FIRESIDE CHAT WITH NELS CLINE


Nels Cline is a local hero round these parts. But it wasn't until I was in Boston at the tail end of the summer of '99 that I was impressed, really impressed. I was in a used record store and a remake of Instellar Space caught my eye. I bought it on a whim and listened to it on the grueling plane ride back on TWA, which must stand for The Worst Airline, with a stop off in St. Louis (you can address sympathy emails to fred@jazzweekly.com). I must have listened to the CD cover to cover at least half a dozen times. I was hooked. It was the most adventurous guitar record I had heard in years. The Wadada Leo Smith Yo Miles! record, which Cline was on is close. Buy it now. If you don't have the money, give up the pink slip to your car. What is a sports utility worth these days anyway. Gas prices are through the roof. You'll thank me later. So here he is, the man with balls of steel to have made this record, unedited and in his own words.


FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.

NELS CLINE: I started playing guitar in earnest, probably around 1967, the height of creativity in popular music. I was initially into surf music as a little kid. By 1967, things had gotten truly psychedelic and obviously Jimi Hendrix was a huge inspiration. My twin brother Alex and I were versed heavily in the rock and roll scene of the late '60s and early '70s. Then in 1971, a friend of ours loaned us a copy of John Coltrane's His Greatest Years, Vol. 1, which he had bought for his poet dad's birthday and he thought that Alex would like it because he was so into Frank Zappa. So we put on the record and quite simply, ever since then, our paths changed. That began our desire to learn more about this kind of music. We felt we had missed some huge movement in music. I think my idea of jazz prior to that was my dad's big band records and Ella Fitzgerald records with Nelson Riddle and maybe some cartoonish idea of what bebop sounded like, something fast and wild. Coltrane's sound and Eric Dolphy's orchestration, the whole thing was so immediately appealing, but at the same time, so dark and mysterious that we had to know more about everyone that ever got near John Coltrane, which of course led us to not just Eric Dolphy, but to Miles, and from there you can pretty much get the whole thing. So that is what happened. That was around 1971. We were about fifteen.


FJ: What stood out about Trane?

NELS CLINE: Well, certainly it's his tone. There is something so commanding about it. It was truly like nothing I had never heard before. There is something about his tone, which I ended up reading, was in his earlier days very controversial. He was considered very nasal and very dry. People thought he was very dry, that he just practiced when he soloed. Whatever that tone is, for me, it had an immediate appeal and it was very vocal, but there is a certain kind of reserve in Coltrane's style that makes it somehow at times, maybe all the time, seem even more emotional.


FJ: Trane has an uncanny ability to appeal to the youth.

NELS CLINE: It is fascinating to me to have read later all the anti-jazz controversy, because certainly jazz as a tradition is not my tradition. I'm just this white kid that grew up in West Los Angeles and I was rock and roll obsessed. Popular music at that time for so many different artists was about how far out you could go, how much you could do to blow people's minds. That is why mind-bending songs were in the pop mainstream. So to hear these guys playing instrumental music, which for us was kind of the main thrust. We were never lyric bent. I'm sorry, Fred, that everything I say was we, but everything I did growing up was with my twin brother. We played music together. We listened to music together everyday. Our paths are inextricably linked. That is sort of the thing about being a twin in some ways, I guess. To hear these people playing acoustic music that had so much color and timbre and mood, it was immediately appealing. Certainly, I don't think that we had ever been drawn or repelled by the saxophone, but it was never a main thing with us. He just made us sit up. Later, hearing Eric Dolphy had that same effect, especially on my brother. Interestingly, my brother also immediately got into Ornette and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. He pretty much hit the outskirts right away. It took me a long time to warm up to Ornette. I was really one of those Coltrane acolytes for years. Certainly, later, Ornette became one of the key figures in my musical life. I was also a philosophy student around this time. I was not a music major in school. I was a philosophy major.


FJ: What college were you attending?

NELS CLINE: Occidental College.


FJ: In Glendale.

NELS CLINE: In Eagle Rock, actually, where I now live. I didn't get a degree or anything. I left after a year. I was really interested in the metaphysical and Western philosophy and I think Coltrane, the more I learned about him, the more he was my guy. You have to remember around this time was Mahavishnu Orchestra and all that kind of Indian mysticism that was infusing the jazz scene. That appealed to me greatly.


FJ: It is telling that Alex was engrossed in Dolphy.

NELS CLINE: Well, my brother bought as many Dolphy records as he could find. I heard a lot of Dolphy because he used to listen to a lot of Dolphy and I think that the record that we were most taken by was Iron Man, which has a very atmospheric kind of ambience to it in the way it was recorded. My brother was relating it to pieces that he liked in Frank Zappa. It is funny on how much I learned about the music since then, how we were sort of undaunted that there were no guitars and although it made it difficult to figure out what I was going to do with the instrument.


FJ: That is a tough gig to have Trane as your primary influence and you are a guitar player.

NELS CLINE: Yeah (laughing). It's funny, Fred, that even as I was someone enamored by Jimi Hendrix, I never tried to play like Jimi Hendrix. I used music as a point of departure and not as something to imitate eventually. I thought that Jimi Hendrix's sound was pretty much untouchable and couldn't be imitated, so I never tried to sound like him and then people came out sounding like him, it was not only shocking but very offensive to me. A lot of times, great voices in music spawn generations of imitators that almost destroy the music. I don't know why I never chose the path of imitation, but I think it was because I felt incapable of playing well (laughing). So I thought what I would do is the integrity of the composition rather than my own technical mastery or listen, I can play John Coltrane's lines on the guitar. I'm not bagging on that because it is amazing, but I never tried to do that. But it was confusing what sound to use on the guitar anymore. I stopped using effects completely for years. I became so frustrated that I played only acoustic for years. It is what John Abercrombie called option anxiety, talking about how many choices there are for an electric guitarist, just in terms of the sound, as opposed to blowing into a saxophone. There are ways to get different kinds of tone, but they are all basically shades of the same sound. A guitar can sound like anything at this point. Whether you play with a pick or your fingers or whether you play with light gage or heavy gage can have a huge impact, let alone all the effects that you have available now.


FJ: As twins, simply by virtue of appearance, you and Alex have a unique bond.

NELS CLINE: We were pretty much inseparable growing up. We did everything together. This is certainly not true of every twin. I have heard of twins who feud their whole lives. Certainly, I have nothing to compare my life to, because I don't know what it is like to not be a twin. We endeavored to differentiate our personalities by dressing differently. People without thinking decide that you are really half of a person. They say things to you like, "Where is your other half?" I think that perhaps there is a strong desire to assert one's identity. We were pretty much seamlessly harmonious in our pursuit. It made it easy to form bands because we usually had two-thirds or two-fourths of a band automatically and had the same aesthetic goals for the most part. Over time, our twin communication became so attune that I had to make a conscious decision to not play with Alex. It was getting too scary. We would play the same rhythmic figures and the same accents. It was starting to get almost annoying (laughing). Technically, we are what are called mirror twins, a type of identical twin. Someone recently told me at this concert of John Carter's music, this woman told me that mirror twins apparently split apart at the very last second. What we are is essentially kind of opposites, not just personality-wise. I'm left handed and he's right handed. When we were kids, if you walked up behind me if I was looking at myself in the mirror, you would think I was Alex. In other words, I look like Alex when I am looking in the mirror. Interesting also, you know, Chuck Manning, he's a mirror twin. What are the chances of that? His brother is a trumpet player.


FJ: It was ballsy of you to remake Interstellar Space. You are really putting it out there in the wind.

NELS CLINE: I know. I will preface this. As a teenager and even playing music in my twenties, I was a completely nervous, self-effacing to a fault kind of person. If I thought about it, I would have never done something like this. There is no way. I would have been too scared. I never had any compunction about releasing material because I was always confident in the intent of what was trying to be accomplished. There were a lot of musicians that I played with that I later found out resented me for releasing records because I am not as good as John Coltrane. They never did anything very creative even though they are incredible musicians. I have never worried about it because I have always thought of myself as being who I am. That said, I was never the kind of guy that learned a million songs and could play like so and so. The idea seemed impossible. As the years have progressed and I have gotten a lot more playing under my belt and played in a lot of different kinds of contexts, I have relaxed a lot about myself and about my playing. As ridiculous as the idea of covering Interstellar Space seemed, I just didn't take it so seriously that I felt it couldn't be done. I wanted it to be an homage. It did start out as just a joke, which was to say that I was playing with Gregg and he was playing his vibraphone with amazing speed and I had never played with him on drums. I just joked that we might as well play Interstellar Space. I think something about that statement stuck in Gregg's mind. He saw that there might be a reason to do that, that it was an interesting idea. The reason we decided to do it was not just to say how much we admired this music, but also to submit our alliance with Coltrane's later music, which in certain camps is maligned. People look at Coltrane's later music as some kind of desperate search that went nowhere. Certainly in some camps, free jazz in general is given the short stick, as I see people like Ayler and all the people that we were listening to on the New York scene. That music seems to have not gotten its due from the historians. This music wasn't really taken all that seriously. I think that Gregg and I decided that we would make a statement. That music has been extremely important to us. It pretty much has affected the way we play and think. That is why we decided to do it and risk being ridiculed. It was an excuse to have a really, really intense time playing music together and challenge ourselves. I think I thought about all the elements later, but it was too late then.


FJ: The album on the Atavistic label (www.atavistic.com) was released more than half a year ago. I was in Boston in October and went into a used record store about a block and a half from the Berklee School of Music and was rummaging through the used jazz CDs and ran into a copy of your release. I bought it as something to listen to on my plane ride home. I must have listened to that thing half a dozen times from Logan to LAX. I have been driving the bandwagon for this thing and finally it is getting some pub.

NELS CLINE: Yeah, I never have any concept of how the records are doing, but I think that for one thing, it helps that it is not my music (laughing). Also, Atavistic is well distributed so I think it is doing well. It is funny. I never think about such things when I release records. Most of them are on such tiny labels. There is so much out there and what I am doing is so unobvious that it takes a little time.


FJ: Michael Dorf has broken ground for a Knitting Factory here in Los Angeles, what impact do you see and has he spoken to you about your possible role there?

NELS CLINE: I just can't handle the idea of booking anymore. I can't handle the idea of people calling for gigs everyday. It had its moment for me. Without getting too far into this, the idea of working for the Knitting Factory is a little too iffy for me. It puts me in a position that I just don't want to be in. Just as a booker, every time you go out and listen to something, someone hits you up for a gig. I did meet with people from the Knit and I am going to call Dorf this week. I am perfectly willing to consult with them. I think they have a really healthy curiosity about the scene here and I think they are pretty knowledgeable about it at this point. I want to make sure that the locals are considered and that we are not just tokens.


FJ: You told me in a conversation we had before that you don't like to play in over 21 clubs, why?

NELS CLINE: I did a lot of touring in rock clubs and rock venues all over America and I built up a following of a younger audience, which I feel that college kids because they are the ones coming to the shows, not only deserve to be exposed to everything, but that audience has the most open mind. I think this is true from my own experience and if I have a choice to play a show, I want to be able to play to everybody that wants to hear the music. The main thrust of a gig sometimes is selling drinks. I am committed to it philosophically and there are people underage who want to hear me play and if they cannot get in, I am shooting myself in the foot. The youth is not just our future, to me they are the most open-minded and the most curious because they have not become jaded and stale yet.


Fred Jung is the Editor-In-Chief and Interview mogul. Comments? Email Fred.