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Q: Jackson, are the terms "musician" and "activist" okay when it comes to your job description?
A: Oh, I never objected to being called an activist. I don't think of myself that way. I'm a musician, but I certainly don't shrink from the name because I think that to be an activist is to be engaged with what's going on in the world and in your community.
But I think that there's so many people doing that. I don't know if it's really much of a distinction. I mean, there's so many people who do feel that way now. Used to be a rarity, I think. For a while. I mean, not like we made it up or anything, but there's a generation of musicians that became very active in politics when people thought it was like going to the moon without a helmet. But I always played at benefits and gatherings of people who were trying to create some kind of change and social justice. And at a certain point, I began writing songs that I could sing at these events. Before that, I had -- there were songs like -- well, songs like For Everyman, which were sort of vaguely philosophical about our reasons for being here and the potential for actually arriving at some ideal kind of society.
So at the point that it started being more specific about what that ideal society would look like, people here thought I was pretty rabidly political. I say, "here," in the United States. And in Europe, it was considered just sort of another artist speaking their mind. I think it's just more common now. I think it's actually -- I think people just accept it as a part of life.
Q: Didn't your friend, Little Steven, say, "What's more personal than your politics?"
A: Exactly... exactly. People used to divide the songs between, you know, your personal songs and your political songs. No, that's very true. And, you know, he said it and it was attributed to me (laughs). But it's just true. I mean, what is more personal than your politics? There are the people for whom life is not yet political, you know, or people who somehow stopped thinking in terms of what they could accomplish. And those people for whom everything is political or has a political meaning.
I know people here in Texas who are -- let's say that they're pro-Bush and pro the current administration. But if I engage them for very long at all, I realize that they're not political at all. They're not. They're not thinking about anything. They're not thinking about anything in terms of whether it works or whether or not it's just.
Q: It's a bumper sticker. The album we're here to talk about today, solo acoustic vol. 1, is released on Inside Recordings. It's an independent label that you oversee and you've expanded for the release of this album...
A: I like that word, "oversee." That's good. I'm going to use that myself (laughs). People say, "Oh, you have a label?" I think, yeah, but -- but that's exactly right. I oversee it.
Q: In a benevolent fashion, no doubt. But over the course of 30 years, your 12 original albums were on Asylum and Elektra Records. What made you start this label, Inside Recordings, and made you release your live album on it?
A: I just wanted to be more involved in the job. You know, of the part of the job that takes place after the record is made, I mean, it's even a sort of a generous term to say I oversee it. In fact, it's just that my partners, my managers and I, have always had to pay close attention to what happens in terms of marketing and distributing records. And in recent years -- well, I mean, for a long time, actually, we just found out that they're not doing half of what they said they would do or the record company was not really doing all that they had promised to do. So it's great to be in business for yourself. I mean, I've never had a record company telling me what kinds of things to record or whether -- I used to think, I wish I did have somebody like an A&R person to help me with the stuff. But I just never did -- or I did briefly for about a year-and-a-half once and it was -- we got into all kinds of mischief there because he knew enough to sort of pose great questions, but really not enough to really help.
How to put this? I've produced a lot of other artists at different times. And, for me, the job was done when the record was finished and then you'd see it go to a record company who either would or would not work real hard to put it across. And in some cases -- I would say in most cases, they were artists that didn't have a huge commercial potential. Like a beautiful brother and sister duo who sang in Spanish, came from Nicaragua, who live in Nicaragua, actually. Or David Lindley. I say may not have had a huge commercial potential, but is a national treasure. And it was somebody who -- who could definitely reach a lot of people. Maybe not as many as the Spice Girls or something, but that's the problem, is the record companies are more and more interested in only making those projects happen that will give them the most sales. It's like being in the bowling ball industry or something or the bean-counters thinking in terms of moving so many units. Instead of dealing with what the music is.
But it's around. The commercial world -- I mean, I've never really been -- I've never really felt a part of it. So it might be strange -- you know, considered strange to start a label and to enter into that. And I don't really want to be in that part of it. But quite simply, everybody's had to reinvent the record business in the last 10 or 15 years. More and more people have started their own labels and just done their own projects and they'd just rather not have the aggravation of dealing with people who are -- who are capable of doing the job, but don't have the vision to or don't have the legitimate love for the music or don't have a clue of who you are and whose job it is to sell your record.
So it's better -- a job that's better done by people with passion. And so I've always produced these other records, like DavidLindley or Warren Zevon's records. And that -- that's an example of something I didn't think anybody would get but me. But I thought these records should be made. I knew critics would like it. But I was really happy to see that he wound up with his own audience and -- not that he wound up with it, but he -- I was really happy to see that he had his own audience who began flocking to his shows.
I remember Waddy Wachtel and I driving to one of his shows to see it. We were in a traffic jam. He looked at me and said, "Did you think this was going to happen?" I said, "No, I didn't. I just thought we were like only ones that got him."
Q: Well, I think that's why for Inside Recordings you're new title is overseer. Because it seems like a perfect --
A: Well, I accept the title. Thank you, Jody. Thank you for finding a word for what I do. In fact, I mean, I'm just doing what I've always done.
Q: Well, and you also produced records -- as you were talking about, you produced solo acoustic with a gentleman named Paul Dieter. What's entailed in producing a solo live album?
A: That's a -- that's an insightful question. Paul recorded everything, ‘cause he was mixing the shows. But he's also -- he's recorded all my band records, recently. And in this case, it was a matter of making sure it all got recorded -- got put to tape and then I made him listen to them all back so I wouldn't have to. I mean, you have to listen to everything, but certainly not the night after you record it.
I mean, I think in the old days, people would make a live album, they'd record -- because you had to get a truck and it was a big expense. You know, you just pick a few shows and record them and listen to them and see how it came out. But what's happened now, because you can record everything, is people do. They record everything. They record everything and there it is. And then it's got to be listened to. So there were months and months of shows that had to be listened to to find -- and I found some interesting things about my singing and about performances that I didn't know. Like there'd be a whole month of touring where I wasn't nearly as good as I had been like the six months before, or there were certain moments where things really got good, got much better than had been six months before.
Q: Would there be a night you walked off the stage and thought, tonight, when I sang The Pretender, I think I really nailed it. Let's make a note that in this city, on this night that was a version --
A: Yeah, but I -- yeah. I had those thoughts, but I never made the notes. I mean, I should have had my itinerary -- I should have had like a little -- yeah. But what I finally did was, I did -- because there's no setlist. I stopped having a setlist because I never stuck to it. People would always call for songs that I would do and pretty soon I'd be doing songs that I'd put in the second half of the show that were song in the first half and I'd have to rewrite... It was just this chore that I never really wanted to do anyway.
So I finally said, "Look, instead of there being a set list and then you have to correct it, why don't you just write down whatever I sing. Just like write... each time I sing a song...So we gave it to the monitor guy, because there's not that much work for him to do. It's just like, you keep a little -- and there are all these songs that he'd never heard or that no one -- that I hadn't done in years, maybe, and he'd come to me after and say, "What's that song that's got -- and he wrote down a few lines of it and say "what's that?" and I'd give him the title. So at least there was a record of what we were doing. At least there was a record of what I had sung so I could go back and say, let me listen to all the versions of this particular song.
But even at that, I didn't listen to everything I'd recorded for this album. I couldn't. I mean, there's just no -- you know, there's not enough time to go sit and listen to like 35 shows that all were three hours long. I mean, who's got, you know... And you know, the other thing is that you listen to something in a live performance and there's something about it being in that order of songs that really works a certain way. I thought to myself, after making this record, I thought, really, I should have a setlist and I should stick to it. No more of this sort of doing what everybody calls for at the moment. Because some of these do work really well -- What I learned 30 years ago, which is, you can write a really great order for these songs to go in and they really go someplace. But the unexpected doesn't happen after doing that order once, it's now expected. And that actually changes it completely. And you don't realize because you're just -- now you're just performing a course. You're going through a course and you're thinking in terms of how well you perform the course. And that's very different than what happens sitting around your house or the times when you begin to write songs and you just go to uncharted territory.
So it works for me to have somebody call for a song or suggest a song. And at any given time, people in my shows will be, inbetween songs, they'll be like three to 30 requests. And you can get away with doing the one you want out of them. It's not like you have to do what any one particular person asks for.
Q: I was looking at the cover of Solo Acoustic. And there's about twelve open guitar cases set out in a row. So are you one of those players who has a different guitar for every song or do you only have one or --
A: Pretty much. No, there are songs -- there are guitars out there that I won't even play in the course of a night, because we didn't get to that song. And there are guitars out there just for one song, yeah.
Q: You're prepared.
A: Yeah. Well, that's exactly right! Basically, I'm prepared just about anything that I can remember. And lots of times, I don't know if I can remember it. But in that spirit, people get that that's the spirit of it right away. That started right away when I started doing acoustic shows. I think I was in England and somebody called for a song that I've never sung. I just was -- matter of fact, that's why they called for it. They wanted to hear me sing this song. I said, "Well, I don't think I -- I don't think I would get through that one." And they said (adopts English accent), "Oh, come on." You know. And the whole place just sort of went, "That's right." It was like those TV shows of Parliament. And so I just sang it. And of course, I didn't remember all of it. But I remembered enough of it that they were happy. "Right, good!"
You don't expect it to be that intimate right away. And that was in Albert Hall. And you think, this is Albert Hall. You'd expect things to be much more formal. And when it was suggested I do this acoustic shows by myself, I -- even I didn't think of doing it by myself. I thought, all right. I'll get David Lindley or I will -- let me think, who would be -- and the guy who suggested it, my good friend and agent, Paul Charles, a real music lover, said, "No no no, I mean, solo acoustic, like just you." And I thought, well, that's going to be a short show. But in fact, those shows were longer because it just sort of like took off across the tundra, like, going wherever you felt like going. It was really exhilarating for me.
Q: And this album is different than your first live album. That was Running on Empty, in 1977. A very unique concept for Running on Empty. A live album comprised entirely of material that had never been released by you before.
A: It just turned out that way, because the original idea was to record... see everybody wants to vindicate themselves. Somehow improve some version of some song they did in the past. And that live album was going to be like a double album and it was going to contain like some -- a bunch of new songs as well as older songs. And the more we started doing it, the more we said -- I think it was RussKunkel, the drummer on many of my albums, up to that point. We just said, you know, let's put out all the new stuff. He just got it -- just from his point of view, those were the things we had that were the most interesting. So that's what we did. I mean, half the band didn't even know we were making a record, even though there were trucks and everybody was talking about it. They just thought we were full of it. Just like, "oh, right, right. You guys are making a record." Because we weren't doing anything. Didn't seem like we were doing anything.
Once again, that was courtesy of the fact that you could rent a 24-track. Nobody thought of making a record that you didn't listen to each night. So in a way, this is a continuation of that idea: you just do these shows and you don't listen to them. Don't even think about them. I mean, ShowCo, which is a Texas sound company located in Dallas/Fort Worth, said, "Yeah, we've got a 24-track you can rent. And we just rented that 24-track and just recorded every night and never listened to anything. And a couple of place where we did have a truck, we would pull out a couple of tapes and listen to it. But it wasn't very organized. And therefore, like the guys in the band didn't -- at least when I was going, "yeah, right, you guys are just staying up all night taking drugs and, you know, having fun and dissipating yourselves." "Yeah, right, you're making a record." But he was shocked when he heard the thing.
Q: Well, what resulted is one of the great rock and roll albums of all time, Running on Empty. It's just a classic live album. But now we have a record of you re-interpreting songs, bringing them back in a solo acoustic way. The first song on solo acoustic is called Barricades of Heaven. It was on 1996's Looking East, originally. It looks back to when you were 16, if you're singing about yourself. We always assume that. And it has that great line, "Better bring your own redemption when you come/To the barricades of heaven where I'm from." Can you give me an inkling of what you meant by that line?
A: This song sort of marks the beginning of my infatuation with ambiguity. I used to really be so fastidious about saying exactly what I meant, and in a way that it could not be misinterpreted. What I realized, of course, is that that doesn't prevent people from interpreting every which way, anyway. So this is a song -- I love the ambiguity of it -- it raises more questions that it answers. But that's what I want to do. And that's what songs are supposed to do, I think. Songs are supposed to engage the listening and the listener of a song provides their own imagery and their own context and their own meaning for a song.
The Barricades of Heaven raises all kinds of questions. By what, the barricades that keep us out or the barricades that protect those who do live in heaven from like an onslaught of some kind? Or the barricades, when we do encounter barricades, they're generally like police barricades. I sometimes think of it in terms of places that would be heaven, were they peaceful. Or that would be heaven were they not despoiled. The barricades of heaven, it could mean a number of things. But, to me, it's generally referring to some place -- some contested version of the ideal world. I mean, heaven for some people is like a big flat screen TV and a satellite dish and a big barbeque. And heaven for other people is a warm, clean place to sleep. And these version of heaven are various versions of what heaven would be were we to be able to encounter it on earth. Varied, depending on what they have and what they expect from this life.
But for me, if I'm really talking about where I'm from and where I'm singing about it in that song is Orange County, California. Like growing up in Orange County, I was -- like if you were a freak, it was really serious business. You had to keep your ears sort of vigilantly listening for the sound of squealing tires and you know, to be a long-haired freak in Orange County was what I imagined it to be like. I one time asked Duane Allman what it was like to be a freak in the South. And he said, you've got to run every now and then in order to protect yourself occasionally. But Orange County was like a world away from Hollywood, where there all kinds of freaks.
Still, I joined CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. I took part in all kinds of civil rights demonstrations and anti-war demonstrations in the ‘60s. And I guess that's what I meant. I think that this world would be heaven, but that it's what kind of heaven and for whom is what's really being contested at all times. So the barricades, I think of them as battlements. I think of them as moral and ethical battles taking place in our lives every day.
Q: That's why you have to bring your own redemption.
A: And you have to do those things that will -- I mean, I once tried to explain to a Japanese interpreter what I meant by redemption and found out I don't think that they really have -- they don't have the Christian context of redemption and the fall and everything to help explain that idea. But redemption is just a very general term of course. For me, it's a very general, secular term, to do with, like, finding what's valuable and redeeming that from the rest of this, the detritus of a very compromised, moral and ethical landscape. I mean, I can remember the first time someone showed me a pornographic photograph. I think I was about 12. But you can walk down the street and these little boxes that vend pornography on every corner. And like any kid's got a quarter to buy this stuff. And yet, most of the kids I know are completely unsullied by any kind of exposure to the adult version of what is elicit and what is racy and exciting. Maybe that comes later or maybe they will somehow pass unscathed through the -- I mean, turns out to be determined by other things, I guess, not just whether or not your eyes pop open at the sight of some illicit sexual image. But I don't know. Like I say, the whole question of what redeems you and what is heaven gets raised in the song, and it's more for the listener to grapple with.
You know, nobody ever asked me about that. I'm really happy, because that's the crux of the -- that's like the really pivotal point in the song. I mean, that's the one thing that's sort of like a door that just, you know, you pass through and it leads you to the whole song.
And also what it means, it could also mean that when you're young and you join a band, it's your chance to make the world right, and to describe the world in terms that you want to see it described in. And that's all it really means, too. It's like what it means to be young and want to drive around playing your songs and finding out what -- I mean, I lifted a wonderful line from a wonderful -- a poem too, just the image of your face bathing me in light. The sound of your childhood friends, like the sound of the voice of a friend. These are the sort of things that real happiness and security are made out of. I like the image. I actually began living with an abstract artist, a conceptual artist and somebody that loves abstract painting and stuff. And I just began seeing the world in a completely different -- see, that's also not a song from when I was 16. It's about when I was 16.
Q: Jackson, you mentioned that these takes come from different shows. Was it one tour or was it over the course of several years that you culled these --
A: It was from probably the last two or three tours I did playing acoustic. I started doing this in the late ‘90s -- I mean, right away, people were asking me, Oh, you're going to make this new record, right? This will be available to us, right?" And I said "yeah." But once again, the task of just listening to all those shows was, obviously, not as -- it was sort of daunting compared to the preferable task of writing new songs. Most of them came from a tour I did last year in Europe and some shows I did in 2002, then maybe 2003, I mean, like maybe for about three years. These tours are only about a month long, because that's about as long as I can go playing by myself without really wanting to hear other people play. So, yeah, they were culled from a number of different shows.
We can't even find the tapes from Australia and Japan. There was a whole month of my favorite shows -- I shouldn't even say this, but the digital drive got -- the hard drive got corrupted and we just lost those shows that I remember as being absolutely transcendent. So they would have been whole shows and whole -- and moments -- these songs just suddenly come up. When there's no set list a different song each night will be the highlight of the show. It's not the same song every night that's really got the power in it. Some of them will be like a string of five songs together where you're just doing really great.
But a lot of that stuff got lost. And it didn't matter. Some of these stuff I thought was so good during that tour was -- and I could listen to the DATS of the shows, but that's not what we're putting (out) -- these we recorded with several tracks and so the DATS couldn't be used. It just sounded like two-dimensional, compared to the recordings.
Q: Barricades of Heaven was a song about when you were 16. We're assuming it's you. And the next song on this disc is one you wrote when you were 16. So I thought we'd backtrack a little in time. You grew up in L.A. Your dad was a jazz musician, wasn't he?
A: Yeah.
Q: And was your mom musically inclined?
A: Yeah, she played piano and ... she sang. But she just sang for her kids. She was musical. My dad was a musician who played in clubs and stuff. But he didn't consider himself a professional musician. His standards were very high and that's why -- and he also, his humility was such that he just sort of -- he made quite a distinction. But he played at clubs. He played every weekend. He had a really great band. It would change from time -- you know, in his personnel over the years. But yeah, there was music in the house, everybody played. |
Jackson talks about his early days
