(transcript)

(note: this is the source material for
"thinking out LOUD...a conversation with the loud family's scott miller"
which appeared in pop culture press #45,fall 1998.)

scott miller at the hotel utah.san francisco.9 may 1998
photo by ana luisa morales

As strange as it sounds, the influences are a lot of classic literature, postmodern critical theory, and religious study. I know that answer probably turns people way off, but sorry everybody, that's where the rewards are. It sounds like, well, he's sick of what he does, he wants to escape to egghead world. But it's absolutely the opposite. It's wanting to look at that phrase "what he does," and get to the bottom of it. Modern culture is very insidious, very viral.

It installs a worldview, mediates every experience, and has this defense mechanism which causes you to say "how dare you imply that I didn't come up with my entire system of motivations myself?"

Now, don't run out and read Rene Girard, Jacques Derrida, and the first three books of the Old Testament and then say "Scott, I don't understand any of this, except for a small portion which is obviously full of shit." I recently put FINNEGANS WAKE at the top of my favorite novels' list and then thought dear God, what if people go out and buy it?

So is this album that sort of thing set to a peppy rock beat? Well, except less like the Mahavishnu Orchestra than you'd expect from that description. And not to imply I'm up to the job. But if you're an average listener, it may be easier for you to relate to me than to a wordy French theoretician, or the prophet Micah.

Maybe in the casual use of that word, not literally bringing Derrida or Heidegger into the songwriting picture. It's not a reaction to a text, or other music, but you could probably call it a critique of progress. Not in a technophobic sense, but in the sense of music or art experienced more as "progress" for its own sake than what the work is actually about, what it touches in your life. I think a great moment in cultural history is with grunge. This is figuratively speaking, but when accused as a movement of having nothing to add to junk metal culture from the seventies, the reaction was: so what?

One of the new songs is called "Businessmen Are Okay." That's probably a critique of the idea that a man in a business suit is a sort of walking affrontery to us enlightened non-sexist modern primitives, or whatever--the problem is those other people, those older people who care about money. Not that they aren't sometimes really the problem!

There's a line in that song about the prophet Elijah. In KINGS, Elijah is usually engaged in what strikes me as the usual holy war nonsense, but there's a verse where he feels defeated, lies down under a tree and prays to die. He says "I am no better than my ancestors." And this moment of surrender is where things turn around for him. God, I find that so beautiful. It's funny, a lot of bands recreate the Old Testament, but they recreate the accusatory violence only, not what I'd call the more poetical aspects. That's just more *rock* I guess, but you hear these singers go on and on about their thunderous interactions with God and hell and angels, and you know these people would ridicule anyone they heard doing this in any context other than their own.

I guess to get it at all, you have to know the expression "legs for days," meaning "long, attractive legs." I tend to focus on expressions of desire like that: conspiratorial guy-to-guy or girl-to-girl stuff. As if that were the bedrock of what we two could understand precisely--"we may not agree on much, but we agree those are great legs!" Now, I'm not a feminist trying to hammer at you that attractiveness is all cultural, it's not, but "legs for days" is less a spontaneous celebration of legs than a kind of negotiation. Yes, we have instinctive sexual appetites, but we have instinctive food appetites, too, and we can't agree on whether a sardine is good or not. "Great legs" in a way says "if you don't also think those are great legs, I suppose I'll have to reassess." Because the only people you bother to tell that to are potential rivals, and you have to verify who's attractive in their eyes, or the attractiveness is no go.

So not to play my own interpreter too much, but "Days for Days" starts with an echo of that expression of desire, and adds the paradox of days that last for days, days for the sake of days, whatever mental exercise you go through trying to make that phrase land on one particular meaning. A lot of people won't go anywhere with it, but I'm happy enough to have a title that doesn't bludgeon you with its heavy irony, because there's so much of that, and I'm guilty of it, too.

Hee! Yes, maybe it's the listeners' fault for acting like hammerable objects.

The LINDA title, that whole record really, was the key break for me from knee-jerk ironic distance. In a fuzzy-headed way it approached issues I now think of as this age's big issues, but before I knew there was such a thing as Rene Girard and these people out there systematically addressing them.

The idea of the title was, though I didn't come right out and say this, a reference to that tape circulating of Linda McCartney's supposedly bad backing vocal part. I haven't heard it. But the fact that "Linda" means "pretty" or "beautiful" creates this powderkeg of overloaded meaning for me. A system containing "only linda," *only* what is beautiful is nonsensical without something to point to as less than beautiful by comparison. I couldn't have used this term for it then, but that is the sacrificial scenario in a nutshell. By victimizing this one tape, holding it up for ridicule, it now is *not* nonsensical to call other tapes all beautiful; suddenly the system works. Obviously taped singing is not an everyday example, but it's the same principle as kids singling out someone to pick on in the school yard. It's a "system of victimization" or whatever I called it in some heavy-handed phrase on the back of the album.

It's too early for me to comment on that. Maybe a couple of years from now I'll have a bead on what you can call the "meaning" of that structure, but it still feels like Shamanism to me. Just "this would be a cool thing to do."

Yes, but that's a song called "Crypto-Sicko"; "Good, There Are No Lions in the Street" is a different song. Although you can put them together and have "good, the only lions on the yellow brick road are cowardly."

And enjoying it greatly. Gil and Alison contribute a lot to the feel of this album. As even Joe or Gil will tell you, Joe is a power drummer and Gil is a finesse drummer. They can both do each when needed, but there's no denying that each takes a record down a different road. The main difference with Alison is that there are a lot more ambitious vocal arrangements. She loves putting a tasty part together so there was no problem just sitting for hours and working them up.

He has a sort of rhythm director role at this point, because he has to take how things worked with Joe and translate them into how things work with Gil. Fortunately Gil is a smart guy and Joe's drumming is fairly interesting to follow. When we're learning old songs, it's never a case of "God only knows why Joe did that, let's change it."

Kenny's a melodic bass player. By default, he never pounds 8th notes, he writes an interesting run. If you want to see a contrast, I played bass on "Look Through Any Window" on the Hollies tribute, and my goal when I play bass is just to give someone a headache as quickly as possible.

Kenny's gotten serious about vocals, too. His singing is all over the new record, almost as much as Alison's. Whereas Paul did the vast majority of backing parts on INTERBABE.

No, I didn't have the feeling of it being a gesture. For one thing, in the late seventies, which were more or less my formative years, there were more bands with women in non-eye-candy roles than later on. The Talking Heads, Patti Smith--there was really no sexism among artists I would have been modeling myself after. Even huge bands like Fleetwood Mac. Well, Stevie Nicks was some variant of eye candy by her own design, but if you'll let Wendy and Lisa pass I'll let Stevie.

If I'm ever choosing between a man and woman for a spot in the band, and they can both sing, the woman has the edge because the singing range is going to be more useful to me.

It allows me not have to earn my living in the music business, which is a huge influence. It gives me email access. It gives me an opportunity to constantly observe human nature, including my own, in *the real world*. Where you can absolutely observe humanity in the raw is a commute to work, because what anyone thinks they know about anyone else is all presumption. For instance, in a car or on foot, people really obviously race each other. You can observe this pageant of weak acquisitive gestures--like walking briskly, or passing, taking a double seat--become these signifiers of prestige, on the fly; things people would deny to the death if you asked them. "I am NOT walking fast just because he's walking fast."

Well, forget million dollar because I absolutely don't want to be a national celebrity. I truly value not having to be 100% accountable for every moment of my life, to not be constantly catching the eye of exploiters. I don't mean evil record companies who want to take advantage of my wonderful talent, God knows, I just mean that as soon as people start printing the shocking photos and going through your private life it's all over. I really feel for supposedly ornery and reclusive artists like Roger Waters, because you know people are never talking to *them*, they're talking to the famousness, which is about five minutes of "wow this is the greatest" followed by forty years of having your whole sense of community wrecked for you.

I think I can reenact that for you.

Morrissey listens to headphones for about 30 seconds, then says

"My God, they want us to do a disco song."

Okay, let's get serious about this. How about...Eric Matthews doing "Selfish Again."

We'll do the usual loop around the country over the course of a month, probably starting mid-June or so. I would love to get back to England some time, and maybe do Europe, but, you know, we're not so famous. We have to wait for a good festival or sponsorship opportunity or something.

Are you really? That's nothing to sneeze at. I'll say this, a low-dollar indie-rock club tour is not for the faint of heart.

How do we know it's not some other Scott Miller? It's a very common name, trust me.

I usually feel a certain amount of anxiety about making the shows go well--both hoping people come out and putting on a good performance. It's not easy to *savor* the crowd reaction because it comes in the midst of having to do a job right, but of course you sure notice it when the crowd *isn't* enthusiastic!

It's great to see old friends and the road is kind of its own foreign country. Breakfast at truck stops that sell outrageously tacky knickknacks, humidity and brick buildings in the east, staying on people's floors in college towns, loitering around payphones to check in with clubs, the label, etc. And of course it's great to see old friends. I sometimes feel I'm not really the same person as when I saw them last, but couldn't begin to explain the change.

It's a lot more than that, certainly. For one thing, I do a lot of my writing on tour.

Staying with people is great. It's a wonderful feeling that through someone's generosity you have a place where you're welcome until the next day. Generally speaking you have no idea where you'll be sleeping or eating and in the worst situations you're driving after the show hoping for any motel you can afford. I've spent more than one night in the van, too. To find yourself in the grace of someone's hospitality is the best thing. Likewise for shows--when people show up and cheer you on, you feel very grateful, because if it's a dead night the promoter loses money and you just have this feeling of being sorry for ruining an otherwise thriving scene with *your* stupid music. Club owners are actually very understanding about slow nights, but it's so much nicer to feel like you've brought them some good business.

The most significant thing I read was THE FOUR QUARTETS by T.S. Eliot. I read it about fifty times and discussed it endlessly with my friend Bob Lloyd, who's an editor at the Stanford University Press. He put me on to a taped lecture series on the poems by a guy named Gil Bailie whom I've utterly flipped for. He also did a series on Dante, which was fantastic for me because Eliot was a huge Dante fan and I'd never been able to quite get it; we're talking 700-year-old religious poetry after all. Lots and lots of other things. Some short stories by Borges. In the studio I read Derrida, but that's such a chore. Right now I'm reading Andrew McKenna telling me what I read when I read Derrida.

Actually it's really funny you should ask that, because some time after I made that list I was listening to a Gil Bailie tape of Eliot's "The Hollow Men" which has the epigraph from HEART OF DARKNESS, and Bailie's comment was so drop-dead brilliant that I wrote it down on the piece of paper I always keep to jot lyrics, which I have right here in my pocket. Believe it or not, this was an unrehearsed sentence:

The man just drops *gold* like this with no effort. If I had to add my own weak-ass commentary I'd say it's a very common thing for us to do, consciously or not, to be on the lookout for ways we can tap into a secret energy behind the curtain of civilization. That book shows what happens if we follow that impulse to a conclusion, equipped only with Western progressive sensibilities.

Then I hope you didn't take the "Nietzsche is dead" line too negatively in the context of Kid "Congo" Conrad. Nietzsche was a great mind, there's no doubt about it, and he makes a lot of compelling points in writings like THE ANTI-CHRIST but I think it's easy to embrace some of his anti-religious sentiment too spontaneously. My guess, and you could educate me on this, is that he would think any religion with a system of taboos--Buddhism or American Indian culture for instance--was as much "moral twaddle" as Christianity, and that on the other hand something like priestly human sacrifice by the Aztecs was comparatively okay as being structurally dionysian.

I sense that a lot of his reaction is to institutional Christianity or "Christendom," and that's in a way no more or less valid than saying Nietzsche's cultural imperatives explain Nazi Germany. I am no expert at reading the gospels, but Jesus seems to be against moral or mental rigidity if anything--his theme is that the pharisaic order misses the point. Jesus wouldn't have stood behind witch burnings any more than Nietzsche would have stood behind Auschwitz.

334

*One must learn how to love*

This is what happens to us in music: First one has to *learn to hear* a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate and delimit it as a separate life. Then it requires some exertion and good will to *tolerate* it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity. Finally there comes a moment when we are *used* to it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing; and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it.

But that is what happens to us not only in music. That is how we have *learned to love* all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty. That is its *thanks* for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way; for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned.

--Nietzsche

Wow, that's a gorgeous piece of writing. Thanks very much for sending.

Oh my God, she bit my ear!

-30-

special thanks to kristine chambers, bill holmes, and walter kaufmann....--a.