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What are you singing on Harborcoat?
Oh, you want the actual background backing lyrics. Well the thing is, they change all the time. When we started doing that song again after the mid 80’s, I probably sing different things. I sing “Laocoon is host”, which is some mythological person Michael used to sing about. Laocoon. I say “the library hollowed” or “hallowed”. “Hollowed”. I say “the library hollowed”. And then, honestly, I just make stuff up the rest of the time.
What about the chorus?
The chorus is, uh… I think I sing “please find my harborcoat, wear my harborcoat”.
Would you know what Bill sings?
He sings something about harborcoat, then he sings “harborcoat is long”. And then there I do sing “you’ll have done no wrong” at some point in the second verse and third verse. But really I’m just sort of winging it most of the time.
What about Hyena?
Hyena is a lot of the same thing. What I sang on the album I didn’t really like that much. It’s just what we had for the album. I actually sing… It has nothing to do with the song. That’s the thing. I think I sing “I see you holding hands and going off across the room, and I know what you’re doing there, don’t you?” So it really has nothing to do with what Michael’s singing. We quit doing Hyena a long time ago. I don’t honestly remember what I sang in the verses of Hyena.
How about the chorus of Just A Touch.
“Kevin heard it on the radio”
But you sing something different…
No…no, I sing the same thing. “Kevin heard it on the radio, we’re gone, word of mouth, Carla read it in the news”
You sing the same thing as he does?
Yep. Probably at a different rhythm. And you know, again, what I sang on the record, I don’t know. It was so long ago…Michael made suggestions for the words to sing, and then I sort of took those and morphed them into whatever felt right to me. So whatever I sang on the record, probably didn’t last very long once we started doing it live.
What about Pretty Persuasion?
The first line…it’s just syllables. It’s just vowel sounds. “Here’s one”…and something… And the next one is “a reading write”. Honestly, I’m not even singing words. I’m singing vowel sounds like, it’s almost like “for has been gone” but I’m not really even singing words.
Are there any words in the chanting part in Animal?
Animal. God, Animal. Geez. You’re really catching me by surprise. Man I’d have to hear it. I’d have to listen to it. I don’t even remember.
What about Departure, during the bridge, when Michael is singing “go, go, go, go”?
How does the chorus go again? I can’t think of it right now. I can’t picture it in my head.
How about Moral Kiosk?
Oh God. I haven’t sung that song since 1985. I don’t know that I sing on that. That’s all Michael. I do something else, but honestly I haven’t even thought about that in 25 years, so I honestly don’t know.
On the Olympia live album for West Of The Fields, Michael says “I looked up the lyrics and someone wrote ‘the animals, how strange, try, try to stick it in’, and never in my drug addled youth did I ever write that”. But he didn’t tell us what he did write.
It sounds to me like he’s singing “the animals are strange”. What he sings after that, I don’t know. Because you gotta remember a lot of this stuff we were doing back then, there aren’t necessarily words for it. We sang the vowels and consonants that sounded good, especially in a lot of the backup stuff. My lyrics, whatever I was singing, was not as important as the melodies that I was singing, and whatever counterpoint I was offering to Michael. Yeah, I mean, I would have to go back and listen to that stuff to give you any better answer.
How about some non-lyric questions?
Okay.
In the book Fiction, there was a picture of you and Michael kissing, and according to the text underneath, it said when you play “Why Not Smile”, Michael interrupts the song and you share a dramatic kiss.
No, no, no. It’s at the end of the song. We always used to give each other a little kiss.
Any story behind that?
No. It’s us up there without Peter. And it’s just us and the audience, and it was a very personal moment between Michael and myself without any of the other band there. So it was just a little kiss just to share the moment. That’s all.
Since Chronic Town didn’t have a deluxe release in its proper staging…they came out with Murmurs with a bonus disc first, I’m assuming it will come out with Dead Letter Office as a rerelease and maybe bonus tracks.
No idea.
You’re far removed from that?
As far as I know, there are no discussions currently to release either Dead Letter Office or Chronic Town.
Because you came out with a live disc for Murmur, and a live disc for Reckoning, and now you’re doing demos for Fables and demos for Lifes Rich Pageant. I’m just wondering, are you going to release the demos for Chronic Town? The RCA demos?
I doubt Dead Letter Office will be rereleased at all. I highly doubt it. The only albums that will be rereleased are studio albums. Dead Letter Office doesn’t qualify.
You have DVD-A of everything back to Document but nothing before that. Was that a rights issue?
You mean recently that’s been done?
It was about 4 or 5 years ago. It was the dual disc. It had DVD audio on one side and CD audio on the other. And it was 5.1 surround sound.
I don’t know why we didn’t go any further. I don’t think it was a rights issue because those are I.R.S. records as well as the ones before that. No, I don’t have an answer for you.
Accelerate was the other one I really wanted, and you did everything up until Around the Sun. But you didn’t do a DVD audio release for Accelerate.
Maybe there just aren’t enough good video that we want to put out on it.
Well, I mean, just for the high resolution audio.
Oh, I see. I don’t have an answer for you. I do not know. That’s something between management and the record company.
I have heard a rumor that one of the reasons Peter Holesapple stopped working with you is that he claimed he co-wrote Low, and there was a dispute over that, and that’s why you guys don’t work together anymore. Is there any truth to that?
Peter Holesapple is a dear friend and a very accomplished musician, and anything that may or may not have happened then is water under the bridge. And I love Peter and I’m happy to see him and I’ve played with him since then and I look forward to doing it again. But, you know, things run their course. You can’t work with the same people all the time.
Speaking of things running their course, is there water under the bridge for Jefferson?
That’s something I can’t address. I’m legally bound not to address that.
I just mean, are you at least on speaking terms with him?
No.
Harborcoat is in Eb on the record.
We move stuff…we move songs up or down from their original key just so that you don’t have too many songs that are in exactly the same key. I mean it’s recorded in D, but it’s…
It’s recorded in D?
Well, or is it in C?
I thought it was E?
Harborcoat? It may be. I don’t remember. You gotta remember, before the Dublin shows, we hadn’t played most of those songs in 20 years. Whatever key it was recorded in is not more than a half step away from what you hear on the record, because sometimes…it’s just an old studio trick. If you have two or three songs in the same key, in the same order, you’d move one of them down or up slightly.
I would have thought it was to deal with vocals.
No, it has nothing to do…we don’t record in weird keys. We record in whatever key it’s written in. Sometimes when you, like I said, it’s just to reduce three or four songs in a row in the same key.
Now I know that Fables was a very difficult album to get through, recording-wise. Just a depressing atmosphere… What other albums were really difficult to record?
Oh, you know it’s no fun to talk about albums in a negative way. I mean, every album has it’s difficult moments. That’s just the nature of it. You’re going to run into some point where somebody doesn’t want something that somebody else wants or vice versa. Or somebody’s in a bad mood or somebody’s not feeling well. You know…There are down moments to every record but I don’t want to…I don’t want people to be viewing a particular record in a negative light because I say we had a tough time doing it. And given all that, you know, I love Fables. It was a tough time because everybody in the band was in a weird place, we were in a bad…not real comfortable studio in very chilly London, so just those factors made that difficult. That’s really the only record where that’s been the case.
Man-Sized Wreath. There’s a really obvious bass drop out during the beginning of the third verse.
Seems like there is. I think I liked it and made them keep it in there.
Are there any other mistakes that, when you hear them, you’re like “I should have corrected that”. Fans will listen to it and think it’s deliberate. Are there any things that you listen to now and when it comes up, you’re like “it’s out of tune” or…
Probably, but I don’t really listen to my stuff for pleasure, so I can’t. And I’m certainly not going to remember a litany of mistakes…
Well, when you were doing the Dublin shows and you were playing all of these old songs, did you have to listen to the albums and play along with them to relearn them?
Oh yeah. There were several songs that we had to listen to and relearn. Like I said, it’s been 20, 25 years since a lot of those have been played.
Did any of it creep up on you as though, “I remember this should have done differently”?
Oh gosh, almost certainly. You know, I’d have to look at a list of songs. Nothing pops into my mind.
Like Rockville? Mitch Easter has said that Rockville should have been…it wasn’t fully realized. In his words.
Oh, I don’t know. We did Rockville almost as a total joke. It was done for fun. We used to play Rockville like a punk song, super fast. We countrified it just because, I think, Bertis loved it, our manager Bertis loved it so much that we decided to do it that way just as sort of a gift to him. And then I think we liked it so much that it stayed on the record. I don’t even know that it was intended to be on the record. But I’m happy with the way it is. I mean, when we play it now, we tend to do it faster than on the record but not as fast as we used to play it.
According to a book by Tim Abbott, the studio version of Romance that was recorded along with the other songs for Murmur, has never seen the light of day, on any bootleg.
A version of Romance? Is there one on an album?
There’s one on Eponymous. But according to the notes in the book, that version that you recorded at Reflection studios has never seen the light of day.
Huh. There are a lot of versions of old songs…there are a couple things floating around that have never been officially released.
What about the fans that would love to hear the studio version of Staring Down The Barrel Of A Middle Distance or Fascinating?
They’ll probably come out somewhere. I mean, we have a lot of songs around that could come out as a b-side or on a soundtrack or a box set. I have to go do a sound check now.
Thank you so much.
You’re welcome.
After the sound check, Mike, Scott, Steve and Linda went off to Como’s on 9 and Woodward for dinner, but I did ask a couple more questions that I remember but didn’t have recorded. I asked Mike what was the most difficult song for him to play, which he responded “Harborcoat”. I asked if any of his piano based songs were difficult to play live, to which he replied, “I’m not going to write something more difficult than I can play.” I asked Scott why Peter wasn’t able to make the tour, and he didn’t know. I asked Scott if perhaps I could have a few minutes with him and talk about Robyn Hitchcock and the Venus 3, but he said that there won’t be a lot of time. After the show, they were signing autographs and then leaving, so he gave me an email address where I can send some questions his way. I did ask what songs he had a part in writing with R.E.M., and he said “Oh My Hearts and maybe a couple of b-sides”.
The band took the stage around 9:15 and played for about 90 minutes. Not having listened to either of their albums. I cannot verify what was played. I managed to snag the set list though. This is what was written down…
Past
TFW
Fairweather
Panda
Tony
Look or Black Jack
Lies
Closer
1976
Twilight
Ichiro
Jackie
Buckner
That’s
Harvey
Twinkies
Ampheta (sp?)
For an encore, they played 3 or 4 songs. Two of them were Rockville and Oh Shit, Man. The crowd also wished Linda Pitmon, the drummer, a happy birthday. I took a bunch of pictures that you can see on my Facebook page at The Baseball Project 6/8/11 photos
The concert footage is available on YouTube.
The Baseball Project 6/8/11, The Magic Bag, Ferndale MI - Part 1
The Baseball Project 6/8/11, The Magic Bag, Ferndale MI - Part 2
The Baseball Project 6/8/11, The Magic Bag, Ferndale MI - Part 3
All in all, it was an incredible night. Aside from getting to meet my idol and talking with him, and then getting autographs and getting my picture taken with the band, the show itself was great. There weren’t even 50 people in attendance, but we all had a heavenly time.
