[This interview is presented for educational purposes only and is reprinted without permission unless otherwise noted. This interview is copyrighted by the original owners and will be removed promptly upon request.] rec.music.phish › Interview with Trey, Olympia, 4/25/92 1 post by 1 author Shelly Culbertson 6/17/92
[Here is the interview with Trey from April. We sat outside on the grass while people played frisbee and talked in the afternoon before the show. TA is, of course, Trey. BW is my friend Beth Whaley, who plays flute and saxophone and (coincidentally) attended a jazz workshop in Massachusetts, "Jazz in July", along with Trey several years ago. SC is me. Feedback is welcome....]
Interview with Trey Anastasio, Olympia, Washington 4/25/92
SC: First of all, I wanted to ask you about the new songs. Were most of those written in Ireland?
TA: I wrote something like ten songs in Ireland when I went over there. I just brought an acoustic guitar and I brought stacks and stacks of lyrics from Tom, I didn't write any lyrics. On the plane over there I started flipping through them and saw a couple of them that caught my eye right away; actually, the first one was NICU (sometimes called In an Intensive Care Unit). That little melody; as usual, that wasn't the one that jelled very easily. But anyway, the whole time I was there I was writing songs - Maze, Rift,...some of them then required more work sitting at a piano when I got home. I made a cassette tape over there of just acoustic guitar and general ideas for the songs, and then I went over to Tom's house when I got back, and we sat around and wrote new lyrics together and came up with other little ideas and made some four track tapes.
SC: How did All Things Reconsidered come about?
TA: That I wrote a while ago. Somebody said it sounded like The Asse Festival - in a sense, it does sound like The Asse Festival; it's the same form, but to me it doesn't sound any more like The Asse Festival than saying that everything by Bach sounds the same. It's the same style and it's definitely true that there's similarity in the form, but after The Asse Festival I wanted to do another theme and variation in that style with a different theme, so that was that. I actually didn't know it was the All Things Considered theme until later
SC: So of all the new songs, Mound was written by Mike, and all the rest were -- (*note - I forgot to ask about Weigh at this point, which I would have thought that Mike wrote.)
TA: Myself and Tom. Except for Brother - well it depends on what you count as new.
SC: I'm thinking of this tour.
TA: This tour - the rest were myself. Maze was myself with Tom's lyrics, Rift was myself with Tom's lyrics, NICU, My Friend My Friend - that's kind of two songs in one: the My Friend My Friend intro was a thing that I wrote on acoustic guitar, and then "My friend, my friend, he's got a knife" was another song that I wrote and then we put them together.
SC: How about Sleeping Monkey?
TA: Sleeping Monkey was myself and Tom....what else is there that's new?
SC: Silent in the Morning --
TA: Silent in the Morning. That's going to be really good on the album. [Just then a crowd of dogs came by.] It's the dog pack! Some of these dogs are the ones on the dog tape. Shasta was there.
SC: By the way, I wanted to ask about a version of Esther I've heard with completely different lyrics.
TA: Oh really? Is it a really early one? Oh yeah, I changed the lyrics. A lot of our stuff - we kind of look at things as ever- evolving...well, not ever-evolving, but starting out as evolving things, so we're always changing things around. Fluffhead went through about eight different evolutions before it became what it is. On the first Fluffhead tape there's just the song Fluffhead without anything else. Then I wrote the first middle thing, and it was that for a while, and then all this other stuff... So, Esther, I wasn't really that happy with the lyrics to Esther. I thought it was almost there but we went into the studio and recorded it with the old lyrics and I didn't like it. Then I went home for Christmas and at Christmas I re-wrote the rest of the lyrics and then I came back and changed the lyrics in the studio. I didn't even remember that we were doing it live before that, but I guess we were.
SC: It sort of changes the outcome of the story.
TA: Oh yeah - what happens? She ends up back at the thing?...
SC: ...and all the souls come up out of the ocean.
TA: Oh, that's right. It's too happy. I wanted something a little more evil. It's too cheery; couldn't deal with it. So I eviled it.
SC: I'd like to ask you about studying with Ernie Stires.
TA: I was at UVM and I was a music major; I wasn't that happy with my situation there. I went looking for a composer to study with. I wanted to study composition; I thought the best way to do it would be to study with a composer. So I just started asking people, found a few names and ended up meeting Ernie, went out there and just hit it off with him right away. A lot of it is a friendship as much as a teaching thing. I listened to his music a lot and learned a lot from his music. He is a big influence on me. I think if you heard his stuff you'd know what I meant. He's incredible; he's great. He's not into rock'n'roll at all. He's into big band jazz, that's his thing that he was raised on and that's his kind of music. He's the one who introduced me to a lot of that stuff. I just learned a lot from hanging around his house -- I'll go to his house and we'll just sit there all day and drink coffee and listen to music. He had me write some two-part things and three-part things and then he taught me about fugues and stuff like that, and then he had me do a jazz arrangement: Flat Fee that we did with the horns I did pretty much under his wing. It was really for a much bigger horn section than that, so it wasn't doing it justice doing it with the horn tour, but that was the closest we've ever had to having horns. That was writing out a full chart, the whole thing, the bass and everything; which was really good, because it got me working on orchestral scores, full score paper, each instrument on a big sheet of paper. And then I started doing that kind of stuff for the band, like Foam was all written out -- except for the solo section in the middle, which is a solo over changes -- it's completely written out. The bass and drum stuff is sort of written out; it's over a latin beat, pretty much.
SC: Mike had something interesting to say about how the structure of composed music can be necessary in order to arrive at the moment when improvisation can occur.
TA: I think so. It gets you to a certain point. When you go through a thing like David Bowie, which is all this worked-out stuff for three or four straight minutes of playing complicated lines, the release when it gets to an improv section is great for everyone in the band -- you kind of break through to a part where you can play anything you want. Without that lead-up to it I don't think it would be the same. That's something that we do in a lot of our songs and have always kind of done. But I like all different kinds of music - I like classical music and I like improv music, so I like to put it all in. It's just another one of those levels. Split Open and Melt is another one that I did on orchestral score like that. It's fun writing like that.
SC: That sounds so good with horns!
TA: I had that all [written out] -- the bass line at the bottom, and then you work with a section -- you can look at the music in a vertical sense and a horizontal sense. It's hard to explain to somebody who hasn't done it, sometimes; you can stop the music in time and see what harmonic structure is going on between what's happening in the bass, what's happening in the piano, what's happening in the guitar, what's happening in the horns. Without writing things on paper you can't do that.
BW: Did you do that on piano first?
TA: On piano. Because piano is right there, the bass is at the bottom - whereas a guitar the notes are all over the place. It's much more complicated to write on guitar. Except that Eliza was originally written on guitar and then I worked at the piano for all the other parts; and then the drums are written out for that one too.
BW: Did you play piano before you started studying with Ernie Stires?
TA: Yes. One of the first things he said was, you don't have to know how to play piano, but you have to know to get around a piano. What he had me do for that was he gave me the Well- Tempered Clavier and he said, do one of these a day until you get through. He's the kind of person who's got an answer for all these little problems and he's right, you can't argue with him. He said, if you sit down with the Well-Tempered Clavier and you go from the beginning to the end of the preludes and then the beginning to the end of the fugues (there's one in every key, forty-seven of them or so - and then there's another book, book two, forty-seven more preludes and fugues), he said, just working as slow -- even if you can only go one note every thirty seconds, or one group of notes, play the chord, hear how it sounds, then move to the next chord; he said, by the time you finish that, and then go back and do the whole thing again, you'll be a great piano player. It's as simple as that.
SC: Having mentioned that an orchestral score gives one the opportunity to look at one moment in time in a piece of music, and given that music as an art form is very dependent on time, I wanted to ask - do you think of time as linear or circular or...?
TA:
SC: An obvious example of things coming back over time would be things like the old music from the end of The Curtain becoming part of Rift, or Punch You in the Eye turning into the Landlady.
TA: That was what I was saying before about how the songs evolve until they reach a certain point when they no longer need to be screwed with and any more screwing around with them would only lessen them. Like Stash -- except that even Stash, you never know. It'll start to pick up something new. I mean, You Enjoy Myself was the pinnacle of Phish songs for a long time, and in a sense it still is. It was the first thing that we ever did that was that different. I wrote it a long time ago; it was one of the first things that I felt like I was stretching boundaries in writing. "I'm gonna go wild. I'm going to put all this stuff together and see what happens!" But even on this tour, we started adding little subtle things that came up spontaneously in the written-out part, the beginning part, not the jam. We enjoyed doing them so much that they kind of start becoming part of the song. So it still evolves, even the written-out stuff evolves. Just because you're playing the same notes -- I mean, classical musicians, Christopher Parkening will play a classical guitar piece and someone else will play it and it will be completely different, and they're playing all the same notes. I guess the written-out -- it doesn't really feel that different, once you're up on stage it all kind of feels like improvising, spontaneous, on a good night. Like we were saying last night, the notes are about five percent of music and the feeling and the energy is all of it, the whole thing. So you're playing written-out notes - you could either move people with it or you could not move them at all and still be playing the same notes, depending on what kind of vibe you were giving off -- or getting.
BW: When you were studying with Ernie Stires, did you take him material you were working on with Phish?
TA: Oh, yeah.
BW: How did he react?
TA: A lot of it he didn't like. He's got very strong opinions. But he started liking it. I met his children when we played at the Great American Music Hall, and they couldn't believe he was listening to it; he doesn't like any kind of electric music. He just thinks it's bad; and I understand why. I could explain it from his point of view and totally agree with it. Big band music, if you go back and listen to the good big band music, people were pushing lots of limits musically. A pop tune would come on the radio for two-and-a-half minutes, and in it you'd hear great orchestration, great harmonic development, cutting-edge soloists, great everything all across the board on every level, great dance beat; just chock full of music. And then the war came and big band music got pushed out by be-bop, which, he would say, (this is not me speaking, but like I said I can agree with him) was basically a lot of mental masturbation. I'm telling you how he looks at it, he's an older guy and he's got his opinions. People taking long-winded solos over one chord. The art, to him, was lost. Music was developing at a rate -- classical music blended into jazz, jazz blended into big band; people were pushing the art forward on all different levels. There were great soloists, but it was a group effort. You couldn't do it without the band. You had a large band, you had tonal textures changing and grooves changing and people doing different kinds of harmony, breaking boundaries with harmony, and then all of a sudden it goes into this thing where you've got combos where people play over a blues progression for fifteen minutes doing a saxophone solo. And people all get stoned and listen to it and go, "Wooo. Oh. That's so heavy. Look at the scale he's playing." That's how he would see it. Then that went into rock'n'roll, which is to him basically nothing but a marketing scheme for rich business people to take money from 14-year-old girls; and on a lot of levels it is, it all depends on how you look at it. I mean, the merchandising business -- the biggest money-making aspect of rock'n'roll is merchandise.... To him, having heard it for so many years, since the absolute dawn of rock'n'roll he's been hearing it, it's the same three chords with a different hairstyle; every ten years it's a new hairstyle. The Sex Pistols played the same three chords as Elvis, and the same three chords as Soundgarden for that matter. The differences in the music are minor; there's really nothing different going on. And if you look at it that way: he thinks of it as the way Disney movies are -- which is, great movies, but what they do is they release them every seven years and then a new wave of children can see them, they make tons of money and then they put them to bed. Fantasia was just out again; now you won't see that for seven years. Seven years from now, they'll put it out again. They're not stupid, these are marketing geniuses. They know exactly how long it takes until the next generation of kids are born, and then they'll sell it to them again, and make a lot of money off it. Basically rock'n'roll to him, and a lot of the later jazz scene, is just marketing: selling people stuff that doesn't have any substance, that's completely hollow.
BW: But big band was entertainment too.
TA: Sure, but there's a difference. Big band was entertainment, but it was completely substance filled. What they did was they took this entertainment and they said: Ok. It's got to be two-and- a-half minutes long. It's got to be a popular song. We can deal with that. Now: for the people who really like to hear the art of music developed, we're going to fill those songs. If you listen to Eddie Sauter arrangements by Benny Goodman -- go back and listen to those. You won't believe the stuff that he put into a three minute version of Bewitched, which is a Gershwin song, which was a popular song at the time, a ditty -- but it starts out in a certain key, it modulates up a major third right when the vocalist comes in, the saxophones are trading off: she'll sing a riff and then the saxophone section will echo it, and then it will go down into the trumpet section, and you'll hear the clarinets come in at a certain part; the drummer knows the arrangement perfectly, he answers the arrangement with a cymbal hit. Everything, just so full of stuff! Just so much stuff going on; no aspect overlooked. But, people who wanted to be entertained could come to that, dance all night long, and never have any idea that any of that crap is going on. They didn't care. For them, it was entertainment and that's it. What saddens him is that entertainment now -- there used to be musical development too in the entertainment.
BW: What about be-bop and modal music and what they got into then?
TA: To him it's a step backwards, it's nothing that people hadn't done before. People had soloed over modal changes forever. Remember, I'm taking his side, and I'm answering your questions from his side. Miles Davis was a be-bop legend. Most people -- and I've talked to not just Ernie, I've talked to a lot of people from his generation because he's introduced me to people -- thought he was a second-rate trumpet player who had an attitude, and his attitude was the market. Now there were trumpet players before him for years that blew him off the bandstand. He got into heroin and he had an attitude and he hung out with Charlie Parker and stuff, who was also doing a lot of heroin, and was in a `cool scene' that was happening; and they took standards and they did long solos over them... His music is something I like, personally, 'cause I like the sound of him and I thought he had incredible flow of ideas. He was great; he was amazing. I'm just saying how he [Stires] would look at it. And I do think that after -- be-bop was a cool change that was going on and I like the way it was mixing with Latin music and that whole scene was really cool; and then it just bit the big one. You can't deny that he's right when he said music, as an evolution of music, was going off the deep end and just going downhill; I really do believe that. You can trace the evolution of music, it's four hundred years old or something, western music the way we know it, harmony,...it was being developed. Ravel came around the turn of the century, Stravinsky, those people were actually doing new things with music; not style. I'm not talking about style. I'm talking about concrete things with harmony. All that stuff that jazz people did, playing ninths and that kind of thing? The human ear was developing, what used to be a dissonance started being heard as a consonance, a new beautiful kind of music, and Ravel was a great example of that. It's a great story with him. He influenced a lot of jazz players. And some of that other French music that was going on -- those guys were into that. And then, suddenly, really, you can't see anywhere that music is developing anymore in that kind of a sense. As far as I'm concerned, it kind of stopped. People are not pushing harmonic boundaries, pushing rhythmic boundaries.
BW: I think on a popular music level that's true --
TA: Well, where is it? Because I want to find it. And I've tried to find it.
BW: There's a lot of things going on even with electronics, people taking acoustic instruments and plugging them in....
TA: Yeah, but that's electronics. That's sound. That's not music. I mean, it's music; I'm not saying it's not music! I mean, I play an electric instrument. I overload a circuit to get my sound.
BW: But sound is pretty important too as far as how music develops; like when Gil Evans came along he started putting lots of different instruments into jazz that had never been in jazz before.
TA: That's true. I'm saying now, 1990s. Who's doing it? Because I listen to a lot of contemporary classical. Celebrated contemporary classical, as celebrated as it gets, 'cause they don't celebrate classical; you don't make any money doing it. There are some people who are being celebrated, and I don't hear much going on at all, personally.
BW: Well, free jazz is becoming more developed. Look at what Yusef Lateef is doing right now...
TA: He's incredible; he really is. Ernie's a composer. So he's looking at things from a compositional point of view, not a spiritual and improvisational point of view. He's really not interested in that. And I am. There is definitely stuff going on, there's always going to be great improvisers 'cause it's in the now. But what about the composers, the innovative composers? Or even the innovative jazz people -- Wynton Marsalis is a good example. He's a great trumpet player. I've seen him numerous times live, and Branford and Delfeayo and all his brothers. I think they're some great players. But Ernie's question, and his friends' -- I've jammed with him and some of his older friends -- where are the innovators? Where are the innovators? What is going on? The only thing that's going on in the jazz scene right now is that a lot of people are doing a very good job of teaching about the past, that's happening. And then you've got people like Wynton and these guys who are basically playing other people's music and doing a pretty darn good job imitating other people a lot of the time. You know, he'll do a romantic album and then he'll do a New Orleans album. And then Marcus Roberts will do Alone With Three Giants and he'll do an incredible imitation of Thelonius Monk; he sounds just like Thelonius Monk! But it's kind of like, ok, where's Marcus Roberts? What do you sound like? Wynton's great, he's an incredible talent; he really is an amazing trumpet player. But still, is he writing anything that a hundred years from now people are going to say, wow, this is incredible? I don't know.
BW: I think it's the small people that you can't even name that are doing the things now.
TA: Yeah, that's probably true. But it does say something about culture, don't you think, that when he was a child, Ernie, you couldn't get away from great music. If you turned on the radio, you heard great music. That's the problem. That's it in a nutshell. It's not that people aren't doing it; it's that if you turn on the radio, you hear Tesla, you know what I mean? Or Ratt, or...I don't know what you hear when you turn on the radio. I actually do like a lot of stuff. I'm speaking from Ernie's perspective -- I listen to a lot of different kinds of music because I like the sound of it. But I understand the point he's making. When he was a child, when he was fourteen he went out to see a concert and he was challenged. And also -- simultaneously challenged and uplifted by incredible beautiful melodies and dance beat. So he had it all, right there - - great musicians, incredible groove. He said he used to stand in front of the bandstand for all those big bands. Every Saturday night there was somebody playing. Just all those horns up there, those incredible arrangements, the actual acoustic sounds of real instruments -- that's the sound thing. The energy and the beat -- everyone was dancing. He said it used to be that if you went on a date, you had to know how to dance, and that was an incredible art form too that is also lost in culture. Nobody knows how to dance anymore. I mean, you can dance -- you can go out and noodle, and that's fun, that's great, I love it, but it's a shame that people don't know how to dance because it sure would be fun to be able to go out in front of a big band and dance while also hearing incredible ground-breaking harmonic things. That was the atmosphere he lived in, and living in this atmosphere today he's become cynical, definitely.
BW: Was that frustrating for you as a student? You could understand his point of view, but you were coming from a different culture. Everything in your experience musically was coming from a culture that he disregards.
TA: To a degree; but it wasn't frustrating for me at all, I really enjoyed it. When I first started seeing him I brought music to him that I really liked. I'd play him something and he'd be, why are you bringing this bullshit?
SC: Do you? I was disappointed when I saw them on Saturday Night Live --
TA: They're not my favorite band or anything, we just have hundreds of tapes that we listen to in the van all the time so of course we brought that one. I thought they had a couple catchy tunes. I'm just saying that I listen to a lot of different kinds of stuff. Generally Ernie will be sitting there talking and saying this stuff and I just say, I know what you mean. He says things like, people tell me that Pink Floyd's lyrics are great lyrics, and he thinks they're really stupid. I think they're great. They're not from his generation. He can't identify with Pink Floyd. I think Roger Waters wrote incredible lyrics. Some of them just kill me, they're so good. He really reached a peak for a while there, I thought. I love Pink Floyd. I'm just using examples of bands, just to say that....but I totally understand what he's saying. I totally agree with him and understand what he's saying, but at the same time I have very different opinions from him.
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Shelly