DAVID CUNNINGHAM: Systems Pilot of Flying Lizards [1980]

Text by Daryl Licht / FFanzeen 1980

Introduction by Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2020

Images from the Internet

This article was originally published in FFanzeen, issue 4, dated May/June 1980. It was written by Daryl Licht, whose name was a pseudonym, but for the life of me I can’t remember for certain whose it was (though I have an idea by the references that are made throughout).

The Flying Lizard’s big song was a cover of the first Motown hit, “Money.” Personally, I thought it annoying, but I will totally admit I sold out for printing this extremely long piece since I had met David Cunningham at a cable access show “Videowave” taping, and was sucked into agreeing to it because I believed at that time (being a relative-kid) that it may lead me to getting bigger interviews with bands with whom I was more interested. While in hindsight I guess I don’t mind it being there, afterwards I was a bit more firm (though I did get tricked into putting in a band or two I thought went against the direction of the ‘zine), and turned down a few big names, such as an interview with Duran Duran (I’m still not sorry about that one), rather than go against my focus for the ‘zine.

What I really like about this interview is that while it’s obvious the interviewer knew his stuff and did his homework about Cunningham, he also doesn’t pander to him and asks some really smart and pointed questions. This is hardly a shallow discussion.

David Cunningham went on to be a record producer and has a sporadic solo career. – RBF, 2020

David Cunningham is a 25-year-old record producer and conceptual artist. He is also the man behind the Flying Lizards, a mysterious aggregation that, last year, provided us with two strange minimalist singles in their covers of Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” and Berry Gordy’s “Money.” The Lizards (actually Cunningham and some friends having fun in the studio) have recently released an album of songs that are every bit as weird as the previous singles.

The following interview took place in a secluded room in the New York offices of Virgin Records on a rainy Tuesday in February. As the interview was quite long, it was necessary to exclude some of it, but all of the good parts (with the exception of Cunningham physically imitating Thin Lizzy, which the tape missed) are here.

* * *

FFanzeen: First of all, General, Strike and Goldman get writing credits on the Lizards album. Who are these people in relation to the instruments, the album and things in general?

David Cunningham: The structure is one of working with friends. I don’t have a group; don’t have a lot to do with groups as such. I’m not really interested in the idea of having a permanent group. And it seems interesting that the situation can be generated by different people and them involved in something, or a combination of different people together; one uses those people and I have a few friends who are, some of them, excellent musicians, and some, maybe not so excellent, but certainly interesting musicians, and I tend to use them in that way, as a group, writing together and performing together in the studio. Vivian Goldman is a journalist in Melody Maker and also a close friend since before Melody Maker.

FFanzeen: Does she do some of the vocals, like some of the vocals that are sung as opposed to Deborah Evans’ (“Money”) vocals?

David: Yes; she sings on “Her Story” and on “The Window,” the latter of which she wrote, as well.

FFanzeen: “The Window” seems so ominous to me. Is there any particularly interesting story behind that song, or is it something that you just came up with and thought would be interesting to do?

David: No, it was written on the spot. It was in reaction to the situation. We started off with a rhythm tape, then added background voices which, at the time, were the foreground voices. And it was this Joni Mitchell-type thing, just a little tape going on with these voices harmonizing against it. And gradually, we added more and more instruments, and it took the shape it does as a song. It’s just what was obsessing Vivian at the time.

FFanzeen: What do you actually play, instrument-wise? I know you were in a band called Les Cochons Chic. [There is no mention of that band on David’s Wikipedia page. – RBF, 2020.]

David: Yeah, that was a joke group. Well, it wasn’t a joke group; it was a systems group that, very roughly, turned into a joke group as more and more people used to join. The first public performance was a 13-piece group and the whole idea was that there were two musicians’ roles: you were either one of the rhythm people or you created the surface over the rhythm, and everyone who was a surface musician went through a delay thing whereby the music was built up into a very dense texture. At the first gig, the machines broke down and everything went wrong. There were far too many people there.

FFanzeen: Were they musicians and non-musicians?

David: Very much so. It was a horrible, sporadic mess of people and the concert was great; it was a competition and there were all these rock groups who took themselves too seriously coming on and doing two numbers and going off again, and we came on and made this horrible noise for 10 minutes and we went off, and everyone was so pissed off after hearing these horrible groups doing their horrible songs that they cheered us enough to get an encore.

FFanzeen: I got the feeling listening to the Lizards’ album that there was an attitude of contempt for basic rock’n’roll and basic song structure, similar to the feeling I get when listening to some of the Residents’ material.

David: I don’t think it’s facetious like the Residents. I don’t think it’s even conscious, like they obviously are, because if you look at the contents of their first few records, I think there is a facetiousness or self-consciousness there. We were – I was – primarily dealing with the vocabulary of that music. I was using that vocabulary when I needed to. When it seemed I didn’t need to employ that vocabulary to make the thing sound good, then I didn’t use it, so the thing was somewhat stripped down. The joke element perhaps came out of not being able to play very well. But that’s a different matter.

FFanzeen: I felt it was half-and-half. On the one hand, you were using what you could take from it and in a way saying, “I acknowledge that this existed.” For instance, on “TV,” you’re using the I-IV-V progression and the reverb guitars, and it’s really like a late ‘50s girl group type thing where she’s talking about cars…

David: What’s a I-IV-V progression? Is that a musical term? [For example D-A-E-D-A – RBF, 2020.]

FFanzeen: Yes [grinning]. Well, the basic structure of the song reminds me of any early ‘60s kind of rock’n’roll, complete with the lyrical content of cars, sex…

David: [Begins to laugh] Well, that was different; this is most embarrassing.

FFanzeen: Why?

David: Because of what a friend of mine suggested to me before “Money.” He said, “If you cut a record about money, cars or sex, it would be a hit,” so we made “Money” as much to prove him wrong as to have a good time. I like the song. I’ve got the Barrett Strong record and I think it’s great.

FFanzeen: But it even carries over to that; you take “Summertime Blues” and “Money,” two standard rock numbers that so many people have covered.

David: Yeah, the important key words like money, TV, cars, sex are our key words. “Pop Muzik” was a key word; that was a hit song. “Summertime Blues” wasn’t so much a key word; it was a statement of a sort. It struck me as being some sort of political statement. It still is in many ways, depending on what country you’re in of courses, and are 18. You’re nothing until you’re about 21 in some places… I’ve gone through that having summer jobs in factories, the traumas of adolescence. I love the song and the actual mechanism in the song; the words, the statement appeals to me. We were talking about key words. “TV” was actually a conscious attempt to use the “Key Word Theory.” We put as many key word references in it and thought it would be an enormous hit. I can’t quite honestly see why it won’t be some kind of terrific hit.

FFanzeen: Do you think that the sound has just as much to do with it being a hit as far as attracting people’s attention is concerned? The first two singles were minimalistic. You seem to state the barest parts of the melody enough to let people know what the song is.

David: That’s what I said about using as much of the vocabulary as one feels one needs. I think “TV” uses a lot more of that vocabulary. I think you’re probably right. The only thing about “TV” is that I haven’t heard a record that sounded like that in years, and really, there isn’t a record that’s like that. You can look at a few things. I mean, what we stole it from was –

FFanzeen: What you borrowed it from…

David: We didn’t borrow it, we stole it. I won’t say it through. We stole it off a Ska record actually, and changed the rhythm and everything, and it ended up going from one thing to another. I’m not terribly concerned about creating something that is completely new and certainly not creating anything avant-garde. I think it’s being perverse to get out and say I want to make a sound that nobody has ever dreamed of before. You’ll end up with some kind of atonal rubbish.

FFanzeen: But don’t you create new sounds on the album by electronic sound manipulation and alteration?

David: One can alter sound in two ways: by technology and by content. I do it in both ways.

FFanzeen: I actually took this to relate more to the songs on the second side, where you have a sound going on and then another sound is laid on top of it, and then another sound, and then the first sound is removed, leaving the second and third sound, which seems totally different than they did when the first sound was underneath them.

David: I don’t do it very much. Most of it is simple layering. I can’t remember being in a position where I actually needed to take away the original sound and replace it. I’ve always known that the option was there to do that and I’ve tried it out, but there is the thing of just doing something and getting a buzz off that. And what I like is the idea that every time you hear a sound in the studio, putting it on tape you should be excited by that sound on its own. If there’s a particularly strange guitar solo, it supposedly should sound great without the backing track. Not great, but interesting anyway.

FFanzeen: With the backing track, the sound of the guitar – even though it’s the same sound – is altered in the way you hear it.

David: Certainly. It’s a much more complex sort of mixture, but if the song is originally exciting, I think that helps. It probably turns an experimental attitude like that. You talked about imperceptible change, it’s very sudden change. I think that’s what is avant-garde music, and why the Flying Lizards are presumably pop music – not that I think there’s any value judgment going on there.

FFanzeen: As far as pop music is concerned, don’t you think that the music on the album tends to polarize towards one point or another? People who would listen to experimental music should get something out of listening to parts of the album while people who are into more conventional rock’n’roll, or who heard one of the singles and liked it, can’t relate to the other type of music. The album is almost divided up side by side, which may or may not be conscious, or maybe it’s the way I’m hearing it. Some may feel Side One has more of a novelty aspect.

David: This is probably because I listen to both. That’s simply it. I can hear differences, of course. I tend to think they’re all part of the same thing. If you’re not used to listening to rock music at all, it sounds the same anyway. It’s all 4-4.

FFanzeen: Oh, is that a musical term?

David: Yeah, ha-ha. I just think it’s an extension of that way of thinking; that to a Balinese person, all rock music must sound the same. I’m not worried if people do think this is rubbishy music or this is horribly serious music, because if they’re going to think that, there’s very little I can do.

FFanzeen: You put out a song like “TV” as the third single, which has the sound which people associate with the Flying Lizards – her voice – when you could have put out “Russia” as the single – and if that came on the radio, I don’t think people would say, “That’s the Flying Lizards.” There definitely is a breakdown in terms of what’s to be released next.

David: I simply put “TV” out as a single. I didn’t even decide. I asked Virgin (Records) what they wanted and they said “TV,” and the same goes for other things. I don’t want to give them something they don’t want to sell. It did strike me as the commercial track on the album and I wasn’t going to argue with it. The only other thing was “Mandelay Song” [“De Song von Mandelay” – Daryl Licht, 1980]. I would have liked to see that as a single, but probably not in an English-speaking territory.

FFanzeen: “Mandelay” ties in with what I asked before about contempt. I felt that it was in tradition, where you’re taking a song and you’re saying you acknowledge it, but at the same time doing this treatment as if to say you’re not taking it seriously.

David: How can you take a song like that seriously? It’s about this brothel in Mandelay [sic] and sailors are lined up along this pier waiting to get in. They’re all banging on the door and shouting, ‘cause someone’s taking a long time in there and the song goes on to say that love isn’t made in hours and minutes, love is where you find it. I chose it because it’s one of the fastest songs (Bertolt) Brecht wrote, and the words struck me as sort of a little game ‘cause people have trouble with the BBC in Britain. The Gang of Four said “Packets” on one of their albums and it got banned immediately. I think it was “packets,” or it could have been “rubbers” [on the song “At Home He’s a Tourist” – RBF, 2020].

FFanzeen: On “Her Song,” the lyrics say, “But you can still make money singing sweet songs,” and it seems that‘s being said on the album when, ironically, you’ve made money putting out anything but sweet songs. I mean, “Money” is very abrasive.

David: “Sweet songs of love” is the full quote.

FFanzeen: And they then start singing this love song and it seems that if it really was a long song, it wouldn’t have to be stated like that. It’s kind of an order.

David: Well, that song’s about the concept of courtly love as devised in the 11th Century.

FFanzeen: “You Are My Territory”?

David: That’s it, yeah. In a way it’s an anti-love song; it’s kind of a feminist statement. I don’t disagree with the lyrics.

FFanzeen: In “Russia,” you said, “I must explain / I’m not complaining / I’m just having fun.” It seemed to tie in the whole theory for me that while you were setting up something that said, you were not taking everything too seriously – but on the other hand, you didn’t want people to say that. You just wanted to state that you were having a good time also, and not really worry about what was going on.

David: I’m not having a good time when I’m singing. I hate singing.

FFanzeen: But you’re sitting back and saying, “Well.” This is assuming you’re using “TV” to poke fun at those conventions.

David: The song doesn’t refer outside itself. I don’t think any of the songs I’ve dealt with do. I’m very bad with lyrics, as you can tell with the lyrics to “Russia” – they’re mostly the kind of treatment of some (John) Cage work and ended up with bits of lyrics to “Russia”; the part from the phone line. Originally, “Russia” was a song with lots of verses which I wrote years ago in a pub and find them so embarrassing to look at now. I love the tune.

FFanzeen: “Russia” reminds me of “Burning Airlines” on Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain. That guitar…

David: That’s strange, ha-ha. The way I play it is more like Thin Lizzy.

FFanzeen: How much of a hand did you have in designing what appears on the record covers; the art movements and the dates, that nap and the thing that says, “There’s performing music and music you listen to.” Did you choose those images?

David: I chose all the images. The juxtapositions are a system. The Flying Lizard sleeves, the stripes, the stars, struck me as visual symbols that one could use in that kind of shape.

FFanzeen: On the single sleeves, the images seem ambiguous, which seemed to tie in with the music – like on the end of “TV,” where there’s a voice that goes “wah-wah-wah” and sounds like a trombone. It seems that even though it’s a human voice, as to what it really is can be kind of ambiguous, if you listen to it in a certain light.

David: Yeah, its porpoises… in a way it could be porpoises mating or something like that. Well, if ambiguity is there, I won’t attempt to make it literate, to make it plain. I can do that on the other music that I do. As far as I’m concerned, the Flying Lizards present the ambiguity – but explains it later. And then you find out talking to people that it was something else. Like the sleeve of “Money”: Deborah is lying on this dark lawn at night – it looks like a dead body in a canal or something.

FFanzeen: It has that wet feeling.

David: She was soaking wet. We had a hose pipe on her. That was a similar one to the first sleeve where there’s a glass of milk flying up into someone’s face. I had the system with lots and lots of flashes around her; we go up in the balcony and we had a sprinkler. So we were going to get the sprinkler going and freeze the sprinkle with all the flashes so it would look like streamers from rockets, and we had no idea what would happen with it about color or image. The flash blew up. Rich, the photographer, was so drunk that he just messed it all up. So that was that.

FFanzeen: You were talking about systems before and I mentioned Eno. I’d like to know if you can draw up any parallels between you and him, since he’s so interested in systems as well.

David: Same sources: English art college. I think we like the same artist’s work. I don’t know about Eno, but I like Kenneth Tom Phillips, Sol Lewitt, Philip Glass; the systems people generally – Steve Reich. There’s a lot of writing on the theory of that work, and the theory of cybernetics and visual art.

FFanzeen: Before, you were talking about taping a sound and a month later listening to it and it would sound very different. It seems that’s the approach This Heat took to their album [that Cunningham produced – RBF, 2020].

David: Yeah, they did that a long time before they made the album. Most of that stuff was released in 1977. It’s a great pity they were delayed.

FFanzeen: Are you going to work with them in the future?

David: I’m setting them up in such a way that they will be able to make records at their own discretion on a self-generating mechanism.

FFanzeen: Is your power to do that a direct result of your success with your own records?

David: It’s a result of that, and I put their record on my label [Piano Records – Daryl Licht, 1980]. It was a last-gasp desperate bid to recoup some money off the incredibly high studio bill they ran up. The fact that the record sold out in Britain has, to some extent, vindicated me as a person who can float records. And it was that, combined with the Lizards’ “Money” that can put This Heat in a slightly stronger position this time around. I tend to think that each project I’m involved in should be self-subsidising; that I’m not going to make an expensive, silly, avant-garde album simply because I have lots of money. I think if I make one, it will be done under the economic conditions which pertain to that music. A reflection of what it is, it shouldn’t be a self-indulgent exercise, but something quite solid and serious.

FFanzeen: Do you have any other recorded work besides the Flying Lizard’s things?

David: There’s the album Grey Scale, which is an album of system pieces. I put it out on my label in 1977. It was meant to be an album of sketchbook pieces. I’ve done one piece five times on the first side with different groupings and different arrangements – different inputs to the system. The reason behind that was to show a work in progress. I was very interested in having that on record. In fact, that’s what a lot of dub reggae suggests: a work in progress – people actually finding things in the studio and playing with them on the mixing deck. If you’re in the studio with a group and you hear them doing that, it’s quite an interesting process. Dub reggae, to some extent, found that.

FFanzeen: Reggae pops up in “Money B” where the vocals end and this fat bass comes in.

David: Yeah, that’s the result of working on the 4-track. When we ran out of words, there was a track free and I put a bass track on it. I took great enjoyment in doing that really, even though it’s a pretty gross aberration of dub music.

FFanzeen: Where does the name Flying Lizards come from? Is there anything in particular, or was that kind of a name people would remember? It’s a bit absurd.

David: It was absurd in the ‘70s. I think it’s cute in the ‘80s. If you want to be silly about things, if anyone thinks the ‘80s should be any different from the ‘70s, I think cute is the word, and I think things will get pretty or cute for a little while. Pop music will become increasingly trivial.

FFanzeen: Some would say it’s always been trivial.

David: Oh, it really has, yes, but it won’t be as pretentious anymore. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing. You know, because the people… like, for instance, the Sex Pistols and the Clash, to some extent, took themselves too seriously. That whole movement was a very profound influence on me and a lot of other people. Here were people coming along and subverting the technology to their own uses. Maybe not in the most distinct and lucid way possible, but it was a very exciting time, and you know that was fashion – and yet again, it wasn’t fashion, it was a real human feeling… and a business.

SNAKEFINGER: Skanks and Shakes [1981]

Text © David G. and Chris Van Valen / FFanzeen, 1981
Introductory text © Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2015

Is there such a thing as experimental free-form jazz rock? Because if I had to categorize the uncategorical British native / San Francisco resident Snakefinger, that’s where I would place him. He found a home on Ralph Records out in California, which for a while was the center of the strange and bizarre, such as the Residents (for whom he was also a member under a mask), Fred Frith, Renaldo and the Loaf, Yello, Tuxedomoon and MX80 Sound.

This interview was originally published in FFanzeen, issue #7, dated 1981. It was written by Anglophile music historians of the off-center, David G. and Chris Van Valen.

Sadly, Snakefinger passed away by heart attack while in tour in Austria in July 1987 at the age of 38 years. – RBF, 2015

Time to interview Snakefinger. Chris and I get to the hotel and it looked just like the Overlook: all endless corridors and flocked wallpaper! Call Ralph Records if I don’t come out in an hour!

Well, Snakefinger turns out to be quite an amicable chap, and the difference between mild mannered Philip Lithman (that’s what his mum calls him) and “Snakefinger,” the wild kimono-clad guerilla guitar player that led his hand-picked “assault and battery squad” (Carlos Crypton, guitar; Johnny Jenkings, drums; and Jack George, bass) through a tour of New York City’s zippier nightspots this past October, when this interview was done, is striking. At Max’s [Kansas City], Snake whizzed off manic slide solos and leapt about wildly as the band punched out rock'n’roll versions of tunes from Chewing Hides the Sound, and the new Greener Postures (in contrast to the heavy electronic bent of those albums).

A highlight of the set was the appearance of “Skanking” Ross, a bizarre youth who Snake swears he met right before the show. Ross subsequently appeared at all of the band’s New York gigs.

FFanzeen: Snake, how do you account for the fact that many of the musicians you worked with in England in the early ‘70s “pub-rock” movement are now backing people like Graham Parker and Elvis Costello, and you ended up with the Residents?

Snakefinger: Well, I think that, basically, they followed the logical line of what was going on; they all took the next logical step, and me, being a sort of illogical person, took the next illogical step and came here (to America). I’d already done stuff with the Residents. I’d left them six years previously and I’d told them to keep my tea in the oven – I’d be right back – and six years later I came back and my tea was still in the oven.

FFanzeen: How did you come to meet the Residents and N. Senada?

Snakefinger: It’s completely fate, completely by chance, every single bit of it. I met N. Senada in Austria on holiday. He then told me he’d heard about these people who weren’t as yet the Residents – they were just some people fooling around with sound – so we came together. I didn’t know a single soul in the whole of America. We stopped in (the) New York airport with the idea of stopping in New York for a while. But he didn’t like the New York airport, so he decided to go straight to California. We arrived there, went straight to the Residents’ place in San Mateo, where the “San Mateo sound” was being constructed, added to the construction – basically completed it – and stayed there for a year; he left to go off and do more stuff in the vein of work he was doing, and I left to go back and be a pub-rocker in England – for a while.

FFanzeen: What made you go back to England?

Snakefinger: Well, I was offered a job with a friend’s group called Mighty Baby, who was like a psychedelic-era band. They fell apart just as I got back, luckily enough, and my friend went off and joined a Muslim commune.

FFanzeen: Doesn’t everyone?

Snakefinger: [laughs] Well, I finally talked him out of it and we formed the Chilly Willies [aka Chilly Willie and the Red Hot Peppers – RBF, 2015].

FFanzeen: Your friend was Martin Stone, right?

Snakefinger: That’s right, yeah.

FFanzeen: While you were still in California, didn’t you do a couple of folky-type gigs?

Snakefinger: Yeah, that’s right. In fact, N. Senada and myself did a couple of gigs with just guitars, piano, and saxophone in a few folk clubs that completely astonished the people there; you know, they were all singing, “Here’s a little song me and my chick wrote when we were on acid, hitchhiking to Oregon,” you know, and suddenly this mad guy with dark glasses and a saxophone and myself – who was pretty mad, but I won’t get into that – jumped on stage on audition nights and things like that, and suddenly the whole place is stilled into silence by the total lunacy onstage.

Snakefinger and the Residents

FFanzeen: These days, a lot of different people are into sound alteration the way the Residents were ten years ago. What do you think of that?

Snakefinger: It’s real hard to put them in a block. There are people that I think are real go-ahead and really have something, and a lot of people I don’t really think have anything going for themselves. It’s very easy to make new sounds by piddling around with a few things, you know. I’m not saying that anybody isn’t entitled to go ahead and do it – anybody is going ahead and doing it right now.

FFanzeen: Synthesizers are so cheap that every 18-year-old kid is buying one these days.

Snakefinger: Precisely, and I mean, you can’t go far wrong; you can do almost anything and have it be art. I don’t particularly look at things that way; I need a bit of substance. I think the Residents have a bit of substance and I’ve known the people for a long time and they’re all very, very clever. I mean, I’d go as far as to saying genii – is that the plural? [Answered HERE – RBF, 2015.] But they’re not the kind to sit around and figure out chess games. They’re really down to earth Southern guys who were brought up in Louisiana, spent most of their lives there. Just hospitable, pleasant, and as nice as they can possibly be. But I mean, with these great minds that only come out when they’re doing their work.

FFanzeen: If they’re so hospitable, why is their music so ominous? Is it on purpose?

Snakefinger: Yeah. It’s meant to be that way. They are hospitable amongst themselves, and with friends that come by and everything, but you can’t be hospitable about your life’s work, and they’re not.

FFanzeen: The music of both you and the Residents always seems designed to unnerve. When the music is pleasant, the lyrics are not, and vice-versa.

Snakefinger: Well, it varies between myself and the Residents; we have different approaches. The Residents, I mean their whole thing, when they started off, was to unnerve; was to wake up people in deep trances; was to create completely different alternatives than were available to people. It was very, very stale for the first six years of their existence. The music scene was really horrid. Then came New Wave, which was a good little kick in the ass for the whole world, even though 99.9% of it was just phoney and not really worth bothering with. But it did do something – it opened up broader horizons and things like that. So the Residents changed slightly.

FFanzeen: I thought it was funny to see six-year-old Residents albums in the punk sections of record stores – especially since they are miles away from any punk or New Wave band; even miles away from label-mates like Tuxedomoon, who are in infancy compared to what the Residents do.

Snakefinger: We’re all miles away from each other. On Ralph Records [d. 1987 – RBF, 2015], there is a label sound for sure, but everybody on Ralph is miles away from everybody else on Ralph. There aren’t two people on Ralph that sound even vaguely alike – thank goodness.

FFanzeen: Do you play your solo on the Residents’ “Satisfaction” single on a slide guitar?

Snakefinger: It’s a slide; I play slide quite a lot. I don’t do any electronic solos. Everything I play is on guitar. I don’t play solos on synthesizers. The most I’ll do is put something through a bunch of effects to get a more interesting sound. What we usually do for the records is record stuff completely experimentally; we’ll try all kinds of different techniques to get different sounds, anything but the sound you expect.

FFanzeen: Most of the stuff is made on conventional instruments and recorded or reprocessed in unusual ways later.

Snakefinger: Yeah, in my work in particular. There’s a minimum of synthesizers – just effects. The Residents use considerably more synthesizer than I do, but for the most part they use normal instruments, played by the Residents – which immediately makes them abnormal – but through a lot of electronics at the Ralph studios.

FFanzeen: Getting to your lyrics, is “Picnic in the Jungle” about a situation like Auschwitz or Jonestown?

Snakefinger: On another planet, yes, that’s exactly what it is. As I said, you won’t find anything like “No more Dachau! It’s a terrible thing, how could they do all that stuff!”, but that’s the situation. It’s about Jonestown and it’s about Dachau and things, basically. I mean, if you want to put a story to it – which is another thing you can do to any of these lyrics; just take them as they stand, as a story. I’m into people drawing their own meanings. The show is a ritual – just like the records – but the story of “Picnic in the Jungle” is that these people who are taken by aliens to another planet are experimented on, and one of the prisoners is telling the story that every day they leave a tray and take one away; a cloud appears and melts away the skin of some. But basically, it’s symbolic of all the things that have happened here, and are set to happen again if we’re not really careful.

FFanzeen: Your lyrics are definitely more specific, and less fantastical than the Residents’ stuff.

Snakefinger: Yeah, my lyrics are more a part of human life. I deal with humanity. The Residents are more fantasy and I’m more reality based, and it’s the same in the music. If it wasn’t that way, I’d be doing what the Residents are doing, but I don’t because the Residents are doing it and you only need one of those – but I do think you need one of those, and I think the world needs one of those, and I think it realizes now that it does need one of those – at least – and they’ve had the most experience and are doing it best.

FFanzeen: There’s so much out there, in art and music, and people are just not interested in it.

Snakefinger: Oh, absolutely, I agree entirely. I mean, there’s discrimination, and being a discriminating person immediately lets you out of a goodly amount of stuff. I’m real discriminating and I realize I miss out on a lot of stuff that way, but being as discriminating as I am, there’s still far more than even I can deal with that I want to get to.

FFanzeen: How did you get the name “Snakefinger”?

Snakefinger: It comes from N. Senada. He named me.

FFanzeen: What did your mother have to say about that?

Snakefinger: [laughs] She didn’t have much of a choice. There was a gig, one of the Residents’ legendary few gigs. It was Halloween, in far Northern California, and it was a full blue moon on a Halloween evening – and it was very, very strange. There were a lot of drug casualities around. Everyone was in fancy dress and people started acting out the parts of their dress, and started to get a little too into them. And the demons that were dressed up were beginning to be really demonic and started to freak people out – you know, the perfect setting for a Residents’ gig. Now, I was playing violin at the gig and according to N. Senada, he saw my figner jump off the violin and become very snake-like. There’s actually a photograph of it which is in the Ralph Records Collection at the Cryptic Corporation. It kind of looks like the camera was sort of out of focus, but there definitely is a snake there – and N. Senada told us about it before he’d even seen the photograph. He said, “Your finger was just like a snake writhing around the violin,” hence, Snakefinger.

FFanzeen: Can anyone get a gander at that picture?

Snakefinger: Yeah, I’m not very recognizable – I have a gas mask and a trench coat on – but it’s definitely me.

FFanzeen: We’re not leaving until you tell us who the Residents are. [laughs] They’re probably not anyone famous at all, just a bunch of guys.

Snakefinger: That would be a big let-down, wouldn’t it? But it could all be a lie. It could actually be John, George, Ringo and whoever else – or I might just be making this up.

FFanzeen: Paul is making too much money to do something creative.

Snakefinger: No, Paul wanted to be one, but we – oh, sorry!

FFanzeen: This doesn’t seem to be much of a tour – you hang around New York for a few weeks, instead of the night-after-night type affair. Is this a prelude to the legendary Residents / Snakefinger tour?

Snakefinger: Well, in answer to that question, yes and no. We’re discussing it right now. We’re discussing how it’s going to get in with all the people what we want to use, and it’s a very strong possibility at the moment. We might do a few little local things first, to see how we like it. They feel how I do about being on the road; the actual shows are exciting and fun, but everything that goes along with it, the whole stigma – there’s a whole mental attitude that is almost impossible to avoid on the road, and I mean, why put yourself into one mental bag like that – apart from selling more records and stuff like that, which is all jolly good I’m sure – but why limit yourself? There’s no chance that you can get out of a tour without being a smaller person than when you went in. And without a few months to recover your scope of vision afterwards, you’re done. People that are on the road constantly, their scope of vision gets to be so tiny; they can basically only see the crew of people that they’ve been with, and the world becomes a terribly small place for them.

FFanzeen: Groupies and journalists.

Snakefinger: Yeah, well, you get to hate your fellow humans after a few months, and you feel like this little assault group on humanity, which is healthy for gigging; gigging’s a ritual – at least that’s what it should be at any rate – to fix something important in your mind, i.e., the costumes and things that people wear onstage, the attitudes they get over. It’s a magical ritual. You cause changes to occur right there in the minds of people that are coming to see you, which is fine, and you need that assault and battery attitude to do it. And it’s like, Us or Them. It’s not that they’re the enemy, but they’re who you have to deal with; they’re the consciousness you have to change. So, to go on like an assault and battery squad might not be the most subtle way of going about it, but it is necessary to maintain some attitude of that sort. Just to get it done, as far as performing is concerned, there’s a middle ground in-between records and live that you have to take because if you go up there and try to be art for art’s sake, you’re just going to alienate everyone. I’d like to get through on a mass level. That’s one of my purposes and one of my points. The more people I can get through to, the better it’s gonna be, and in the excitement of a gig, you have to solo down a couple of times, and you have to make it loud and nasty, and there’s a middle road where you can keep the subtleties in it, but still do things that are semi-expected at a gig – and also, the things that are semi-expected.

FFanzeen: What kind of band set-up are you using for these gigs?

Snakefinger: The instrumentation is completely straight. I think the music is weird enough in itself that one doesn’t have to go to synthesized cow udders and things like that to get weird music. It’s a basic set-up, with two guitars, bass, and drums. The other guitar player’s a co-founder of the Dead Kennedy’s. They’re all very young, very fresh, without time to pick up any heavy attitudes yet about what they are or what they like. They don’t really know what cool means yet, which I really like. If I’m gonna tour, I certainly don’t want to do it with a bunch of seasoned old soldiers; I want it to be fresh and exciting.

FFanzeen: Are you using any visuals?

Snakefinger: No, we’re on the tightest budget you ever heard of in your whole life. Also, I think the added extraordinary visuals in the way of slides and films would just help to confuse the issue.

FFanzeen: People ask you about the Residents so often, you probably feel like just handing out a printed statement sometimes?

Snakefinger: Yes and no, for two reasons: one reason is that you take the question and answer it, and then you can turn it around to take in the subjects you want to talk about; the number two reason is this – and it’s something I wanted to say to you – I’d sign a paper and say that everything I’ve told you so far, and every question that I’ve answered has been the truth and the way I really feel – right now. If you want to come back and do an interview next week, every answer might be completely different; my whole concepts on life might have changed. That’s the only real difficulty I have with interviews, and it’s the only real thing I like to say at the end of any interview I ever do. This is the way I feel now; tomorrow it might all be different, so don’t take the philosophical word of the Lord out of what I am saying. It all changes.

FFanzeen: That’s reasonable, since everything is always in a state of flux anyway.

Snakefinger: That’s why, particularly with rock’n’roll stars – or whatever they’re called – rock’n’roll morons – these big quotes of ”This is my stance,” and “This is my view on life, come hell or high water,” are just full of shit. I’ve never agreed with it, whatsoever. I’ve never endorsed it.

FFanzeen: Right, but don’t you ever get sick of answering questions about the Residents?

Snakefinger: That’s okay. They’re interesting to talk about. I don’t mind.

FFanzeen: Okay then, who are the Residents?!

Snakefinger: Well, my mum’s one of them!

 

 

WALTER STEDING: Sound Style Change [1983 interview/article]

Text by Julia Masi / FFanzeen, 1983
Intro by Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2015
Images from the Internet
www.waltersteding.com

This article was originally published in FFanzeen, issue #10, dated 1983. It was written by Julia Masi.

Currently, Walter Steding is a painter and actor who writes film scores and is in the group Crazy Mary, based in New York City where he resides. – RBF, 2015

On the cover of his new album, Dancing in Heaven, on Animal Records, Walter Steding, in an oversized pair of rolled-up bluejeans with his violin in hand, is suspended in an extracted hop, like the Pied Piper ready to dance off a cliff, or Peter Pan flying back to Never Never Land. A confusing change of image for those of us who think of him as the black-clad figure of the concert stage.

Dancing in Heaven is light-years away from the Walter we once knew “wheezing and wailing” to home-made bio feedback machines. He’s still inviting us to experience his different reveries, but now with 11 simple, lighthearted, commercial songs, his daydreams have become danceable.

“To me, the cover would have been this hat,” he points to his large, black felt fedora that looks like it was designed for a Pilgrim, “the darkest glasses you could find, and just skulls and daggers all over the place. He holds up the cover for careful inspection. “At first I didn’t like it; but now I do, now that everybody is telling me that they like it. The back is the history,” he flips over the cover. ”I never have to talk about my past again. It’s done. It’s documented,” he says of the black and white montage that traces his career. Although he’s only been performing since he came to new York in 1976, the photos on the back of the album read like a Who’s Who of rock‘n’roll. He points to the center picture of himself and his manager, artist Andy Warhol. “Andy was posing, and I said to him, ‘Well, we have to do something. Why don’t you put your hands by your ears?’ Did he go for that in a hurry! It looks derogatory, like, ‘Why is he doing that to Walter?’, but it was my idea. He rests to skip over the pictures of himself in his early days as a one-man-band, wearing electronic gadgets around his waist that looked like Batman’s utility belt, but his past is too interesting to ignore. Even as a kid growing up in Harmony, Pennsylvania, his background was always art. “Remember the kid in high school who always went around and painted the twelve days of Christmas on his windows? Well, that was me.” He temporarily put down his paint brushes in the late ‘70s to try his hand at performance art. “Just ‘cause I saw something happening.

“It was an era when new technologies were being introduced to the masses, and it was a time when bio-feedback and Rolfing, and any kind of New Age idea was really out there. But I just didn’t see any aesthetic in it. I saw that the more that we define existence by finite terms, the less we really see it. You can use any kind of formula you want to start defining existence, but all you’re doing is making it real; making it physical. Unless you put those physical symbols in some sort of aesthetic means, you’re not really describing what’s there.”

At this time, Walter had been working with the Mankind Research Center in Washington, D.C., and was in close contact with the Menninger Foundation, so he knew a lot about bio-feedback. “As people were going on and really thinking they were discovering something new, it just was the phoniness, the unreality of it. It was new at the time as far as the masses were concerned. I was using it as a means of expression. So instead of working with bio-feedback as though it were something real and tangible, I needed something to play against, so I took the bio-feedback and made it into sound, and then used the violin on top of that.

“Working with color and working with animal sounds, I learned a lot about how the sound would affect your brainwave output. Not only brainwaves, but EKG, too. And Galvanic skin response. Any kind of monitored bodily functions. I took a generator to a lake in Pennsylvania where these spring peepers were coming up, and played a concert along with them. That’s another reason why the violin was a good instrument, because it didn’t have frets or finite points. So I could really deal with sounds and sound like the noises that animals make; wolves and whales. You’ve head those whale records and things? So I was playing along with those, but I knew what kind of range those kinds of sound existed in. They’re all over the place. They’re not necessarily concerned with stops and finite points. But it does develop into patterns from that.

“And then, from that, I kind of go into – holistic is the word – where you don’t have the stops. I could transfer that into music because I knew a certain pattern that I’d be playing that would follow along with the noises that the whales would make. And then I knew instead of sliding my finger and going from one step to the other step, I could break that into steps, so I could play a song very similar to the noises a whale would make without actually trying to make it sound like a whale.

“You have different reveries in your different states of consciousness. Like, if you go into the deep Delta region, in this Delta it reverts to neuronal bursts per second. It’s actually (that) you send out these signals, and they can really be monitored. You’re sort of in-between Alpha and Beta, and you’re conscience and think about things, like your motor actions, like moving your hands. That is more in the Alpha region, and those (signals) are amplified. It’s a real minute signal. I built little amplifiers so that I could convert the signals into sound. I did that by taking the electrical impulse and putting it through an LED. The LED would charge a photo-transistor, and that photo-transistor would change the rate and the pitch of the synthesizer.

“I used a homemade synthesizer just built for that.” He learned to make his musical equipment from scratch, “just by reading schematics and things.” And by “working with chips,” he says nonchalantly.

“The tools and things are out there. You can go to an electronics store and just buy all these parts. You could buy a clock – it’s called a clock (but) it’s not really a clock; it’s a little chip, a timer. And they use it for everything. Not necessarily for music. Once you understand the basic principles of how a chip works, you can apply it to anything.” Walter chose to apply it to the violin because he felt that the “violin epitomizes music.”

His first concerts were very short and very avant-garde. “I thought it was art! I mean, I was doing it at art galleries.” And even though he describes those performances as “wheezing and wailing,” he did gain a certain respect for music, and command of his instrument. “That’s how I started getting more and more musical, learning about notation; different stops and points, with Western scales broken down into all those finite points. The more I learned about that, the more I learned how I could use it.

“I’m definitely trying to create a mood with the notation. Certain things do create a mood. The sounds that whales make do have an effect on the human body, even though it might not be aware of how that sound is. Even without hearing whales, a person is still affected by their sound. There is communication between all living things.

“I use the 4/4 beat. With the 4/4 beat, I try to find a more universal kind of sound, even though it’s relative to the 4/4 timing. It’s kind of scaleless.

“I like to think of the violin without any frets, and how it can transform that mood into a sound. And then I like to transfer that into a progression. A real progression in the 4/4 format, starting with the root note, and then going to the 4th and 5th – you know, real traditional progressions. So it comes from a thought and I just keep working it out until it becomes a tune.

“Right now, today, I got this line that goes,” he sings, “Do, do, do, cha, cha. I’ll take that line and I know how I want it to go, but I know that I have to put it in a format where the bass can play along with it and the keyboard player can play along with it. So, I’ll take the rhythm machine and set it to a counter, where it counts off 4s. Then I’ll rearrange the idea that I had in my head to fit that format. Then I’ll arrange it so that the bass can play his full measures, do a turnaround, and come back in again. So it starts with just an abstract idea, but then you keep going over it and over it, until it becomes a song.

“The songs I write anyone can play. I keep them simple. And I can make tapes where everything is separated. I don’t even have to rehearse. I can give someone a tape of what it’s supposed to sound like, and give them a tape of what their part is so they can listen to these tapes and learn the part exactly. And never come to a rehearsal and (still) play with the rest of the group. And then show up for a concert and know all their lines. Like the bass player. I’ll give him a tape of the song, how it should sound with everyone together, and then a separate tape of just his part. And the same with the keyboard player and guitar. So there is no question then of what they should do.”

Lenny Ferraro, drums; Paul Dugan, bass; Karen Geniece, vocals and guitar; Mark Garvin, lead guitar; and Robert Arron, sax, keyboard, vibratone and guitar, accompanied Walter on the album, which he produced himself. “I wanted help. Really. I would have liked to have a producer,” he says modestly as his big dark eyes widen. “At the time, Chris (Stein, of Blondie) wasn’t feeling very well. I learned; I’m glad for the experience. I learned ‘cause I had to. I really would have liked to have someone professional come in and say, ‘This and that has to be done.’ It’s just like, there are rules that you have to follow. The bass beat is on the one, and the snare is on the two. Until I learned that, I didn’t write songs that way. I put the snare wherever I felt like it. Someone could always tell something was wrong with it. I could tell something was wrong, but I didn’t know what. So it would be good to have a producer who could say, ‘Why don’t we write a harmonic part that goes with the 4?’

“I don’t want to do something deliberately wrong when I know it shouldn’t be that way, just because it’s been done by so many other pioneers of electronic music and avant-garde musicians, like Cage and Stockhausen; people who have designed instruments, like Bookla and Moog, and all. That’s been done before.”

Right now, he can’t see himself returning to the avant-garde, using music as an art form. “It doesn’t make much sense for me to stay at one level and just deal with the emotion.

“The last concert I did, people liked it. I’ll keep going in that direction.”