Wire Magazine’s Invisible Jukebox – Hal Willner - Part 2 - Tested by John Kruth
“Church” - James “Blood” Ulmer – Odyssey, (Columbia Records) 1984
Willner: I don’t know the song but I know it’s Blood Ulmer instantly. He’s just a monster. I was lucky to have seen him early on in ’75 or ’76 when he was into some different scenes. But I didn’t know him. I saw him on the same bill with Carla [Bley] at Town Hall. He was singing a lot at the time.
JK: It’s “Church” from Odyssey, his trio with Charlie Burnham on violin.
Willner: For a few years I was doing multi-artist shows for the Canadian Consulate at Prospect Park, [in Brooklyn]. We did Leonard Cohen and then I chose Neil Young, largely as an excuse to study his music. I often use subject matters that I’m not that familiar with so I have an excuse to dive into their material. Blood just seemed like a natural for this material. He played the hell out of “Fuckin’ Up.” His playing has the kind of power that gives you shivers. When he’s having a good night, it’s as good as music gets, period. Everything you want from music is there - all the beauty of jazz, the power of the best rock and roll and punk, and that night it was happening. Both James and Charlie played at the Bill Withers show. What can I say about Blood other than I wish he was more recognized and I’m sure that he will be. You put him in front of a crowd of Neil Young fans and their jaws drop.
JK: It was a brilliant move Hal.
Willner: No it wasn’t. I think it was obvious. I have very low self-esteem as you know but I do have the best taste in the world [Laughs].
JK: Well, you are in The Rock Snob’s Dictionary.
“Bad Rapping of the Marquis De Sade” - Lord Buckley - Bad Rapping of the Marquis De Sade. (Re-released by World Pacific Records) 1996
Willner: [Instantly] That’s “The Marquis De Sade” by Lord Buckley.
JK: That’s ridiculous, he barely got his first lick off before you called it.
Willner: Initially I was a Lenny Bruce guy but then, like everyone else I heard the hit, “The Naz.” I have all of his records and for years they meant a great deal to me. Did you ever see the tape of him with Groucho Marx? You can tell when you watch it that Buckley was told to take pauses so Groucho could make comments. What a talent. He invented this persona that was amazing and you know he was like that off-stage too.
JK: When you performed The Marquis De Sade years ago at the St. Marks Church was Buckley the inspiration behind it?
Willner: I was on the board of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project at the time. They actually had some trust in me. I can’t actually remember the inspiration other than it was an excuse to read it. It reads so well out loud, especially the on subjects like religion and the way he viewed women.
JK: You had mostly women on the show as I recall.
Willner: Chloe Webb read a piece about a priest seducing a young kid. And there was Lilli Taylor, Karen Mantler, and Stanley Tucci, who is a great, first-rate actor. Nearly all the music that went underneath was improvised. The show could have used a little editing, like most of my shows but the problem is that you put these things together and you don’t know what it is because the run-through is the performance. But a certain magic happens when one does these things. A few shows like the Edgar Allan Poe and Leonard Cohen show I’ve done a few times but it gets a little more slick and less dangerous. I don’t like to rationalize everything. As Doctor John would say, “It’s what it is.” But I’d love to do that show again.
“Solo Dancer” - Charles Mingus - The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (Impulse) 1963
Willner: That’s Mingus, of course. One thing about doing these projects is that I tend not to listen to the artist’s music again for a long time. The Mingus record [Weird Nightmare - Meditations on Mingus] was the last multi-artist/concept album I did of my own conception. All the rest have been jobs for hire. At that point I think the tribute album thing had gotten out of control. I never meant to make “tribute” records. I didn’t start it. There were some charity records, the Neil Young project for the bridge, which had all alternative bands and John Carlin did the Cole Porter album for AIDS [Red Hot and Blue] which was all superstars. It was a natural thing to happen. It was like vaudeville, with different people doing different tracks. When I started with the Nino Rota record I got Debbie Harry and Chris Stein next to Jaki Byard and Carla [Bley] it got attention in the mainstream press and it built from there. Each record got more and more wild, culminating in the Disney project (Stay Awake). I felt like Cecil B. DeMille. I was out of my mind. And this one, [Weird Nightmare ] just got more and more insane and it was time to stop.
JK: How did you match up Harry Partch’s music with Mingus?
Willner: I don’t know… I was listening to a lot of Mingus as well as a lot of Folkways records and early Nonsuch recordings of monkey chants and I’d returned to [George Harrison’s] Wonderwall and the soundtrack to Satyricon and somehow it all seemed related. Then one day Frannie [Francis Thumm] took me to a Partch concert. The instruments, from their names, like “cloud chamber bowls” to the sound of them, which were basically mutations of normal instruments, were amazing. So I asked if we could use them and somehow we got permission. We did the album over a week and we hired people like the beautiful, late Don Alias who climbed up on a ladder in order to play the bass marimba, and Bill Frisell and Michael Blair and Greg Cohen.
JK: You made that album in a week?
Willner: Pretty much, except for the two sessions we did with Bobby Previte, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts. Meanwhile, people like Vernon Reid, Robert Quine and Elvis [Costello] were all stopping by. It was an amazing time. I was able to pull people in to make these records, coming fresh out of Night Music and having made the earlier records. We had Leonard Cohen with Diamanda Galas on the same track. I pieced it all together, like a map. And once again, at the time it was not an appreciated record [Laughs]. Years later it seems that people love it. It found a cult. I still get calls and people write about it and it’s still in print! There’s something magical about that record, the way it sounds.
JK: With its montages and the way its edited, I always thought of it as the fourth side to Rahsaan [Roland Kirk]’s Three-Sided Dream in Audio Color.
Willner: Well, you know who I learned from. Joel Dorn always said that his son Adam [Dorn AKA Mocean Worker] walked with his acceptable side and I got the weird side.
JK: The reason I picked The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady was because none of it appeared on Weird Nightmare.
Willner: Well, Sue Mingus was there for the recording and she was very open to anything with Charles’ music. She was incredibly encouraging but she asked me not to use it as it was written as an entire piece and Charles wouldn’t have wanted me to use sections of it and I honored that.
T. Rex - “Summer Deep” from T. Rex, (original release - Reprise Records) 1970
Willner: That’s early T. Rex, with the color cover and the two of them standing there. I forget the title of it.
JK: It’s just called T.Rex, the first electric record.
Willner: Let’s see if I know the song. That’s beautiful. That’s Tony Visconti [producing]. Is that Flo and Eddie on this?
JK: Yeah. It’s “Summer Deep”
Willner: I just love their voices. They’re so much fun. I recorded them twice doing background vocals. They put on a great show in the studio doing a stand-up act. But Bolan, the second the music comes on it just puts you in his world. This is taking me back in strange memories. I first heard Marc Bolan from a friend of mine, he was a priest’s son. He had a job in a graveyard with tough types and he’d come home and play T. Rex to calm down. He was so real. One could feel that and tell there was no pretension there, which is hard to say about anyone else from the glitter period. I don’t know anybody who's heard him that doesn’t love T. Rex.
“‘T’ain’t No Sin” (with William Burroughs “singing”) - Tom Waits - The Black Rider (Island) 1993
Willner: Okay, The Black Rider. Where do I start? I’ve been very fortunate to have worked with Robert Wilson a few times. I’ve known Tom for over twenty years and we’ve worked together. There’s [Bassist] Greg Cohen who arranged a lot of the stuff and William Burroughs who I did three records with. I had nothing to do with it but I knew about The Black Rider. I was down at Burroughs’s house in Lawrence, Kansas and heard about it and saw a few pictures. And Tom told me, “Yeah, he’s scary” [Laughs]. I saw William’s original text, most of which wasn’t used because Wilson doesn’t like a lot of text, and I heard a few of the demos beforehand. I remember the overture at the Thalia Theatre on opening night. Tom and Greg had researched a lot of carnival music. It was so loud and so amazing it almost blew you out of the theater. I felt like I was in a Tex Avery cartoon. It was magical. I was very, very lucky to have met Tom when he moved to New York in ’84 or ’85, when he did Rain Dogs. I was just starting the Kurt Weil record at the time and was trying to find him. Meanwhile Doc Pomus told Tom to call me because he was looking for musicians. So it was just the strangest thing. And we recorded [Brecht and Weil’s] “What Keeps Mankind Alive?” What he had done starting with Swordfishtrombones actually invented a new type of music and recording technique. How many people since have made records that sound like Tom Waits records? He’s influenced basic record making, whether it’s P.J. Harvey or Beck. Let alone that Tom is among the top three greatest living songwriters, if not higher. Beyond that, it’s this sound that he creates and I don’t know what it is. I got to see a little bit of that, working with him. He uses real echo chambers, with animals running in the room! He’s one of the few artists today that when he’s got a new project I’ll just sit and listen to it from top to bottom without shuffling around. Orphans was just an amazing Pandora’s Box - sixty songs, all gems. And I was proud to have the two songs we’d done together on there.
JK: How did you wind up working with Burroughs and what was that like?
Willner: Well, Allen [Ginsberg], once he entered a good situation, he brought his people in. Once we made this record with Allen [The Lion for Real] for Island Records, he said, “Why don’t you record William?” I was like, “Oh, really..” I had worked with William for a few hours on Saturday Night Live, the year that Michael O’Donoghue and Terry Southern were there [1981]. They brought him on the show and Lauren Hutton introduced him. He read from Naked Lunch. It was really wild. I had put the “Star Spangled Banner” behind his reading of “Twilight’s Last Gleaming.” With all the avant-gardists and people using electronics, it’s amazing how great he sounded with a real orchestra behind him. He was an American writer, a dark American writer but an American writer. Why don’t we approach it like he’s Mark Twain? Put Aaron Copland behind him. Why be weird? So we got all these old recordings from the NBC orchestra and recorded him reading in his living room. I was just hanging with William those days [1987], capturing conversations at dinner, having him do an old radio show and read from the Bible. It was insane. Lenny Pickett wrote some Biblical-type music which we used underneath him reading “The Sermon on the Mount.” And we used old samples of the NBC orchestra and had Sonic Youth, Donald Fagen and John Cale add little touches. Even though it was all loose, I always need to start with a solid idea. The first night I got to really hang out with him, of course I tried to keep up with him and we did a bit of drinking. He liked Coca-Cola mixed with vodka. You don’t really taste the vodka and it hits you like a ton of bricks. He was talking about Busby Berkley and Marlene Dietrich and started to sing “Falling In Love Again” in German. I said, “Will you sing that on the record?” He said, “Yes,” and that was the beginning of the record. And once again the purists attacked me for it. I just like to expose people to the same journey I’m on. So now what? I’m just sitting here in my studio, with all this memorabilia from my childhood. May this be a lesson to you all!