because he kept mentioning Miles. I think he had just discovered Miles, so we were conscious of that direction. But he thrashes pretty heavily. I did work with him and Otomo Yoshihide, and sometimes Haino, and sometimes all of them together.

Haino is different, because it’s the volume and the aggression, but it’s not metal.

No, you can’t pin down Haino, which is good. You can’t put a word on it: It’s Haino’s stuff. He’s been doing it forever. It’s sort of like Derek Bailey; when you hear it, you say, “Oh, it’s Derek Bailey.” Haino has that. He can play really extremely loud sometimes, and irritating.

Yeah, I saw you with Haino and Rashied at the Stone, and it was really piercing.

Yeah, it kills you. The vocal is what gets you. I think I blew out an eardrum with him once because of the screaming.

You mentioned how Blind Idiot God was playing their own version of hardcore. It’s interesting how in the ’80s, while Last Exit was going on, Black Flag was also testing these regions of noise-jazz or punk-fusion, or however you want to put it.

Yeah, I know some of it. Henry Rollins. I remember when they first came out, and then I lost track of it.

Yeah, their guitar player, Greg Ginn, had this real noise sensibility.

Right, and the bass was moving around more than usual.

Yeah, and the Descendents have that quality too.

I guess I didn’t like that, which is why I didn’t continue. It reminded me of those crazy bands that came out of Ohio: MX-80, where they’d play a bunch of changes and they’re moving all the time. Something about the tone of the bass. You just picture a dorky guy with a pick.

But to get back to Blind Idiot God, their record came out on Black Flag’s label, SST. What did you make of those guys?

Well, I remember Andy had approached a guy that I knew, Roger Trilling, and Roger was friends with a lot of the English guys, like Adrian Sherwood. So Andy approached Roger and said, “We’re doing dub, but we’re also doing metal stuff,” and he said, “Do you know Adrian Sherwood? Because we want him to do the dub stuff.” And then Roger said, “Sure, I’ll call him for you.” And then my name came up, and Roger said, “He’s into dub stuff, but he also does metal.” So it made sense. I met Andy, and I thought they were funny, so we decided to do some stuff. I thought that first record was interesting, but it didn’t have much of a sound. But I understood what they were trying to do.

Andy’s still doing the same thing; he’s obsessive about it. And I guess he gets a little better as he goes; he’s just taking his time. But it’s good, the new stuff. He’s pretty much perfected his sound.

It seems like that band ties into what Massacre was doing, this progressive-punk aesthetic.

It is, but there’s something else [in Blind Idiot God] that’s a little more sophisticated, without boasting. There’s an underlying intelligence. You can’t quite locate it, but there’s something about it that makes it smarter.

Maybe that’s why not a lot of people know of them.

And they never thought that being known was going to matter. They were more interested in getting the right amps and rehearsing the thing so it’s perfect. And they forgot about the whole thing of success, and the audience and money. They just didn’t think about that; their obsession was really the sound and getting their parts right.

What about working with bands like White Zombie?

They weren’t really a band yet. It was just some kids and they were starting; just experiment with stuff and put it out. It wasn’t very memorable and not much to write home about musically. I saw them live and I thought they were interesting. And then later on, I don’t think they ever made a definitive record that meant anything. Later on, Rob Zombie got into the whole movie thing and that’s what made it happen. I remember seeing them live, and I thought it was interesting.

At that point, any band that was making a buzz, I was curious about. I did a Swans record, which came out good, but it wasn’t exactly the right musicians. I liked it when he had Ted Parsons, and the guy he had on this was a little lighter. I liked the band he had on a record called Children of God. I thought that was a great idea; I didn’t think the sound was great, but I thought he had a great concept. I was hoping that when I got to it, it would be that stuff and we would just make a massive record. But when I got there, he had gone in a few different directions.

Yeah, you could relate the early Swans directly to something like Last Exit.

Sure, yeah, I thought so. And I thought Children of God was a step up from that, but he retained all that power. When I got to it, I guess he was being more musical. I was there right at the transition.

Yeah, he’s more in a folk vein now, almost.

Yeah, that was the beginning of it. You could feel a little Bob Dylan, a little Leonard Cohen. They did a Blind Faith song.

I wanted to discuss your work with Motörhead. I actually interviewed Peter Brötzmann recently, and he said that you wanted to put him together with Motörhead.

It’s possible, yeah. I remember Diamanda Galás came to a session of Motörhead in London, which was interesting. Peter never really connected with it; that might not have made any sense. But I might have mentioned it to him

Speaking of Diamanda Galás, I heard a fragment of Last Exit playing with her.

That was the first tour we ever did.

It’s interesting to think about her with respect to these metal vocalists we were discussing. She has a different kind of extremity.

It relates, and she’s got technique. Mike Patton’s like that; he can scream, but he has a lot of technique too. He’s a pretty good volume screamer, and I’m sure she could do that all day long. They have technique. A lot of those guys, like I said, I don’t know how they do it. Some of the lower stuff; it’s amazing.

Did you enjoy producing Motörhead?

It was funny. Again, I was with Jason Corsaro, so we were in our destructive period. We recorded in London, and there was a lot of comedy with the whole thing. We mixed it here, and there was fighting all the time. They even called us back for a second record, and we got into arguments, fighting again.

You were fighting with the band?

Well, Lemmy. But it was more comedy; it wasn’t serious. We were arguing all the time. But they did call us back to do a record; we did two songs on a record called Eat the Rich. I was working for free. There was no budget; the conditions were pretty raggedy, so finally, we just bailed. But looking back, I’d have to say it’s positive. It was funny. It was comic. But they’re a legitimate rock band; they have their fan base and people love them. To me, it’s a little limited, the way they think and what they do, but that’s my problem. They have their own thing, and people love them.

Having worked with everything from Blind Idiot God to White Zombie to Motörhead, were there any other hard rock or metal bands that you spotted that you really wanted to work with but didn’t get the chance to?

Yeah, probably a lot, because those bands were coming up quick. I met with Megadeth, and they were pretty out of it, to be honest. That was maybe at a bad moment. A guy I was working with tried to manage them around that time. I was with Jason, the engineer. We were all just moving kind of quick, and that didn’t happen. I thought that I could’ve done something good with them until I met them and I realized this might not be the moment where everybody’s at the top of their game.

Other bands, rock bands… I always thought that if I had the right system, like a production team, and I kept to my extremes on certain things that I probably could’ve done anything and done a pretty good job, if everybody was clear. I always thought it was kind of pointless to just make another record for a band that had been doing a series of records, but if you could make the one that’s different, even if it’s bad, as long as it’s something unusual. A little different from the normal routine. And most groups like that are not that open; they just want to continue.

But I never really wanted to be a producer; I just wanted to create labels and projects, and travel and do things. I got caught in that thing. Rick Rubin’s a record producer; he has a label and he likes rock music, and they all sit down and listen to whatever it is they listen to, but I’m pretty sure it’s in one genre, and that’s what they do. But I prefer more to do improv projects and create labels, and work in Africa and Asia. It’s more interesting than just getting stuck in this job thing. At this moment, I still work with bands occasionally, if it makes sense for the band and for me, but it’s not really what I value so much. There’s always so much you can learn if you just keep moving in different areas.

I think that the first Arcana album is a great example of doing something different, because you literally can’t hear Tony Williams or Derek Bailey doing anything like that on any other record.

No, it’s a weird record. When we were getting ready to play, I even purposely told this kid at the studio, I said, “Can you go upstairs and get something weird? Like the 8-string bass, something that I can’t play that well?” And that’s what it is; it’s all 8-string bass. It’s hard to play. I just thought it would be too obvious if we did the obvious. And I know what Derek’s going to do, but I thought if me and Tony did something unusually weird, it might be better, and it’s not like we had pressure from the label.

What was the Derek Bailey/Tony Williams chemistry like?

Interesting, funny. We did some gigs with me and Derek and Jack DeJohnette in Europe, and Disk, the DJ. That was interesting.

We were talking about some of the extreme Japanese hardcore, but I was curious what you thought of Masayuki Takayanagi and Kaoru Abe, some of the more noise-oriented Japanese free jazz.

To me, it’s not so different than Merzbow, KK Null; it’s all related. I’m supportive of that stuff. If somebody said, “Do you like it or dislike it?” I’d probably have to say I like it, but if someone says, “Do you want to listen to it all the time?” Probably not. A lot of that stuff, if there’s any criticism of it, it’s that there’s no dynamics. I’ve been to some of those gigs, where the switch goes on and it starts, and there’s just this wall, and it doesn’t move for a hour and then it stops and that’s the gig. You’ve got to be really into it to experience that and be honest about it. But otherwise, I’m supportive of it. It’s not something I’m going to listen to, or probably release anything. But I’m glad that people are doing that.

Japan for me, it’s deeper, because in March, me and Krush played with the Gagaku Orchestra. Gagaku is this music; it’s a hybrid from Korea, Vietnam, China. It was all built in the emperor’s palace, and it was always the music of the emperor only. It’s about 1500 years old, and it was never released outside the palace till after the war, after ‘45. They said, “Okay, now we’ll let it out and people can hear it,” and it’s this incredibly serious orchestra of traditional instruments. No vocals, just instruments. And we did a concert with a serious classical set-up, and it was incredible. We’re going to try to bring it here, to the Japan Society. That kind of stuff, to me, is the future, because it’s just unheard of; it’s impossible. That’s more like it. And this is with a DJ, but it could also be with somebody doing complete noise too, or metal or anything. As long as it works musically, and it did with the DJ.

Last Exit has some of that quality of the impossible, like “What if you presented an improvising group like a heavy-metal band, at that volume and on those kinds of stages?” It’s really a different thing.

We were conscious of it: the attitude, the way it came off. Remember too, we were playing at jazz festivals. So you’d have John Scofield playing, or Horace Silver, and then we’d come up like this monster in the middle of these festivals. It was fun, actually. And they needed to be shaken up a little bit.

What did you find was the attitude of the other musicians on these festivals?

They probably hated it. They hated to see us coming too, because it wasn’t just old jazz fans coming to these kids; there’s kids there too. And when you start playing stuff like that, kids respond to it. So half of the audience would be going crazy, in a good way, and the other half would be the jazz crew and they’d just run out of the place. So you’d always get that controversy, pretty consistently.

Were there people, whether they were fans or musicians, who surprised you with their positive reactions? Did any famous jazz musician ever come up to you and say, “I love Last Exit”?

Sometimes, yeah. Weird people came. I remember playing in London in this big theater, and when the people started coming backstage to say hi to the band—”I liked the gig,” or whatever—I opened the door and it was Iggy Pop, and he came in, and right behind Iggy was Derek Bailey. Sonny Sharrock was saying, “That’s kind of deep. How many gigs would you be doing where you’d have these guys come backstage?” It’s completely different worlds, and Iggy was saying that it reminded him of when they started, when the Stooges had a saxophonist, and I think Iggy was making noise; he wasn’t even singing. They started kind of like that. He related to it a lot.

The record you did with Iggy Pop, Instinct, has a metal quality to it.

Yeah, we were conscious of that too. Steve Jones. They had a couple of riffs that maybe could’ve translated; I don’t know. A lot of that’s got to do with business. But Iggy had a video, and I think he was nominated for a Grammy. I think at that time, he really wanted a big record. It didn’t really matter what happened, as long as it [was big]. But of course, it [wasn’t].

Looking at your discography, I kept thinking about the progression of drummers: Shannon Jackson, Tony Williams, Mick Harris, Dave Lombardo. It’s a pretty heavy selection of players, and all so different.

They just did an article in Bass Player magazine, and they had a sidebar that listed all the drummers. It was pretty accurate, and it’s crazy; I went from Ginger Baker to Yoshida to Milford. And people I had recorded, like Elvin, and played with, like DeJohnette, and then you go to Mick Harris or Brain. Then there’s the African drummers, the reggae drummers; it’s pretty out there. But you know, that’s up to now, so I’ll keep trying.

What do you remember specifically about being onstage with Dave Lombardo? I was checking out Bladerunner, and I was thinking about how Lombardo does bring a metal element to the table, but it’s not the primitive style of Mick Harris. It’s much more refined and musical.

He’s a much more refined drummer. He has serious technique, a technique that’s geared toward that one dimension, that one idea, but it’s serious. You can’t just jump up and do that; it takes a lot of work. And he does it perfectly. Like Reign in Blood—to me, that record is all about the drums. He still does that, but that’s what he does and I don’t think, beyond that, that he knows much about so-called music or anything. Mick is just that raw nerve, but Lombardo is a serious technician when it comes to that. And not everybody can do that, even the really great technical drummers; not everybody can get up and just decide to do that.

I have a guy in Japan, Hideo Yamaki, and he’s the only drummer I’ve found in years who can really immerse himself in almost anything and pull it off: live drum & bass without really doing any research, and super-fast. I’m pretty sure he could nail Lombardo’s stuff. It might take some focus. Feel-oriented, dub stuff, anything.

So Bladerunner was you, Zorn, Lombardo and Fred Frith. Did Fred Frith have any awareness of or interest in metal?

Not so much. I don’t see Fred really fitting into that. Massacre, there were riffs, but they were never conventional rock riffs; they were never blues-rock related. They were always more prog: something in 7 or 5 or 6. It was never just a straight riff, which makes it more like Zappa—that quirky, interesting kind of stuff. But never the heavier stuff.

Another thing I wanted to bring up was metal imagery. It seems like metal-style imagery has been important to your work even when the musical influence wasn’t necessarily there. Even on the Arcana record, the song titles and the art seem to allude to it. Was that a nod to metal?

It is in a way, but it’s more of a nod to just the heaviness of it, and to the fact that that stuff is still semi-defiant, in a way that you’re not trying to join the club; you’re not trying to just complement the way things are done. You’re always rebelling against whatever structure exists that promotes or presents or champions music; you’re always saying, “Fuck off” to that a little bit.

I have this project Method of Defiance, and we clearly use a gothic logo that looks like a metal logo.

That has nothing to do with metal; it’s a good example. And the titles, yeah—the darker titles, I lean more to that, consciously and I’ve spent a lot of time looking for them.

As far as that more macho current in Last Exit, titles like “My Balls/Your Chin,” was that you as well?

That’s Sonny and Brötzmann. And “Die Like a Dog”—they always had death in there somewhere. You keep thinking punk, but obviously those guys were older. It’s like Burroughs, or Bukowski, as opposed to a Walt Whitman or something. It’s just that sensibility. Not necessarily cynical, but borderline.

Black humor, or something.

Yeah. Humor, for sure, and dark a lot of times.

On the Arcana record, there are titles like “Cold Blast.” It just has this ominousness to it, and it fits the music.

Totally conscious of that, and I probably won’t be able to stop it, because it’s not really flowery and ultra-silly, so where do you go? You move more toward the dark side. That’s in there in a lot of things. Just like I was saying I can’t lose the low-end; I can’t lose the dub. I probably can’t lose some of this other information—words. It creates an image, a quick impression that you’re not something else. I don’t know what it is exactly, but it’s clearly not going to be an obvious choice of something on the bright, positive side. It’s never really been political, but in a sense, everything is.

To loop back around to where we started, it’s interesting to think of this idea of a dark image with respect to something like Lifetime. That music had a dark aspect, but it wasn’t being labeled that, or presented in that way.

Well, if you think about it, Emergency! is an aggressive title, and then when you get into the song titles, there’s some silly stuff. But when you get to the second record, which I did a remix of… To me, that kind of almost works. The first one was so badly done.

Yeah, I really like how you extended the tracks.

Yeah, I tried to find more stuff. But if you think about that record, it’s a black record, with no artwork, and it’s called Turn It Over, which is like, “Put it on; take it off.” And then you have to read in a circle on the back, so it’s getting in there a little bit. And it had a serious picture of Tony on the back, looking all tough. So they’re kind of moving that way a little bit, but nothing compared to all this nastiness that comes later.

I really like the idea of doing a remix of that record and reclaiming the aggression of it.

Yeah, that was more like a rescue, because they got dogged on that thing. I have multitrack of the guy—I forget the guy’s name, this idiot that produced it; he was, like, a staff guy—and Tony was dead serious, and they’d play and Tony would say, “How was that?” And the guy was like, “Yeah, whatever.” You can hear him saying this; he did not care. The organ’s completely out of phase; we had to reverse everything, flip it. I put all the guitars back through real amplifiers and re-miked them, bass also. But it was a disaster; they got dogged. And to me, that was the record.

Yeah, Emergency! doesn’t all sound great, but at its best, there’s a real heaviness to it.

it’s getting there. The organ’s so dissonant, and because there’s no bass, at least you can hear all the drums, so you get that energy coming off the drums. McLaughlin I thought was a little tentative, but the sound wasn’t there. It was a jazz thing; it’s an organ trio, a loud organ trio. But when they got to Turn It Over… And live, it was impressive; it was pretty loud. They were using real amplification.

So is that a fantasy of yours, to be able to go back and record Lifetime?

It’d be great if we could’ve done it. And then they needed some management; they needed the right label. They were on the wrong label. That’s when Al Kooper was the A&R guy for Columbia, and he went out and signed everybody: He signed Zawinul and Weather Report; he signed McLaughlin; DeJohnette had a band called Compost. Everybody got signed; the only band that didn’t get signed was the best band, and I don’t know why. They played at the Vanguard and everyone went to that gig. Al Kooper went and that was the gig he judged the band on. The reviews were incredible; everybody said it was amazing. That was just the trio. And he didn’t sign them, and nobody knows why. ‘Cause Columbia was doing everything: Mahavishnu, Weather Report. He signed Ornette and they did two crazy records: Science Fiction and Skies of America, an orchestral record. That shit is insane. They signed everybody, but not Tony, and Tony got stuck with Polydor, which was not the right place to be. Tony was insanely bitter about that, rightfully.

Do think that bitterness, or wanting to get his due as a rock player, was fueling the Arcana project?

I think he always felt with me that there’s a reminder that he’s going to do this rock thing somehow. It’s going to get to a bigger audience. I remember once going to the Village Vanguard with these maniacs from L.A.: Tony Meilandt, and a guy who ran a club—I can’t remember his name–and Brötzmann. Anyway, in the Vanguard, when people come into the club—at least that was in the ’80s—you come down the stairs into this room, and if you’re onstage, you can see who’s coming in, and Tony was playing, and he clearly saw me bringing these maniacs into the jazz club, and immediately, the music shifted, and he went from light jazz to just drowning out the band for the rest of the set. The instant I came in, it changed to this rock thing, and he figured I was going to come and say, “I got this thing…”

I made a big proposal with Bruce Lundvall once; I went with Tony and we put together this weird band we wanted to develop, and it was with Jeff Beck. It was crazy: Wally Badarou, and people like that. Laurie Anderson was involved. Of course Bruce was like, “I’d love to hear a demo,” and we were like, “Fuck off,” and that was that. It never happened. I did send Tony to play with Jeff Beck, though, and it didn’t work. I missed the thing by one day; I was a day behind him, and he flew to London and they played. Then he came back and said it didn’t work. I mean, Jeff Beck’s obviously not the brightest guy in the world, but I thought it would be interesting musically at the time. This would’ve been late ’80s.

So you think that in a way, Tony Williams associated rock with “making it”?

Maybe just getting respect from people that wouldn’t necessarily know who he was. Something bigger than just this jazz. You know, in that world, people say, “You’re incredible; you’re a genius,” and then you can’t pay your rent. It happens, and people get tired of hearing that shit, and they get tired of that reality. They want to make it better. And he liked heavy music; it’s not like he was faking it.

The Allan Holdsworth version of the band was heavy too.

Pretty heavy. I saw that band live, and Holdsworth comes also from—not necessarily jazz, though he could probably do that. He had his moments with rock music; he had a good sound. I saw them live, and he wasn’t a bad choice. He played solid. I didn’t get the keyboard, but Tony played a lot in that band. Those guy would just play a structure and he was the soloist. That was a really good idea. They did two records, and the third one is the one where he tried the Montrose thing. One came out, The Joy of Flying, where he was experimenting. I think Cecil Taylor plays on one song.

There’s also some really strange stuff I’ve seen from the ’80s where he’s playing with Jan Hammer and the keyboardist from Dream Theater. Very slick, keyboard-oriented stuff.

Yeah, anything’s possible. I didn’t listen to some of the later things. I know he did the jazz [records] and he did the gigs to keep the chops up, just physically working. [The rock thing] never happened.

I found an interesting quote by you from a 1994 Wire interview:

“I was kinda stressing that I didn’t think it was possible for me to be interested in music that people played anymore. That if five people came into a room, knowing their influences, knowing their backgrounds, knowing maybe what they had for dinner, it’s not interesting. It’s been done a million times. I thought maybe if you change that even slightly, then I would be interested, whether by processing it, whether it was by killing one of the guys while they were playing. Anything, but just make it different. Find another way to determine a creation of something.”

We were talking about how Last Exit was such an unhinged band, and Iron Path, the studio record, is obviously a very different thing. Are you happy with (A) the overall documentation of Last Exit and (B) that record?

I think with Last Exit, you’d have to be unhappy about all of it, in terms of documentation. There’s just live recordings and then there’s a studio record, but the studio record is just forced application of the potentials that were there; we just did it to make a studio record. We weren’t prepared to make a studio record, and we probably weren’t prepared to do those live records. But I don’t know how you could document something like that. It was more of a feeling, and an exchange that’s personal. Most of it, we did it for ourselves, and if people liked it, that was cool, and if they didn’t, that was cool also. I honestly remember not caring at all, which is maybe what translates, in terms of energy, that you’re not begging for acceptance. You’re not caring what people think. There was a lot of bad response to that, as there would be with something like that; it’s out of context no matter where you put it, especially if you put it in the middle of a jazz festival. And we played some pretty big ones, respectable jazz festivals.

It seemed to always work better when there were kids around, or a younger audience—just psycho energy. I remember a lot of punks, or punk-looking people would come, in Berlin especially. We’d get that weird crowd with the mohawks and the leather. I thought that translated a lot better than… With the jazz people, it didn’t make any sense. If anything, we were a good detonator to take away the encouragement of these complacent festivals. And if you go now, they’re a little different: You get world music, or a DJ playing crazy stuff. It’s not just the same shit all the time. In those days, it was a lot stiffer. So maybe something like Last Exit is good for loosening the foundation of those things; it shakes things up a little bit.

Yeah, it seems like a similar kind of energy was going on in Painkiller, but the documents are better.

Yeah, because you have Zorn there, who’s conscious of doing that. He had a label. He was, again, a lot more together; we weren’t necessarily together. We were making very little money, too, and it was really my fault because I didn’t realize you could make money doing this kind of stuff. I was making money doing other stuff, and it didn’t matter to me. Last Exit was like a vacation, and I would never come back with any money. We were going for smaller numbers. I didn’t even realize that we could make any money. Now looking back, I realize we should’ve charged more money for Last Exit. We would never do more than, like, ten days, because at the end, everybody was just falling apart.

I think that’s about it. Thanks for taking the time. This is a pretty open-ended project; I’m just trying to find anyone I can think of who’s had contact with both of these worlds.

Yeah, yeah. Again, I’m less of a jazz person. I’ve had a lot of experience with jazz people, but I don’t come from jazz. I know less about it probably every year, but I have had the opportunity to work with a lot of these guys. And I do remember the beginnings [of the jazz/metal crossover], and to me, like I said, Lifetime was it. The rest of it, the fusion thing, made no sense. And rock people don’t have much of a jazz sensibility, so it’s a fine line. Our thing is more in the hardcore, the noise, the avant-garde, and again, the dub in the background, with the repetition of country and R&B and blues, which you can’t put into to hardcore. Like you said, how do you go from Shannon Jackson playing Texas music to Mick Harris playing blast beats? You have to leave some stuff at the door.