Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

Veteran journalist, lyricist, novelist, humorist, essayist, columnist,
editor, music historian, and record producer Bruce Pollock is the author of
eight books on music, including Working Musicians, The Rock Song Index,
Hipper Than Our Kids, When Rock Was Young, When the Music Mattered,  and In
Their Own Words, as well as three novels. He is the founding co-Editor in
Chief of GUITAR: For The Practicing Musician and was the editor of 17 Volumes
of Popular Music: An Annotated Index of American Popular Songs (1983-1999).
He is currently a record producer in New York City.

"WORKING MUSICIANS: Riffs on Craft from 112 Journeymen, Sideman & Superstars"
contains over a hundred interviews spanning thirty years. "I see it as a kind
of 6-cd boxed set compilation of my career as a rock and roll interviewer,"
Pollock notes. "I have tried to highlight those moments when it seemed the
musicians were moving beyond their usual PR-speak into some revealing truth
about whatever aspect of their craft they were discussing. As an interviewer,
you always know when these moments are occurring, when you're no longer doing
an interview, but instead are having a conversation. My template, in that
regard, was Studs Terkel's landmark book 'Working.'

"The musicians included here cover a wide variety of instruments, genres and
levels of success," Pollock adds. "In setting up the book I have paid special
attention to the segues, trying to emphasize the similarities of experience
that unite all musicians into a community."

"I guess for the purpose of this interview it might be appropriate to call me
a hardly-working musician," jokes interviewer Gary Lambert.  "Although I've
been a guitarist and bassist for more than 30 years, much of my professional
life has been occupied in working behind the scenes in the music biz: helping
to promote and produce shows for Bill Graham Presents in the '80s and early
'90s; working since 1991 for Grateful Dead Productions (and writing and
editing the Dead's official newsletter, the Grateful Dead Almanac since '93);
and, since 1998, co-managing one of the greatest bands on the planet, the one
and only NRBQ (while continuing my chores for the Dead)."
  

    
I've finally made it to this page and boy am I happy to be here.
  

    
Welcome, Bruce!
  

    

Great to have you here, Bruce. Make yourself at home!

As an incorrigible music-business lifer myself, I am quite enthralled
with your book, and find that the stories told by your 100-plus expert
witnesses ring a lot of familiar bells in me -- there's a sense of
kinship and community between musicians that you manage to convey quite
beautifully, even though the speakers here come from a widely disparate
range of musical genres, degrees of renown and economic circumstances.
The tedium and frustrations of the musician's job is given no less
weight than the moments of glory and transcendence, and in this sense,
the book has a kind of universality of outlook that should appeal to
anyone who has ever worked at any job, not just to music geeks like me.
I was delighted to see your reference to Studs Terkel's "Working" in
your introductory remarks -- not only is it a book that I have long
cherished, but it is one that I thought of immediately when I started
leafing through "Working Musicians" -- so much so that I went out and
bought myself a brand new copy of the Terkel book in part of my
preparation for our little online shmooze. And as I thought they would,
the books have a lot in common -- they both paint compelling portraits,
full of hard-earned insights, of the working life, whether the workers
in question are coal miners, CEOs or rock stars.

But to get back to the kind of work you depict in your book: I guess a
good place to open the questioning would be to ask you about the genesis
of this project: just what inspired you to take it on, and the process
you used to distill three decades of dialogues with musicians into the
small gems of insight and epiphany to be found in the pages in "Working
Musicians." And I can't think of a better takeoff point than the very
first line of your introduction to the book:

"It all started the day I saw Jerry Garcia in a laundromat in Santa Fe,
New Mexico."
  

    
     Thanks for the wonderful critique, Gary. This book is obviously a
labor of love, on my part as well as on the part of the subjects I
talked to. In some sense, I've been putting together the book for the
length of my writing/interviewing career, as a few of the pieces date
back to the mid-70s. A handful of them emanate from the magazine I
co-founded and edited, GUITAR For the Practicing Musician (now
defunct). It was there that I developed an interviewing style that
allowed the musicians to speak at length about particular aspects of
their craft; ie. performing, songwriting, in the studio, etc. Not only
were these nuggets more filling than the usual gossip of the fan
magazines (while at the same time being less tedious than the technical
jargon of the trade magazines), but they were usually the times when
the interviews really took off and the subjects opened up. I could talk
to Neil Peart on songwriting for an hour, and really learn what he was
all about as an artist. Then it became a process of finding those
moments in interviews I'd done and carving them out of longer pieces.
About 50 of the interviews are brand new.
    As far as the Jerry Garcia reference (he was dead four years at
the time), that actually led to a novel I never did finish, to be
entitled Channeling Dead Rock Stars. I invented for the main character
of that book "the oldest continuously publishing rock journalist in
America" two previous books, one called Working Musicians. When I
abandoned the novel, I decided to put together Working Musicians
myself. Now I'm working on the other one.
  

    

I was at RECORD when you started Guitar for the Practicing Musician.  Al-
though you were "competition," I always appreciated your approach.  This is
how I've always done music journalism, and my book "Conversations with the
Dead" is all full-length interviews with musicians talking about how they
make music.

So: great work!

I'm gonna start posting great quotes from your text, which is just bursting
with 'em.
  

    
Conversations with the Dead sounds eerily like my aborted novel
Channeling Dead Rock Stars.
  

    
Heh.
  

    

Re #4: Here's an interesting extra-curricular question: who *is* the
oldest continuously-publishing rock journalist in America, anyway?
Christgau is a good possibility, I suppose... or Paul Williams, even
though the "continuously publishing" part may need an asterisk there...

But putting that aside... I'm intrigued by this, a couple of posts north
of that:

>...I developed an interviewing style that allowed the musicians to
>speak at length about particular aspects of their craft

I was wondering if you could elaborate on the nature of that
interviewing style a bit, because whatever you're doing, it works! One
of the distinguishing characteristics of the book is the fullness and
thoughtful nature of so many of the responses. Indeed, they stand so
well as statements in their own right that you were able to abandon a
standard Q&A interview format for the book, removing your own voice
entirely save for the introductory material. Were there certain
questions or subjects that you found particularly effective in getting
these musicians to speak in such an expansive, unguarded fashion?
  

    
I have enjoyed it from a history perspective.  It is always a good read when
you get away from the star aspect and discuss the real life aspect of a
musicians life.

I have played guitar for over 30 years and I always wonder what my life
would have been like if I hit the music road rather than going to college
all those many years ago.
  

    
Gary,
  Actually, I think I have an answer (maybe not THE answer) to the
first part of your question. At least, when I came up with the idea of
the character for the book, the person I was thinking of was some lady
who wrote for a newspaper in Cleveland; I don't remember her name. It
might have been Jane. Maybe somebody does. She had covered rock from
the days of Alan Freed all the way through Heavy Metal, Sludge, New
Wave, Old Wave, Grunge, and whatever came after that.

     As far as my own interviewing technique goes, I think setting up
an interview totally on one topic is the best strategy. You come up
with dozens of questions about playing live, for instance, or just
about rehearsing. This frees you from having to cover many different
areas on a surface level and allows you to go very deep. It's also
almost impossible for the subject to come up with his usual scripted
responses--almost. 
     Since musicians care most deeply about playing music, they are
usually able to get very detailed about it. Then,I collect all these
details at the end of an hour and throw them into the computer and try
to reassemble the comments into a kind of personal statement, so it
reads like a hip commencement address. 
      In a context like that, I think inserting my own questions would
just break the flow. Sometimes in a Q&A interview, there simply is no
flow. Often the interviewer is just trying to show how well informed he
is, or clever, or somehow, as spaced out as the subject.  
Questions come and go, without adding up to anything.
  

    
Dan,
   What I think would be really interesting is if you could get an in
depth interview with a superstar about the "superstar" experience. But
usually these people are so surrounded by managers and publicists and
so concerned with maintaining their image and their status, that an
honest, detailed conversation is probably beyond their ability...and
certainly their desires.
  

    
Oh, I so agree.
  

    
Hi.  I've read about two-thirds of the book, and one thing I would have 
liked to see is the date of the interview.  THey seem to span a fairly 
wide period of time - I'm guessing at elast some of the interviews are 
from the mid to late 1980s or very early 90s, while others are more 
recent.

I really liked the comment by one of the interviewees who learned they had 
to get the satisfaction from doing the music, rather than from record 
sales, etc.  It sounds naive, simplostic, or maybe just obvious, but I 
think it's a really important point that's often overlooked.
  

    
I thoroughly enjoyed this book.  I am usually reading about a
half-dozen or so at once, so I appreciated the format.  I liked that I
could put it down at the end of a chapter, and not have to worry about
any difficulty in getting back into it.  But these were more than sound
bytes.  With very few exceptions, I was intrigued with every musician
in the book.  Even the ones whose work I don't appreciate.

Your interviewing style has already been discussed, so I will just try
and put a new twist on that.  The impression that I got was that you
let each person talk about what *they* wanted to talk about.  I don't
know if that's what you did, but as the reader, I got the feeling that
they were all a bit jazzed about passing on whatever it was that they
were saying.  I have seen and read many interviews where it was obvious
to me that the subject was answering questions that they either didn't
want to answer, or had no interest in.  That usually makes for a less
than enjoyable reading. People light up when they talk about what's
important to them.  It appears that you let them do just that.

I too also enjoyed the variety of subjects; their musical style, age,
experience, level of success, etc.  I doubt anyone would get through
this book and not find quite a few comments and people that they could
relate to.  I started dog-earing the pages where I wanted to come back
and re-read certain comments that I thought were particularly
insightful, or related to my personal experience.  When I was done, I
had dog-eared most of the book.

If I had a criticism, it would be that there was no interview with Ian
Anderson (sigh) and I think dates on the interviews would have
benefitted me as well.

I've already recommended it to others, and will continue to do so.

Thanks for the opportunity to participate.
  

    
It is interesting how this topic already seems like a literary version
of the Henry Diltz topic (ie. your approach to 'allowing' the musician
to reveal themselves.) 

I'm with Kurt regarding  the wish for understanding the timeframe in
which the interview occurred.  

Another thing I wished for was a bit more objective bio information on
each artist.  I often couldn't tell if I didn't recognize an artist
because I live a far too cloistered life, or if the performer was
simply a regional musician who I would never have heard about anyway. 
It isn't their relative 'fame' I cared about - more a context in which
to read the interview. Milt Jacoby, for instance, is an example where
you provided just enough distinction for me.  Lita Ford, on the other
hand, was an example where I struggled to identify a context for the
interview.  

 That said, interviews like Brenda Kahn's gave a wonderful glimpse
into a particular life of a musician. "If you want to get money, then
you have to be a business person.  If you want to get famous, that's a
whole industry networking game.  But if you want to be a musician, you
get to play music."
  

    
Ohhhh, Lita Ford....  Had a few posters of her in my
adolescence...hmmmmmmm...where was I?  Oh yea.  I agree that some
context would have been helpful.  I know I am cloistered musically, so
even a few lines containing more details would have been good.  But
still, a monor quibble.
  

    
tftp Jim!

Yes it is minor, or monor, whatever.

So who is Lita Ford?
  

    
sorry 'bout the spelling.

What does 'tftp' mean?  Pardon my ignorance

Lita Ford was a guitarist in a manufactured girl group called The
Runaways in the late 70's, early 80's.  The band also featured Joan
Jett.  She went on to a heavy metal career in th eighties, mostly know
for a duet with Ozzy called "If I close My Eyes Forever"  or something
like that.  I liked her older stuff though.  She is a more than
competent guitarist, with a decent voice, and looked mighty good to my
catholic schoolboy eyes in all that black leather.
  

    
thanks for the pseud?  Is that it?  I LOVE a mystery!
  

    
Ok, no wonder she never hit my radar.

And yes, tftp = thanks for the pseud. Mystery solved. Spelling errors
are a great source of pseud material.  Keep 'em coming.
  

    
That is a very deep well in my case.
  

    
  Good morning everyone. Sorry for missing so much of this chat by
sleeping through the night. I would like to address the two main issues
that have come up, the lack of dates on the interviews and the lack of
sufficient biographical information. 
    The truth is, whether the devices work or not, those were both
intentional decisions. My aim was to make all the pieces in the book as
timeless and as universal as possible. I was hoping that the
statements would not be tied into a specific musical period, album
release, hairstyle or attitude. 
    In some cases it was impossible to remove timely references, but
still, when Paul Simon talks about Graceland, the idea was that if he
was talking a day after making it or ten years after making it, the
truth of the comment wouldn't be altered.
    When I first talked to Randy Newman about writer's block, he was
hilarious and eloquent. Now, that was in 1975. He's won at least one
Oscar and one Grammy since then. He's no longer making albums with the
same deadlines as he had for WB in the 70s. But I would hope that the
essence of what he feels about writer's block is still true. Randy, if
you're reading this, drop me a line.
    As far as identifying information, that was a tough choice. With
112 interviews, I certainly could have added 112 pages to the book. My
feeling was all or nothing. A paragraph or a page about Bruce
Springsteen you can find in any rock reference book. I decided to go
with "Rock Performer" and let his words do the identifying.
    If you're talking about Milt Jacoby, for instance, who has been
playing weddings and Bar Mitzvahs in my area for 30 years, what can you
put in a bio that would make him known to people in Kansas City?
I think when you start to hear him talk, he soon becomes Every Wedding
Band guy, which is the point.
 
  

    
Sorry Bruce, I guess I wasn't clear - I brought up Milt as an example
of an instance in which I thought your bio info was exactly on the mark
and entirely adequate. 
  

    
Well, they weren't reall the "two main issues".  They were the only
two suggestions.  I think the main issue was that it was a very good
book.
I do, however, appreciate you explaining the reasons for your
decisions.  
  

    

Well, my questions for the morning have been answered already.

The Henry Diltz interview <chrys> referred to is <inkwell.vue.163>, just a
click away.


Off-WELL readers who would like to askk a question or make a comment are
invited to send email to inkwell-hosts@well.com -- we'll post it here.