Tag Archives for Fugazi

"Like Frank Sinatra and Huey Newton rolled into one" — Ian MacKaye on FELA KUTI (1999)

Ian MacKaye on FELA KUTI
interviewed by Jay Babcock

This short article was originally published in Mean Magazine in 1999 as one of the many sidebar to the massive feature on Fela Kuti (see below for links to the other articles that comprised the feature). Mean’s publisher, Kashy Khaledi, wanted to have contemporary artists of a certain notoriety talk about their admiration for Fela, who we knew would be an unknown, slightly outre quantity for most of the magazine’s readership. These sidebar interviews would be a way in to digging Fela for some of the less-curious readers.

It was a good idea, and easily executed, as there were plenty of Fela admirers ready to testify—including Ian MacKaye, a founding member of Minor Threat and Fugazi, and the owner-operator of the Washington, DC-based Dischord Records (which is still in business).

I interviewed Ian by telephone in late summer ’99…

Q: When did you first come across Fela?

Ian Mackaye: I probably first heard him in the early ’80s. There was a deejay here in town that used to play him at shows. I was working at a record store starting in 1983 or ’84 and some of his records came through then, and I was attracted to them because they’re so completely primitive looking…a lot of them had no art at all, they were almost just like 12-inch things… Of course the songs were like 15-20 minutes long, but they were like punk records, so I was attracted to them on an aesthetic level. Then I started listening to them. I really had no idea who he was or what was going on…I thought the music was interesting. I listened to a lot of go-go music here in Washington, and there’s a lot of similarities. Also it had a really organic feel to it which I was always really drawn to.

Somewhere in the mid-’80s, I saw King Sunny Ade, who’s a bit of a lighter version [of African pop], and at least to my knowledge not nearly as politicized…And then I started getting real interested in Fela cuz I was like, ‘This other guy is into some very serious issues.” He seemed way more punk to me. So I had him on the brain. I just started picking up things here and there…I got the biography, Fela, Fela: This Bitch of a Life in London. And in the back of this book they have a discography, and IT BLEW MY MIND how many records he had done. I have seen a FRACTION of those in my life.

I think that anyone who reads that book would just know that this guy was coming from such a totally different place, and he was SO hardcore in what he was doing. I used to tell people that Fela is sort of like Frank Sinatra and Huey Newton rolled into one—he filled stadiums and at the same time was the most aggressively anti-government guy you can imagine. He had the dough and the power to actually really make a stir. He was an originator, an innovator, and he clearly brought a lot of people together in one form or another. He also had a lot of fuckin’ nerve—to leave your mother’s coffin at the gate of the palace…? [laughs in awe]

Q: It puts a lot of things in perspective, doesn’t it?

Mackaye: It definitely does. Some of the most publicly radical American musicians, their great acts of defiance are always these sort of paltry drinking offenses or sexual offenses, hese kinds of things where you’re like, [sarcastically] ‘Okay that’s really radical.’ Fela actually had a political agenda that he apparently was willing to really suffer for.

“Fela: King of the Invisible Art”—main article

TONY ALLEN on Fela Kuti, Afrobeat, solo career, more

GINGER BAKER on Fela Kuti

LESTER BOWIE on Fela Kuti

BILL LASWELL on Fela Kuti

BOOTSY COLLINS on Fela Kuti

DAVID BYRNE on Fela Kuti

FLEA Aand JOHN FRUSCIANTE (Red Hot Chili Peppers) on Fela Kuti

Fela! is now playing on Broadway at the Eugene O’Neil Theatre. Info: http://felaonbroadway.com/index.php

Here’s a review of the earlier off-Broadway production of Fela! from C & D’s column in Arthur No. 31 (Sept 2008).

Flea and John Frusciante on FELA KUTI (1999 interview)

Flea and John Frusciante on FELA KUTI
interviewed by Jay Babcock

This little article was originally published in Mean Magazine in 1999 as part of a massive feature section on Fela Kuti (see below for links to the other articles that comprised the feature). Mean’s publisher, Kashy Khaledi, wanted to have contemporary artists of a certain notoriety talk about their admiration for Fela, who we knew would be an unknown, slightly outre quantity for most of the magazine’s readership. These sidebar interviews would be a way in to digging Fela for some of the less-curious readers. It was a good idea, and easily executed, as there were plenty of Fela admirers ready to testify—including bassist Flea and guitarist John Frusciante, the more musicianly members of the tremendously popular Red Hot Chili Peppers, who had recorded a b-side called “Fela’s Cock” in 1991. I talked with the two of them together at John’s Silver Lake apartment in Spring ’99…

Q: When did you first hear Fela, or hear about him?

Flea: I was playing with James White, who described Fela as “the James Brown of Africa.” That’s how I found out about him. I just went out and bought the first record I found in a store, Expensive Shit. And a greatest hits record with “Gentleman” and “Lady” on it. And in the next year, he got out of jail and he came and he played at the Olympic Auditorium. I went to go see him play and it was one of the most AWESOME things I EVER saw in my life. He played for about four hours, like three songs. It was the greatest thing I ever heard: It was incredible! People went crazy, the whole place was on fire! I just remember being enthralled by the music. I was totally entranced. He had freedom to play as long as he want, say what he want, did what he want, he was just like walk onstage in his underwear, smoking joints, rocking out, counting out tunes, long solos.

What was the scene like onstage?

Flea: There was this whole big band. and the musicians were very distinct, playing their parts very well, just grooving their asses off, and the dancers were really sexual, you know. They were wearing some kind of outfits and they were on all fours in the front of the stage with their asses facing the audience, doing some wildly sexual humping movements. It was all choreographed—

John Frusciante: They do that thing where they syncopate their asses, the girls who are singing backing vocals, like he says, they line up and their asses are facing the audience, and all their asses are doing the same thing: one cheek is going up and down and the other cheek is going left and right. They’re all doing the same thing. They’ve got like hundreds and hundreds of muscles in their asses that you don’t see a girl in America having…

John, when did you first hear Fela?

John: I first heard him because in David Byrne and Brian Eno interviews they would talk about the fact that he was a big influence on the sound of the album Remain in Light which was an album I bought when it came out in 1980. But I bought a Fela record in ’84…Black President…I remember I just fell in love with it right away. I mean I went crazy, I was excited and moved. It really connected with me. I got Black President, and then I would learn the saxophone solos on the guitar. Now I’m much more into playing along with the guitar parts, because I find a lot of value in just playing five notes or six notes or ten notes or whatever it is, over and over and over and over, and thinking about the relationships between all the instruments. With Fela’s music you can really trip out on it. The relationships between all the parts…. Total mental exercises. From the period when we finished the record, whenever that was, in January, around the time we finished it and for four months after that I think I was playing along with a Fela record every single day.

Flea: Fela’s just the rebel, the punk rocker! Fela’s the guy who spat in the face of all authority. And you know, Fela’s the guy, one of those rare people, that made a WHOLE style of music that is his, that you identify with him. The Afrobeat style of music, you can’t think of anyone else, you know. And Fela would never do anything to TRY and be popular. He stuck to his guns. In that way he’s like Fugazi or something, you know what I mean? In terms of not playing the game at all. He would never play a song after he recorded it. That’s like total opposite of what people do to have big audiences. For me, being just a white guy growing up in Hollywood, my image of what’s beautiful about Africa is Fela. I’ve never been to Africa, but…everything that’s beautiful about people I see in Fela. I love his music so much and to me, he’s one of those transcendent artists like Bob Marley or Billie Holiday or Miles Davis or Led Zeppelin…all those great artists that transcend everything else.

John: With Fela’s music you’ll hear a groove at the beginning of the song and you’re just happy because you know you’re gonna be hearing the same groove for ten minutes and it’s a groove that will sound good for ten minutes. That’s only certain kinds of grooves…most people that write music, they write grooves that if you had to hear it for half an hour you’d go crazy. But with Fela’s grooves, they all sound really good, hearing them forever.

Flea: Yep. All of em. Every record! The sharpness of the music and the sound of the music is so…it’s a bottomless pit of groove, you know? There’s nothing else like it. I tried to think, is there anyone else’s like it? Nothing, you know. And all the records are consistently great.

John: I’m so happy he made so many, you know?

Flea: People have gotta hear it, you know? He should be heard by everyone. …Plus, the main thing that I always liked about him, probably the most CRUCIAL element, was that his name had the same four letters as “Flea”… [laughter]

“Fela: King of the Invisible Art”—main article

TONY ALLEN on Fela Kuti, Afrobeat, solo career, more

GINGER BAKER on Fela Kuti

LESTER BOWIE on Fela Kuti

BILL LASWELL on Fela Kuti

BOOTSY COLLINS on Fela Kuti

DAVID BYRNE on Fela Kuti

Fela! is now playing on Broadway at the Eugene O’Neil Theatre. Info: http://felaonbroadway.com/index.php

Here’s a review of the earlier off-Broadway production of Fela! from C & D’s column in Arthur No. 31 (Sept 2008).

CALVIN JOHNSON (K Records, Beat Happening) on the importance of ALL-AGES gigs, and the secret history of age segregation in rock n roll

calvinscooter

photo: Danielle St. Laurent

“What’s Wrong With Having Fun?”

A History of All Ages: A conversation with Calvin Johnson

by Jay Babcock

Calvin Johnson is the founder of Olympia-based K Records. He was in Beat Happening, Halo Benders and Dub Narcotic Sound System, and recently toured the USA in tandem with Ian Svenonius. His influence on underground American music in the last 25 years is enormous; read more about him at wikipedia.

I spoke with Calvin by telephone in early 2007, following on an interview I did with former MC5 manager/poet/historian John Sinclair, published in Arthur No. 24, in which we tried to figure out how rock n roll music went from being an all-ages thing to what, all too often, it is today: age-segregated. Calvin had some ideas about that…

Arthur: Where did you see your first shows?

Calvin Johnson: I was going to some stadium shows. When I was 12 I saw Paul McCartney & Wings. That was in the Kingdome, which is like 75,000 people. I was like, This is different than the Casbah Club in Liverpool. This isn’t the same. I kind of view that as more… Having read this biography of the Beatles and their whole world in Liverpool just seemed really exciting. Very little of that excitement existed in the stadium. And I’m like, Hmm. Something went wrong here. Just shortly after that is when I started reading about punk rock and I recognized that as being within the spirit of that local scene that the Beatles came out of.

It was about two or three years later that I went to my first punk rock show which was… A band from Seattle called The Enemy played here in Olympia. Then I started attending shows in Seattle. There was an all-ages club called The Bird that was in an old warehouse, then it moved into an Oddfellows hall. They had shows twice a month at this Oddfellows hall. That was really exciting.

Arthur: How did age segregation in rock ‘n’ roll music performances start, do you think?

My knowledge is second or third-hand on these things, but in reading rock n roll histories or biographies, it seems like some of those people, like Little Richard, was playing in nightclubs and juke joints that were serving alcohol and they were mostly oriented towards adults, meaning people in their 20s and 30s.

So live music was divided in a demographic way: there were these teen-oriented events and then there were adult-oriented events, and rock n roll was viewed at first as teen-oriented music. It seemed to have been normally in these environments that are dance-oriented—the armory, the school cafeteria, gymnasium, the local union hall—might be rented for these teen events.

When people like Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis became rock stars, and they were playing at those kinds of shows where there’s 10 or 15 acts on the bill and they each do their one or two songs that are well-known, kids were still trying to dance in the aisle. [in faux announcer voice] “Can’t stop the kids from dancing! They’re dancing in the aisles! Crazy! Bedlam has broken out!”

You look at films like Charlie Is My Darling—the Rolling Stones on tour in Ireland in ‘65—and you see it’s sort of a transition to this more concert-type situation, where it’s not necessarily a dance, kids are still dancing, and the set-up seems so nascent, they don’t have huge P.A.s or amps, they just have their regular amps and drums, little vocal public address system, and it’s …very quaint.

But it seems as though in the Northwest here, there was a circuit more or less of all-ages teen dances, which were held at various either hall-type situations or clubs that catered to teenagers and…

Arthur: How is that different from a sock-hop?

A sock-hop is more like high school dance where people are just dancing in their stockinged feet. It seems like the demographic is what divided things rather than a legal situation. The demographic was, ‘only kids would want to go to that show.’

Arthur: ‘Who else would want to?’

Yeah. It’s difficult to say, because I’m just piecing this all together, I didn’t live through it, but it appears that it had this vibe that as the audience for rock n roll starts to age into the ‘60s, and people were in their 20s and still interested in rock n roll, the focus changed. I blame the Beatles for that, because they created the atmosphere for where every rock band was suddenly Beethoven, and was creating “Great Works.” So it was more like when you go to the concert symphony orchestra and everyone is paying attention in this way and dancing is almost like an insult. It’s not that the Beatles had that attitude, but I think that the way that their music developed, people started to view music that way, and then these more serious prog rock bands came along and people suddenly forgot all about having fun. What’s wrong with having fun?

Continue reading →