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Interview: The late-blooming Nels Cline
Cline visits Austin Sunday night to play inside at Stubb’s with his avant-jazz trio, The Nels Cline Singers. I caught up with the thoughtful and modest Cline on Friday to talk about his musical influences, his love of sound and being a late bloomer.
M.O.: I know you grew up in California and were probably entering junior high during the Summer of Love. How did the music out there in California in the late sixties affect you as a child, as a listener and in the nascent stages of your guitar playing?
Nels Cline: Wow. What a great question. At the risk of overstating it, I would have to say that I am permanently damaged by the incredible creativity and by the colorful nature of popular music of that time.
That’s pretty good damage to have…
Yea, I think so. I think that at that age when one is — at this point my twin brother Alex and I were becoming completely obsessed with rock ‘n roll — and at that age, when you have that sort of voraciousness and that openness, to have the sort of operating rule of the day being ‘be mind-blowing’ or ‘be creative’ or ‘be eloquent’ or ‘protest,’ of all these different things, with wide-open non-formated radio, the beginnings of underground radio coming in right after this — for us it was KDPC, one of the great underground radio stations. It’s basically the thing that I draw from to this day: psychedelic music, folk rock, later on acid rock, and inevitably, what I think led me and my twin brother to a love of sound, and as such, to instrumental music and later jazz and jazz rock.
Speaking of growing up in that heady period for music, people think that with MySpace and the ubiquity of online music, that the options are more wide open for kids to find music. But it seems that things are becoming more niche. Do you think as a kid growing up today it would be harder for you to find music that inspired you?
I don’t know because I’m a little behind because I don’t spend a lot of time online searching for music. Not because I’m no longer curious, but it is daunting because there’s so much more out there than when I was growing up. You know, one did not realize necessarily what all the options were back then. But I think when you went to a decent record store you were pretty much looking at a lot of them. Whereas now, just the amount of online information to download, let alone walking into a place like Amoeba Music, there’s so many artists, so many releases, and even genres that I haven’t heard of. That said, I think that at a certain age, with the kind of curiosity I was describing earlier, that people do find things, and that’s there milieu. They understand it, so they’re able to find all kinds of stuff.
I’d say slow wins the race.”
I was actually a buyer at a record store in Los Angeles for many years, and at one point I was the independent rock and import buyer, and at that time, which was the early eighties, one could listen to pretty much everything that was ordered. You couldn’t do that now. That said, at least it’s nice that people are being creative. (Laughs) There’s just a lot out there. But truly, what you said about niches has just become increasingly true and I think the reasons for that can be traced back to the eighties in the Reagan years when everything became extremely formatted on FM radio, and really segregated. And I think that had to do with advertising, with targeting an audience with some kind of marketing. And it was also easy to do then because, not to say anything against eighties music, because there’s plenty of eighties music that I like, a lot of the bands at that time that were very popular did whole albums of the same song.
So it was really easy for a promotions department of a record label or a programmer at a radio station to get behind these records, because it didn’t really take a lot of attention to listen to the whole record as opposed to a Jimi Hendrix record or a Jefferson Airplane record, where you’re listening to all different kinds of material on one album.
Or your new record, “Draw Breath,” there’s some very disparate styles on it.
I think ultimately what you’re hearing there is kind of the same mixture and the same compositional improvisational parameters, if you will, that I was attempting to work on with my twin brother in high school. Those things haven’t changed all that much for me. I think that stylistic diversity, where it was once daunting and perhaps anxiety-producing, because people like reviewers, or even me, were saying, “Where’s this going?” I think that now it’s not so odd. I think because of world communication, because of a lot of interest in new things, and because generations come up that have absorbed a lot of different information, this kind of diversity is perhaps less suspect. And in my case, I think I’m just lucky that I’ve lived long enough and continued playing long enough to have it not be nonsensical.
Yea, imagine Coltrane living in this post-modern world. Speaking of Coltrane, you grew up listening to a lot of rock, obviously, at what point were you introduced to jazz and to Coltrane and what did that do to the way you thought about music.
One thing I’ll say about Coltrane related to what we were talking about before is I think, in terms of a post-modern world, he was already going there. In his later life, his interest in Indian music and in the harp and African percussion and all these different things was, I think, leading him to a palette definitely beyond the so-called traditional jazz. But, anyway, what happened with the jazz exposure was that because my twin brother Alex was such a Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart obsessive, a friend of ours who also played guitar lent us a John Coltrane record that was his dad’s and thought my brother might like it because he liked all that instrumental Frank Zappa stuff. (Laughs) So we put on the record and “Africa” was the first piece, and it was definitely like an entire world that we had never been aware of was revealed. Pretty much from that moment on, we set out to investigate where this music had come from, because we had no clue, living in West Los Angeles and a quasi-suburban life, that this music had been developing. When I found out that Coltrane had already passed away, I felt so gypped. I thought, “Wait a minute. No one told us about this.”
And around the same time, on underground rock station KDPC, my brother heard the opening track from the Tony Williams’ “Lifetime: Turn it Over” record called “To Whom It May Concern (Them),” and that completely blew his mind, and he ran out and found that record. And that’s how we traced Tony Williams to Miles Davis, and John McLaughlin back to Miles Davis, and pretty much connected the dots from there. Then my brother got really into Eric Dolphy and the Art Ensemble of Chicago in high school. At the same time we were listening to progressive rock, which was flourishing in the early to mid-seventies, all those aesthetic young British lads. So, again, as was the case in a lot of that sixties pop and rock, sound was the order of the day and instrumental texture and creative expression that was wide open — you know, early Weather Report, Herbie Hancock’s septet, you know what I mean?
I heard (Carlos) Santana say one time, and it seemed really pretentious at that time, how guitarists are just born with their talents and it’s kinda something that’s just either in your DNA or not. You didn’t receive much formal training … what do you think about that statement?
I think that in my case, all I was born with was a love of sound, and I don’t think I evinced any high degree of talent early on at all. As opposed to my brother Alex who was really always good, and he’s one of those guys who can pretty much pick up any instrument and get his way around on it rather quickly, and I never had that ability either. I think that if I believed in “the race” or if I believed in “winning,” I’d say slow wins the race. My life has been a very late-blooming, slow and circuitous path. I think I just gradually improved because of my desire to play the guitar, and I don’t think I was born with any flash of brilliance that then led me to be who I am now. I think it’s rather the opposite for me.
There’s something beautiful about that in the sense that it’s a testament to faith and persistence and there’s kind of fearlessness in that, and I wonder how you deal with fear and what inhibits you most.
Oh my god, you’re asking really good questions. They’re really kinda deep, and that would be a hard one to get in to adequately, but I can say that what speaks to this is that I just finished a recording of me doing overdubs that I’d been thinking about for over 20 years, the material of which is completely not from 20 years ago except for this one piece, but just the idea of it is old, and it’s called “Coward.” And the whole idea that you asked about, the whole question, is part of the name of the record. And I think, as opposed possibly to Carlos, who maybe had some kind of warrior-like fearlessness that catapulted him into the scene in San Francisco and made him rise so quickly, I on the other hand was always unsure of myself and rather a neurotic kind of self-doubting person. The one thing that I never really doubted was my desire to play and my desire to play some kind of original music. So, I’m not really an agonizer aesthetically, as much as I’m an agonizer sort of personally.
of original music.”
Although I played with a lot of my musical heroes, even in my twenties, I’m not sure how I did that because my abilities are certainly not that of some of the greats. I definitely never hustled to get gigs. I never tried to get gigs; I don’t have any business sense at all. Seriously, the one thing that I’m not afraid of is sound. So the one thing that I’ve maintained is my desire to make sound and to create mostly spontaneously, if not partially spontaneously, with like-minded individuals, which I think is a good thing.
Music is not, like some artistic endeavors, a solitary act, I guess unless you’re a composer. So I think that by playing with people better than me, by playing with people who are sympathetic or inspiring, I’ve been able to just keep going and always be happy in the moment, when the music is happening. So that’s the thing that keeps me going, where I’m not afraid. When the music is happening, life makes much more sense to me.
Can you talk about the difference with the song writing process with the Nels Cline Singers versus with Wilco? To what extent does Jeff (Tweedy) allow you to contribute to the writing process, and when you do step away from Wilco to play with your trio, do you find it hard to stretch back out from the confines of Wilco and back into a more improvisational style?
I think that, for me, any amount of soloing or finger wiggling isn’t really a requirement for enjoyment. Playing with Wilco, just like any other thing, even if it’s me improvising in a duet with someone, is about being part of the orchestra or being in the moment. And I think I have a lot of latitude in Wilco. And I don’t feel reined in; a lot of people think I probably do, but if anyone reins me in, it’s me. And I do that by choice because I’m trying to serve the song and trying to serve the music. And, currently, in Wilco at this moment, Jeff’s writing a lot of songs, so what we’re doing right now is learning Jeff’s songs and coming up with some at-least-temporary arrangements that everyone can enjoy listening to played back on tape. How they end up sounding when we go to record them after sifting through them … it may change. I ask a lot of questions. Sometimes I’m not sure exactly what to contribute, so I might lay back for awhile before I decide what’s gonna possibly work in any given situation. That is all fine for me, and it’s not inhibiting. It’s all part of music making. And as long as I enjoy the music and the people with whom I’m playing music, I’m happy to play three notes if that is what’s required.
makes much more sense to me.”
In fact, I don’t really enjoy listening to myself solo all that much, and I got some constructive criticism from a record producer one time who said that my records of my own music don’t have enough of my soloing on them. And I had to tell him, “Well, I don’t really like listening to that as much as I do to a piece, say, on ‘The Giant Pin,” “The Ballad of Devon Hoff,” which doesn’t have any guitar solos but is a satisfying piece of music to listen to, with the open-tuned guitar.
I wonder if there’s a connection there, between growing up a “mirror twin” and the way you feel about being in a band, in that you learned and felt comfortable early on in life as being part of a unit and being supportive and not being self-serving.
Well, I think I can say with some confidence that my brother and I are both kind of like these caring-nurturing types of players in different situations. And sort of enablers, if not catalysts, for chemistry. So I think maybe you’re on to something there that I hadn’t really wanted to ponder too much. But to answer your earlier question about composition in The (Nels Cline) Singers, yea, they’re my tunes, and I usually boil them down in to two categories: one being the obsessive, fascistic, didactic category where I have some very specific ideas and they tend to be something maybe related to the idea of resonance, emotion, maybe a sense of drama that I think both my brother Alex and I seem to be drawn to. I think a piece like “The Ballad of Devin Hoff” is a good example of that. I think pieces like “The Angel of Angels” on “Draw Breath,” they’re not so jamming or solo-driven. They’re really about expressing a mood or a feeling or some sort of sound that I like to live in.
And then there are the pieces that are much more about blowing and three-way interplay where Scott (Amendola, drummer) and Devin contribute equally, sometimes to the destruction of my structure as much as to the construction, and I get out of my own way as the didactic fascist and we just blow. That’s where the free jazz comes in because although stylistically we may sometimes start playing dark metal, it’s not always structured. It’s arrived at spontaneously. I try to do both because truly my desire in having my own band is to play things that are enjoyable to listen to and fun to play with people that I like to play with. So there’s sort of that mixture. The electric guitar, also, I think is quite serviceable in this manner. It’s able to go to a lot of different areas.
Yea, if it doesn’t give you an anxiety attack thinking about all the different places you can go with it.
It’s funny that you say that because many, many years ago, one of my favorite guitar players in the world, John Abercrombie, was interviewed and he was describing what he called “option anxiety,” which is just thinking about how many different ways one can change the sound of the electric guitar. Even just changing, like he has done, from pick to finger. Or changing the string gauge or changing the amplifier or the pick up. Let alone the introduction of reverb, delay, effects pedals, distortion. It’s an interesting thing. To me, that’s the beauty of it.
There is a beauty about instrumental jazz, in that, unlike novelists or songwriters whose ideas and words may get stale or boring, there seems to be infinite possibilities to create.
And then in my case, as the sort of poster boy for the late bloomer, literally I look at ever year that I live as better than the previous year. And I think that right now I have so many marvelous opportunities, and really more work than I can actually do, I feel like I’ve just begun. I’ve got a lot yet to accomplish.
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Comments
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By tweety
July 12, 2008 11:10 AM | Link to this
matt: superstar interview. hope yer proud.
By Shannon
July 13, 2008 3:43 PM | Link to this
Great interview, from both participants.
By kcreb
July 15, 2008 4:55 PM | Link to this
Agreed that this is a superb interview. I know it’s not always easy with some musicians, but this site needs more of this. Kudos.
By Ihor Gowda
July 15, 2008 5:03 PM | Link to this
Wow - great show AND great interview!