On Playing

Noodling

SK
It's partly neurotic, I guess.

X
Like worry beads?

SK
Yeah. And then the other thing is, you're trying shorten the times in between the times you're playing. If I sat down right now and played all day and all night, and then didn't play until, you know, Friday, then it wouldn't do me any good.

X
So you can't "bank" it.

SK
Yeah, so I was playing before I went to bed, and I gotta get up and play some more just to keep that time inbetween short. It's better for your hands and it's better, even if I'm not doing anything too specifically other than knocking the dust off, it's what allows me to be in some kind of shape in case I do get an idea, and you never know when that's going to happen. You'll be sitting around, you'll finally get warmed up, and something will hit you, and you'll finally get a piece of something. Then you can assemble those later, but you don't get the opportunity to do that if you don't have the thing in your hands a lot, so I do sit with it a lot.

X
It seems that music is on some level a physical discipline, an athletic thing. So you're kind of staying in training, keeping yourself in condition to play.

SK
As best I can. What do they say about talent and work? There's something they say about talent and work. It's like 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. It's that kind of thing. It's mostly work. It's nowhere near as much talent as it is just application.

X
Do you revisit inventions that come up in that spontaneous way later on when you're performing?

SK
Most of the stuff that hops up and then is usable later, hops up in an ensemble context. I'll find something that works and like a fool I'll try to apply it the same way another time and go, "Oh, that doesn't work now. What's up with that?"

X
Are you conscious of when you're learning to do something new, when you're on the threshold of a conceptual breakthrough?

SK
You'll get to a point with something where you can feel that
you've almost cracked some idea, or illuminated some concept from a different angle, but you don't know what you're going to get. You're just breaking into some unknown territory, and then you work, and you work, and you work, and you work, and you work, and you might be working on something that seems like it's going in one direction, and then when it finally reveals itself, it's something completely different.

It will either be difficult to do and then I'll know to work on it, or it'll be easy and then I'll do it a bunch and I'll remember it.

Always the Same, Never the Same Way

SK
Sometimes it does. I don't think of it like that, and I wouldn't prefer that it be that way, because that's kind of knee-jerk. That's not like going towards something; it's like going away from something. In the case of having played a tune ten thousand times - like in Zero we've played Catalina ten thousand times or something like that, or a hundred million times - then to spite myself I'll go, OK, I'm just going to play it ska today, even though I know that that's not it. That's not really going for it.

X
That's like pricking yourself with a pin to stay awake.

SK
Nothing against kids, because I was a kid myself and had the same thing going on, but that's that "rebelling against yourself" kind of thinking. You don't necessarily want that. It would be better not to have a path that consisted completely of negating this or negating that.

X
Sure, and I don't want to keep hammering away just on this one thing--

SK
No, it's cool! It's a cool thing. You're hammering away on a cool thing. We'll all learn something.

X
All right, let's beat that horse. When I've listened to you playing a solo, perhaps on a song that I myself have heard you play twenty-five times before, maybe it's just speaking this language and having heard the music of this culture, but my ear knows when there's a certain expected note or resolving tone.

SK
Cultural preconditioning.

X
I expect the intonation to fit a pattern, and the kind of soloists who excite me end up dealing with the requirement of that cultural conditioning, but not in the way that my mind had preconceived it.

SK
Uh-huh.

X
And, that often comes down to kind of dancing around that last note. When the band seems to be heading toward some inevitable climax or resolution, often there's dance to come up with a fresh way to get there. That's one of the things I enjoy the most about your playing. There are times where I'll think, What the hell is he doing now? and then I realize you're there. You actually were going there, and I just couldn't see it myself. Are you conscious of the thing that I'm perceiving as a listener?

SK
Yes and no. Say, there's a space in this song that's x amount long that's going to have to come back to the tune. You're trying to wind up with "always the same, never the same way." That's the basic Big Dumb Idea that's at work. What happens in my head to try and get it there and what happens in your head as a listener are very necessarily different. You're just going to hear stuff differently on different days, different things are going to surprise you, and different things that I'm going to try are going to work to varying degrees on different days.

And sometimes, exactly what you're saying, "Where is he?" shows up in the Zero thing quite a bit. We'll begin to play, and the thing will instantly be on Mars, and I'm going, "Where are they?" I'll go back to where I knew the tune was and I'll just start playing quarter notes, like 1, 2, 3, 4, playing the old straight time against the prevailing time, which often sounds totally weird, and everybody's looking at me like, "Where the fuck are you, man?" and then it kind of flips up, comes back over, and there you are, and I'm already there.

X
So it's different for the listener and the musician?

SK
Anybody who's not a trained musician is necessarily listening referentially. They're hearing the music, and they're comparing it to something else. They're getting an emotional hit from it, or a feeling like "ship tossed on a stormy sea," and I'm thinking, "G Minor." So what I've got to do, to operate my equipment on my end, is completely different than what you've got to do, to receive it at the other end. I wind up mostly being an absolutist as opposed to a referentialist about the musical stuff. I'm quite content with the interplay and the juxtaposition of the actual intervals and the math of it. That's fine with me. I'm not trying to paint a picture. I'm actually working with the intervals, with the music, and I'm delighted by that.

Infinity Goes Up On Trial

SK
Yeah, or not at all. Ideally, not at all is the place to be, but you don't often get to start there, with the no-thinking thing. That's where it's heading. Ultimately, one of the reasons why I sit around and play all the time is because, playing music or being in that music thing, there's a timeless quality about it.

X
That's interesting, since you're dealing with time in a very hand's-on way, when you're playing music.

SK
Well, musical time is different than chronological time, extremely different, and the actual experience of music is a no-time kind of thing. When it's really happening - when it's really happening, when it's really in the zone - there is none of that duality of time. There's none of this thinking like "all nine of my old ladies are here," or "this guy's looking at me," or "that's not right." There's no judgement. There's no thinking like, "He's not playing the right thing," or "I'm not playing the right thing," or "I really have to go to the bathroom," or whatever possible thing you could think. There's no thinking when you actually get in the moment, and the time thing kind of stops entirely, and so does all the rest of your duality, all the rest of that nonsense, judgement or thought about yourself.

X
Do you think it's that feeling that makes you want to play music?

SK
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's why people listen. That is it. If you're loose enough or can indulge yourself to the point where you actually get it, you get those moments where everything stops, and it's just there. When you really get to that flow state, that's it. That's what it is, and the attraction to that seems fairly obvious: cheating chronological time. It's kind of a godlike thing to do.

It's just like, boom, you've got the eternal moment there. There's other ways to get there. You can crash your car into a tree or you can kiss a girl for the first time, stuff like that, but music consistently, I think, more than anything else, gets people to that space, and when you're in that space, that's the "piss in the ocean" consciousness raising that music does that's good for people, for everybody involved, for the community. When you get community, you get the music, and you get to that place, everybody comes out better. That light that happens right then, that's it. That space, that's God. That's where people are trying to go. When they write the book about how to get there, that's where they're trying to go!

X
The divine feeling.

SK
Yeah. It's the now.

X
That might be the thing that bridges the fan's "tossed on the ocean" feeling and the musician's technical understanding of what's going on, because if you're both in that place, it really doesn't matter how you got in that place.

SK
No, it doesn't. On the way in, there's necessarily a me and you, and there's up on stage and there's out in the audience, and there's right foot/left foot, and all this stuff, but not when it really gets there. All that shit just disappears when it's really good, and everybody that's heard good music knows that. All the rest of it's gone. The job is gone.

X
Would you say that you become conscious of the people who are just hearing the music? Does it feel like a group thing to you or is there a self, an ego at the center, that's generating it?

SK
No. It's not an ego-generated space. People will try and talk to me at a gig, or before a gig, or inbetween on break. They'll start talking about the music or about me, just like what we're doing right now. I understand that there's a need for it, but for me personally it's counterproductive, because anything that you do that creates a sense of self around the ego needs to be discarded to go ahead and play the music in the first place. So you wind up having to tell people, "Thank you very much," and that's it. It's hard to talk, because you either walk away feeling like "I fucked up" or you're all full of yourself and either way, whatever that is, it's going to have to be dropped before you actually get to some kind of zone. It's part of the responsibility of musicians.

Calico
It's also about being with many other people who are also in need of it. I see you guys very much as being in service to our spirits.

SK
Right, yeah. Exactly.

Calico
How many times have you not heard somebody say, "God, I need a show"?

X
Absolutely. It's like a well that you've drunk from and you're thirsty again.

Calico
It's not necessarily to see big famous musicians on stage. It's being together and enjoying an experience, that manifestation, together that produces a result other people can only dream of having.

SK
For me, what I feel the work is, is to try and do what's necessary to produce that authentic musical improvisational experience, which tends to take people to that place. It takes me to that place. That's the job. All the rest of this guacamole, all the rest of this work is for that. It's for everybody.

X
Well, I've had to consciously restrain myself from bugging you at gigs...

SK
Thank you.

X
...because of that exact phenomenon, and I think I see both sides of it, because I do get drawn in. It's an attempt to get to the center of things, but I'm also aware that you're working and that you probably have to keep your concentration. That person who comes up to you and starts jabbering away about their theory or the vision they had, they probably really just want to hug you or something.

SK
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. When people hear music or when they're taking part in an event like that and they get that feeling, sometimes you have to try and explain this. No, that's not about me. It's about you. You got that. I didn't give that to you. You got that. Pat yourself on the back. That's your own capacity to open up and enjoy music and experience things in the moment for a minute.

X
You may have put the foot in the door for that person, though, even if they still had to push their way through on their own.

SK
They may think so, but it's them. It's you, individually. Different things'll do it for you at different times. There's music that got me off totally when I was a kid that I can't listen to now, and there's stuff that I listened to when I was a kid where I was like, This is horseshit, that I listen to now and I'm like, Oh, God, I love it so much! It's completely an individual thing. It's your own capacity to open up and to feel that. Somebody's not doing that to you. It's you allowing that for yourself.

Authentic Feeling

SK
Authentic, spontaneous. A real, authentic experience, not some kind of phony experience, not like audience participation: Everybody clap your hands, you know? It's like we're just gonna hop up here with our pants down around our ankles, man, and we're going to go for it, and so are you, and we're either gonna get there or not, but it's real, something real, authentic, not phony.

X
Well, I think that that's what comes across. One of the things I heard instantly in your playing that has always made me want to come back and hear more is that authenticity, which I would have called honesty. You mentioned once, in an interview I read up on the web at the old Rockweb site, that "mood is not a note choice," but music plucks at emotional strings in our physical bodies and in our heads, and I feel like I'm hearing really you. You may not be thinking about emotions at all. Maybe it's just one of those things that comes through the cracks when you're forced to jump off a cliff and cope. What do you think is the role of emotion in music? Does it create feelings in you while you're playing? Is that a meaningful way to think about music at all from a musician's point of view?

SK
Yeah, it is. Boy, this is some thin ice, questionwise! I certainly can prove it in court that I cannot convey to you a specific emotion through a specific combination of pitches or tones. There's no one-to-one correspondence between any of the intervalic or mathematical relationships that maps directly onto your emotions or onto colors or onto smells or onto anything. It's its own thing, entirely, and it's complete within itself. For some reason we get all wrapped up in this emotional component to the thing. That's a gift that it's there, but it's not how it starts. In a way it's completely tied up in it, and in another way no part of it that maps onto it either.

X
It's sounds like it's the thing you can't go for. It's not like it's an ingredient you can dial up. It has to come across as a side-effect?

SK
Well, no. You have to intend that it's part of the thing. It's my intention to play in a way that will engage you emotionally, somehow. What exactly that means, I don't fuckin' know, you know? I know that when I heard music when I was a kid that I dug, whatever it was, like Duane Allman or whatever, or Roy Buchanan or something, it got me! I was just stuck straight through with a spear.

When they write a piece of music, they say right on the music the tempo and the key signature, and then, in Italian or French or something, there's always some kind of thing about how it's supposed to be played. You're supposed to have a certain attitude to play. "Lively," or "somber but not slow." You need to think of the physical sound in a certain way sometimes to make it be that way. You need to think that it's going to be buoyant or radiant or veiled or open, like a kid shouting. There's attitude involved that may be emotional entirely and have nothing to do with what you're actually playing. You can play the same note the same way thinking "buoyant," or you can play the same note the same way thinking "shrill." Maybe that part of the thing might come off as being the emotional part of it.

Soloing, interpreting

SK
It depends how often you've heard the song before, I guess. If I haven't heard the song before, I try to see what the form of it is, listen to the version that I'm hearing, and separate the stylistic elements of the people who are playing it from the form.

X
Is that part of it easy to do?

SK
Yeah, there's obvious elements of style.

X
How about when you do know the song?

SK
If I do know the song, if I've heard it a million times, then I'm interpreting my feelings about the song. My impression of having heard the song so many times has an ebb and flow to it, and an attitude, and I just go with that.

X
If you know the song better, does that mean you'd be more likely to take liberties, to interpret it more radically?

SK
It's almost better if I don't know it. Are you familiar with the concept of beginner's mind?

X
Sure.

SK
Well, that's the deal. In the expert's mind there's few possibilities, and in the beginner's mind it's wide open. The fresher the better for me.

Rhythm Theory

SK
Clueless. I was clueless about all of that. Totally clueless about all of that stuff. So happy.

X
Were you thinking "time signature"?

SK
No, I tend to not think about it. You can tell when stuff is not metrically entirely straight, but I have a really twisted kind of metrical conception anyway.

X
Want to talk about that a little bit?

SK
It's kind of technical, but the short version is, in Western music the metric component to the thing is called compound duple, groups of four things or eight things, basically, and it's subdivided. It's really kind of a funny way to do it. The older musical cultures think of music as either being circular, like the Indians, or layered - layers of rhythms - like the Africans, and we have this chopped up kind of thing. That's how they teach it, that's how it's learned, and that's how you talk about it: this fraction of this beat or this subdivision of this grouping. But what you wind up getting with compound duple, when you have four things [holds up his fingers of one hand splayed] is you have no center, and then you have uneven spaces, and you either have a beginning- or an end-accented thing, necessarily when you have two things, right? So if you have an unaccented pulse [slaps lap], and then you accent the first part [ONE two ONE two ONE two rhythm] it kind of tends to plod or slow down. If you accent the other part [one TWO one TWO...] and you don't think about it for a minute, it's turned back into, you know, "ONE two, ONE two." It turns around. So in compound duple, where we're kind of forced to think, stuff either falls back or falls forward.

In the last couple of years, I started looking at all the even divisions as being groups of odd divisions anyway, so eight, for me, for example, is like five and three. If you look at five things and three things, then you've got a center for the five and you've got a center for the three, and you've got even spaces, and so it's just a different way to look at it. If you take five and three, and you accent the middle of the five and you accent the middle of the three, you have backbeat anyway so you wind up with the same stuff. It's just a different feeling, but then once you're that far, what's the problem with five or seven? [He demonstrates on his lap]

It all grooves if it's got a backbeat, except the backbeats are now in the middle of the thing. It's all odd anyway, so when stuff's odd, especially if I don't know it's supposed to be odd, I don't have any problem with it. It doesn't bother me that much. But when I know it's "in seven" - and so much of that Grateful Dead stuff that I'm working on right now is in odd time signatures and odd bars - it's confusing to have to think of it first, but it's fun to just hear it and play it.

X
It sounds a little bit like the way, in visual arts, asymmetry can be sometimes more appealing than symmetry. Those regular, even, perfectly divided things can seem less interesting.

SK
Yeah, the odd numbers in music, whether it's pitches or beats, tend to be the ones that seem symmetrical.This seems to be the way most of the primitive music was generated. If you have a central, starting pitch, [holds out hand palm down] and you go a note above that [points] and a note below the starting pitch [points], and you go one more note above or below that [points to both], you wind up with a pentatonic scale. So it's just a starting pitch and then pitches on either side of that ... and repetition at the octave. So that's where the melody's been for the last couple million years.

X
Is it time for it go somewhere else?

SK
No!

X
OK, just checking.

SK
I think it's part of the human condition that we hear it that way.

Limitations, Thresholds, Goals

SK
Oh, yeah. There's a million of them. Most have to do with writing. I always wish I was writing more. I try real hard to write, man. I come up with, you know, shit.

X
What makes you think you should write more?

SK
Well, if I could write like a hundred tunes right now, and any of them were any good at all, then in twenty-five years one of 'em would be a toothpaste commercial and my kids would get mailbox money. That's why!

That's one reason. The other thing is that, improvisational music - which is what I enjoy, I enjoy improvising - even with recording, kind of dies with the improvisor. The improvisor goes, and there goes that music. It's different if you somehow manage to wheedle your way into the literature. It seems like that would have a little more enduring impact. One of the reasons any of us do this at all is because we want to have more good music in the world. It's nice to think that you've contributed something.

X
Anything else you'd like to be able to do?

SK
I don't get enough practice playing through changes. That's another part of the writing thing, because I think that there are some areas where there might be something to add, in terms of just having some interesting "blowing changes" for people to play over. What else? Play more instruments. Play a decent blues. Sometimes I can play it a little bit.

X
Are all the instruments you play stringed instruments?

SK
I used to play the saxophone, and the flute, and the piano, keyboard stuff. I used to do that more when I was younger. I was never really any good at it, but I dug trying it. I just kind of got stuck with the guitar. I love playing the lap guitar, Hawaiian guitar stuff. That's a lot of fun.

X
When you pick up a stringed instrument but not one you've played before, how much carries over from what you already know how to do?

SK
It's not that different. If I really decided I wanted to play mandolin, I could. If I really decided I wanted to play violin, that might not work. The violin's pretty different.

Influences