By John Hagelbarger (Baribrotzer)
Since the early Eighties, Thinking Plague have been a voice howling in the musical wilderness where the Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountains. Denver may seem an unlikely place for progressive rock of any sort, let alone the avant variety, but Mike Johnson, the band's leader, has persevered at writing music, putting bands together, and putting recordings out. As a result, Thinking Plague have earned a status as one of the world's premier avant-prog ensembles. Their entire catalog remains in print. Which goes to show that if you howl long enough and eloquently enough, even in a wilderness, eventually you might begin to hear a faint echo in the distance.
Mike (guitar and compositions) founded the band along with Bob Drake (bass and production), and a number of other musicians have passed through - notably Dave Kerman on drums and Susanne Lewis on vocals. After Bob's departure in the late Eighties and something of a hiatus, Mike formed a new Thinking Plague with Deborah Perry (vocals), Mark Harris (saxes, flute, clarinets), Matt Mitchell (keyboards), and Dave Willey (bass and accordion).
About a year ago, A History of Madness was released, recorded by the musicians above plus David Shamrock (drums). One of the more significant progressive rock recordings of 2003, it continued their distinctive brand of avant-prog with a few differences: a more transparent chamber-music approach, production by Mike and engineer Mark McCoin instead of Bob Drake, and the feeling of a concept album - although the concept never hits you in the face and seems to come out more in the music than in the lyrics. Because of questions about this, as well as the music and production, I contacted Mike to interview him for Progressive Ears.
He and I conducted the interview over the summer. Concentrating on A History of Madness, we attempted to go into some depth about its concept and the stories behind that, about Thinking Plague's music and how it works, and about producing this album and why it sounds the way it does. Mike had a great deal to say about all of these. While the band's history came up on occasion, we didn't intentionally deal with it except as it relates to their present - Mike has covered the past very well elsewhere.
If you follow avant-prog and want to know what goes into Thinking Plague, this should tell you a good deal. And even if avant always seemed like too hard a nut to crack, but you still wondered what was inside, this might give you a better idea of what that strange sound, off in the distance, could be.
John Hagelbarger: I gather that A History of Madness is a concept album, based upon the history of the Cathars, a Christian sect in medieval France. One song, "Consolamentum," seems to relate directly to them. Others might also do so, but less obviously. Could you explain a little about that, and where one might find out more about them?
Mike Johnson: I apologize in advance that this will take a bit of explaining. I suppose A History of Madness is sort of a concept album, but not in as literal or exact a fashion as the usual example of the species. I actually wanted to somehow combine and express ideas concerning both the insane history of humanity - with all its inhumanity - and the personal experience of insanity, or mental illness, which I believe is extremely relevant to this "post modern" world of ours. Thus the "history of madness" title is a double entendre - at least. I was connecting them on some kind of emotional or symbolic level... I guess.
My main historical theme, the tragic extermination of the Cathar sect in southern France in the 13th century - the so-called "Albigensian Crusade" - is just one of thousands of examples I could have used, but there were several reasons why I was inspired by that particular slice of "man's inhumanity to man." I first learned about the Cathars back in about 1987 or so when I read the book, Holy Blood: Holy Grail, a fascinating, if dubious, investigation into the "true secret of the Holy Grail," which gets into the Priory of Sion, the "secret treasure" of the Templars, and to a limited degree the Cathars, who are believed by some to have a connection with this "treasure."
The Cathars were a dualist Christian sect active from the 11th to the 14th century, who may have evolved from the early Gnostics via the Manicheans (if this is something of real interest to anyone, there are books and Internet sites galore). Their ideas had spread from the Balkans across northern Italy into France, where they lived in peace and prosperity in the Langdoc and Midi-Pyrenee regions. Their preachers and leaders, known as "perfecti" or "parfaits" were pacifists, vegetarians, celibates - men and women who had equal status - who cast off their worldly goods, and became wandering preachers. They were about as benevolent and non-aggressive as any of the devoutly religious might ever be, in that they had NO desire or need to alter or control the world of "this life." They believed this world was essentially evil, and the solution was to live as devoutly and harmoniously as one could, preferably to bring no new lives into this world, and then to exit this life for the next - where all is opposite of evil, and where the true God rules.
Unfortunately for them, they also rejected the Pope as the "Anti-Christ" and the Roman Church as false, which was dangerous in those days. Especially if you lived, as they did, in a rich region that was not controlled by any major power. When the Church began to resent and fear the success of the Cathar faith in what is now southern France, it was easy to convince the King of France to lead a "crusade" against these "heretics," cynically offering their rich lands as reward to the "crusaders," their fellow "Christians." And that is precisely what happened, leading to the persecution and brutal slaughter of thousands, and a decades-long "witch hunt" for "heretics" carried out by the Inquisition, and ultimately motivated by hypocritical greed - like so much of our insane history. That region has been part of France ever since.
Holy Blood also mentioned another heretical sect with similar, if less radical beliefs, the Waldensians, who were started in Lyon. Many of them were living in Langdoc in the 12th and 13th centuries, and were persecuted, though not eradicated, along with the Cathars. When I read about this I was amazed. My own grandfather, my mother's father, was born into a community of Waldensians, a vestige of the original medieval sect still living in the Cottian Alps between France and Italy. A group of these folks founded a "colony" in North Carolina in 1893, which became a town called Valdese - about 60 miles NW of Charlotte. My mother, brothers, aunts and uncles were all born there. My grandfather was actually mayor of Valdese at one time. As you might imagine, these medieval events took on a greater significance for me, when I learned that some of my direct ancestors may have been among those tortured and burned with the Cathars. Despite this interest, once I finished that book I kind of forget about this history and went about my life, which among others things, included working on Thinking Plague. It wasn't until 1995 that my interest was again drawn back to the Cathars. I had the opportunity to go the south of France in 1995 when I was invited to tour Europe with the 5UUs. Two of my closest musical colleagues and friends, Dave Kerman and Bob Drake, besides being key Thinking Plague members, at that time constituted the core of the 5UUs. They had recently taken up residence in the south of France on an old farm owned by Chris Cutler and long-time Art Bears/Henry Cow friend, artist and sound engineer, E. M. Thomas, who wanted to create their own studio there for the serious production of avant-rock/RIO and/or experimental groups. Dave and Bob became involved in helping to renovate, remodel and rig the farm to become a recording studio, as well as livable habitat - which was eventually accomplished. It was named Studio Midi-Pyrenees (now called Le Maison Isolé), and Bob became the resident engineer/producer. So Dave and Bob, having released Hunger's Teeth the year before, wanted to take a live version of the band on the road in Europe, and they needed a guitar player. So they asked "moi."
During our couple-of-weeks of rehearsing there and on subsequent visits, I became familiar with their neighborhood. It happens that Studio Midi-Pyrenees lies in the heart of the old Cathar country, as the "Pays du Cathars" signs on the roads thereabouts remind one. All around are numerous ruins of mountain top chateau/fortresses that were besieged during the "crusade," as well as well-preserved medieval hilltop villages, one reputedly the center of magical lore related to the Holy Grail and/or treasure of the Templars - not to mention various ruins of Roman baths, "mysterious" tombs, caves and other "wondrous" things. Part of the area is dominated by the Pic du Bugarch, which when I first saw it in 1995, seemed to me that it must have been some kind of "holy mountain" for any of the area's ancient roster of inhabitants, such as early homo-sapiens or Cro-Magnon Man (various famous cave paintings - Lascaux and others - are nearby), the Celtic Gauls, the Romans, the Visigoths, the Merovingian Franks, etc. It is dramatic and somehow "otherworldly" - and it became, by the way, the image used on the cover of A History of Madness. The other image, the fountain, comes from a village in the area. The whole region radiates ancientness and beauty for me - mixed with a faint hint of nostalgic and slightly ominous sadness. I became even more interested and over several years read books and visited web sites about the Langdoc and Midi-Pyrenees. I reread Holy Blood: Holy Grail and read histories of the Cathars, such as Massacre at Montsegur by Oldenbourg. I also delved a little into the origins and meaning of the "Holy Grail" legends, including a scholarly classic called From Ritual to Romance by Weston, which was the inspiration for T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. That book essentially says that the whole Grail "romance" or legend evolved from pagan religious ceremonies and symbolism. The recent bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, equates the Holy Grail with the "sacred feminine" - as in the "Goddess," "Earth Mother," or whatever. I had been into this before when reading Graves's The White Goddess, which was the inspiration for the TP track "Moonsongs" from back in the mid-80s.
So anyway, to finally get back to the point. I was not trying to tell a story about the Cathars, relate historical events, make a "theme-album" on them, or anything like that. I used that particular slice of tragic history as a vehicle to express the sorrow and madness of human history with references to certain allegorical symbols. And this is only directly pertinent to two songs, "Consolamentum" and "The Underground Stream." The personal madness/insanity aspect of the CD is dealt with more specifically in "Blown Apart" and "Lux Lucet," which by the way, is shortened from Lux Lucet In Tenebris, Latin for "a light shines in the darkness" - that's the motto from the emblem of the Waldensian sect. I liked that connection, and the song is really about a journey through mental darkness. "Blown Apart," on the other hand, is another "complaint song," in the same vein as "Dead Silence," but dealing more with the disintegration of one's psychic and emotional being caused by living in this society of superficial commercialism, phony icons and self-destructive hypocrisy. (Phew!!... Don't let me get started!...).
That's already more than you were probably expecting, so I won't try to explain the virtually inexplicable any further.
JH: While I hadn't caught on to the whole "madness" aspect of the album, I did see another theme, and wonder how much you intended it, or if you intended it at all: Much of A History of Madness seems to concern the search for spirituality, and the conflict between the real thing, which comes from within, and the kind of mass-marketed religiosity that can forge lost, frightened, or angry people into cannon-fodder usable by the power-hungry. As in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, you use the search for water in a barren, ruined land as a metaphor for the search for spiritual renewal. However, in addition, you tie in an image of that water as something unassuming, yet able to wear away the hardest stone, rust the strongest steel.
MJ: Actually, the line you're referring to in "The Underground Stream," "We should be as water, lower than all things, yet stronger even than the rock," is an old Lakota Indian saying, which I meant to credit as such on the CD. But it got lost in the hurry over the deadline flurry. People mustn't think that I'm so "wise" as to come up with such things on my own.
JH: Let's go through the CD piece-by-piece. I'd like to give you my interpretation of the pieces and get your reaction.
MJ: OK.
JH: "Blown Apart" starts the cycle off by setting out the cognitive dissonance of modern life - the need for a connection with something greater than oneself and for life to make sense, but the lack of any clear answers other than inadequate, predigested ones pushed by those with a very large ax to grind.
MJ: I'll go along with that. The song is really intended to be more pre-conscious or emotion-oriented than a particularly analytical statement of any type. But it is all you said with a good solid overlay of alienation toward modern western materialist society. Which, as one may note, has always been prevalent to varying degrees on Thinking Plague records.
JH: "Consolamentum" describes the conflict in its ugliest form from the viewpoint of a Cathar, who has actually tried to live by Christian principles, but in the end can do little more than die for her faith at the hands of the Albigensian Crusaders.
MJ: Yes, and this is one of my big problems with organized religion. The idea of "Christian principles," as practiced by the Cathars or anyone else who tries to actually follow the instructions for living provided by the person/being known as the Christ, is very different, it seems to me, from the "principles" apparently espoused by not only the medieval church, but by many modern so-called Christians. Their ideas and behaviors seem to be paranoid, tribalistic, intolerant and, above all, hypocritical. It's all about making everyone believe the same as they do, using God as an excuse to exploit people and the earth, and rationalizing away Christ's really powerful message - that gets overlooked or lost - his example of selflessness - his call to abandon wealth and dedicate oneself to others. That kind of thing is certainly not "the American Way."
Mind you, I don't profess to be a saint, myself, but nor do I preach intolerance regarding peoples' sexual practices or preferences, their right to chose what to do with their own bodies, to believe what they want to about the world and the universe unless, of course, it is an intolerant belief. I say, think what you want, until your thinking begins to impinge on the right or ability of others to do so as well. Build what you like, make what you like, think what you like and act how you want, until your thoughts or actions begin to prevent others from doing the same. Then you go too far. It's kind of the good old "Golden Rule," a social philosophy that I think is without peer. We are so very far from such a society.
Regarding "Consolamentum," I also wanted to evoke an incredible harrowing and heroic act, one that happened many times among the Cathars when besieged at Montsegur and elsewhere. Even when it was clear that the crusaders had won and the fortress would surrender - even on the eve of the gates being opened to the enemy - friends, family members, hired or volunteer soldiers there to defend the Cathars, and others trapped in the fortress would choose to accept the "Consolamentum." This was the ritual laying-on-of-hands by which a regular believer became a "perfected one," or parfait (French) or perfectus (Latin). In so doing, they knowingly chose to be condemned to immolation on the pyre when taken by the French (these Cathars were from "Languedoc" and spoke Occitan - similar to Catalan). They all knew that death by burning was the rigid Catholic requirement for all captured perfecti. The rest of the captured might be whipped, imprisoned, fined or even sent home. So it was not necessary to face the flames. My protagonist in the song, has made that choice and is contemplating her escape from this evil world into the next.
JH: "Rapture of the Deep" offers a different and more hopeful possibility, of finding spirituality in the natural world and one's own sense of connection with it.
MJ: Hmmm, perhaps. But in all honesty, that song is a kind of fatalistic love song, inspired by various poems written from the perspective of one facing death. Deborah, who I think initially liked this song the best from this CD, was immediately struck by the sadness of it. I hadn't intended it to be like a message from someone on death's door, but rather a contemplation of the pain and beauty of love and mortality. We all know we will be gone someday, and if you feel great love for another, what might you say to that person while you still have the capacity and opportunity to really express yourself. I know it's pretty bleak, but the song actually envisions a "place" where "love never dies," to use a corny phrase. As I say, it is a "love song," a rare but not unknown thing in the avant-progressive genre. It is very personal and is dedicated to my wife Leslie.
JH: "Gudamy Le Mayagot" presents a crazed, increasingly off-center French folk-dance tune - perhaps an evocation of that culture gone mad.
MJ: More like Balkan meets Irish in my mind, but in truth just me writing in a way that attempts to "appreciate" some of the incredible ethnic music I've heard - particularly in Ireland, but also Romanian Gypsy music - and to exploit the qualities of acoustic instruments, and the skills of some really good players. In so-called "RIO" (I dislike that pitiful categorization) circles this sort of thing is not at all unusual.
JH: "Our 'Way of Life'" shows the deluded - the Crusaders and their modern equivalents - as their puppet-masters see them: nothing more than convenient weapons who'll get thrown away when they break or grow dull.
MJ: That's a good interpretation. But I must confess that this song was written years before the rest of the material on this album - it's part of what was to have been a "Kingdom Come suite" written between 1987 and 1990. I reworked it, and included it here, because I just thought it fit the flavor of this CD. And when performed by the current group it "sounds" like it belongs.
JH: "The Underground Stream" returns to the Cathar view. As does the last portion of The Waste Land, it evokes waiting in the desert for the rain of divine grace to bring peace to a blighted soul and life to a drought-scarred land.
MJ: Well yes and no. This song is the one where my symbols get mixed up and the message is very subtle and vague. I didn't really try to define the meaning and intent of this record very clearly, but wanted to evoke the curiosity and interest of those who might be inclined to look for the connections in my references.
The reason I used the water symbol has to do with two things really. One of the secret code names for the hidden bloodline of Christ, according to the book Holy Blood: Holy Grail, is the "underground stream." I liked that name, although I am not religious in any systematic way, especially not Christian, as in the organized church. But I liked the image created by a secret bloodline.
So I co-opted it for my own more "pagan" anti-industrial, anti-capitalist, anti-globalist message. Along with this is the idea of water as the healer of the dying land, the "wasteland," as portrayed symbolically in the romance of the Holy Grail, according to the analysis of Weston in From Ritual to Romance, and others. The king, or the "fisher-king" is dead or dying, and the land is barren. In pre-Christian thinking, this means the Gods of fertility have been offended - or you may say the "earth" has been exploited without regard to restoring or preserving what is being taken.
According to some native American legends and religious practices, the gods must be thanked for the animals killed for food, clothing and shelter, and the people must never take more than they need. They must never harvest all the plants or seeds that they find. Nature must be preserved and humankind must stay in its place as part of the natural order.
Of course, this all began to change with agriculture. In the last 2000 years (even more so in the last 100 years) human exploitation increasingly came to constitute a crisis for the continued existence of the planet as we know it - the environment from which we sprang, and upon which we absolutely depend. Somewhere along the way, as our methods and skills became more and more effective in protecting us from starvation and environmental and climatic conditions, we were able to step outside of, or circumvent, the rules of nature. People used to die at about the same rate they were born. The earth was once able to restore itself at about the same rate that humans damaged it. Our "footprint" was small. Now our print covers the entire earth - the atmosphere and the oceans are polluted and there is almost no piece of land that has not felt the impact of humans. We've all known this for a number of years now, but the greed of those in power, and the complaisance of those of us who are comfortable, have caused us to try to ignore it.
Meanwhile, according to the Grail legends, the wasted land and/or the fisher-king is healed or cured by "water." This reflects a very ancient life cycle of hunter-gatherers and proto-agriculturists. The restoration of the world - the greening and burgeoning of the environment - depends on water. And in the flood legends, the evils of the earth are washed away by floods, and those who understood, or kept the "faith" were spared to start a new life.
So, I took that meaning for my song "The Underground Stream" - referring to an imaginary secret society or community of those-who-understand, who are awaiting the restoration of the earth through some kind of cleansing by "water" - a flood, an endless rain, etc. All as metaphors, of course. It is not religious, certainly not Christian. It is metaphoric, coming from the ancient pagan world.
I did not spell any of this out very precisely on the History of Madness CD, because it was my hope that the flavor of the music and words would convey something ineffable to the listener, at some kind of unconscious level perhaps. And that they might become curious enough about the intent of the words and titles, to do some investigating - like on the internet. Try "googling" "underground stream" with "consolamentum" and after filtering out all the Thinking Plague hits, you can find some pretty fascinating articles. Try just "underground stream" and you get tons of possibly relevant stuff.
JH: "Lux Lucet," finally, again takes up the third path, that of finding spirituality, a sense of connection, and redemption within oneself. Perhaps to do so, one must turn away from two other paths: That of the Crusaders - aggressively buying into the set answers offered by society and becoming the willing tool of the vicious and greedy; and that of the Cathars - passively waiting for God to make everything right in the next life, if not this one.
MJ: Wow, now that's more and maybe better than what I consciously intended! I was again being vague on the conscious analytical level. Lyrics, as you know, are often just intended to evoke images or "flavors" without really meaning much (look at all the classic Yes albums). In this case, I was trying to evoke a journey through darkness as a metaphor for mental illness - an old idea. Among many other works that express this idea, there's Darkness Visible: a Memoir of Madness, by William Styron, which I have not read, but which Bob Drake told me about.
I am, myself, a sufferer of clinical depression, and I had a serious bout of it before I started the final phase of writing for this CD. I often had in my mind the motto of the Waldensian sect, Lux Lucet In Tenebris ("a light shines in the darkness"), which appears on their emblem, and that includes the image of a candle burning. Noting the connection between Cathars and Waldensians - similar provenance and beliefs, and appearance in France at approximately the same time and region - the Waldensians, or Vaudois as known by the French, started in Lyons, and the Cathars were to be found farther south along the Rhone valley and to the south west.
JH: The CD's instrumentals both punctuate the vocal pieces and offer their own take on A History of Madness's central conflict: The four parts of "Marching as to War" present a cracked, off-tune, satiric look at "Christian Soldiery," while the soundscapes and unaccompanied solo of "War on Terra" and "Least Aether for Saxophone + Le Gouffre" offer the possibility of peace and redemption.
MJ: Hmmm Good! I would say that "War on Terra," besides being a takeoff on the manner of speech and seeming obsession of our current "president" is really open for personal interpretation. I sort of see it as if you were watching history go by rapidly, but from a distance and in a kind of disconnected state - kind of like the effect they use in movies when they want to give the impression of the passage of time and events.
JH: Turning, now, to the music, A History of Madness sounds somewhat different from your earlier recordings. In particular, In this Life and the work collected on Early Plague Years both have an aggressive, spiky, clamorous tone, rather like the Art Bears, although your music also remains very much itself. On A History of Madness, that influence seems less obvious, and the entire mood has become more low-keyed, although I think it has the same level of emotional intensity. Does this result from the different musicians you worked with, or do you think it has another cause?
MJ: The Early Plague Years material is all from 1982 to about 1987, and so is around 20 years out of date in terms of personnel, recording approaches, etc. The band on A History of Madness is almost the same as that which recorded In Extremis, which is apparently considered by a lot of progressive fans to "rock" more than A History of Madness, heh heh... The Art Bears were more of a conscious influence on some of the work of Thinking Plague in the 80s. But I don't now, nor did I ever, sit down to write something and think, "Hmmm I want to do something that sounds like Art Bears" or anybody else. If the influence is there, it is primarily at the unconscious level, or was actually brought out more during the recording/production of some songs. In this Life has an Art Bearsy feel on a couple songs, but you couldn't identify a particular Art Bears cut that was referenced. A Thinking Plague has very little in common with Art Bears, in my humble opinion, with the possible exception of the verses in "Possessed." On Moonsongs there is nothing that for me is reminiscent of the Bears. It's more like Crimson with a little Gabriel filtered heavily through something else I can only call Thinking Plagueness. I will not say that the harmonic, melodic, rhythmic and production sensibilities of the Art Bears and Henry Cow (in particular Western Culture) were not in our heads and souls. But so were those of many other groups as well as composers like Stravinsky, William Schuman, Prokofiev, and so on. We weren't out to emulate any of these. We were just making music that we liked.
The particular orchestration and attitude of the music on A History of Madness are, I would say, about 95% a result of how it was written, and then recorded. The performers, for the most part, played the parts that were written for them. Of course, whenever a person plays an instrument the sound they make is very much a product of their facility, fingers, breath, expression, intensity, etc. But on this record, they were really given some pretty precise parts to play. I don't doubt that the sound would be more "rockin'" if Dave Kerman and Bob Drake had played the drums and bass. But so much of that is often a function of mixing. After all, Dave Willey played bass on most of In Extremis, but it was mixed by Bob. And, of course, Dave "rocked" on that CD, in my humble opinion. David Shamrock, who played the drums on A History of Madness, did not choose to embellish very much, and did not presume very much about dynamics or "feel." He was very careful to follow my chart. That was OK with me, because, I always think that the musical whole is more important than any one player's flashiness or slickness (although David has plenty - listen to Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's Grand Opening and Closing).
Overall the goal that Mark McCoin and I had in the production and mixing of A History of Madness was a very organic and "personal" sound, as opposed to the more "in-yer-face" quality of In Extremis. Many people say that In This Life is the best Thinking Plague record ever, and it was much more - how would you say - "mooshy" and sonically integrated - as in less spiky - more "mixed together" - than the Early Plague Years stuff. In Extremis was chock full of parts, layers of things going on, all recorded very discretely. Could have been a "transparent" but maybe not so hard-hitting record. But Bob Drake chose to "smash" the sound a certain way that makes it rush out of the speakers right at you. In the process some of the transparency or discreteness might have been lost, but the energy and excitement his mix created are a big part of that CD's success.
As the days and months go by since the release of A History of Madness, it seems to me that the general appreciation for the record has increased. In Europe, according to reviews I've seen in French, German and Italian magazines or prog web sites, it has had nothing but a very positive response. It seems to have scored very high in some of the prog music polls.
I think our society is so overloaded with stimuli. Most of it loud, in-yer-face and very hyped up. It makes it hard to notice things. It requires things to hit you over the head. So A History of Madness is like an art film versus a Hollywood action movie. Much less slick, immediate, loud, etc. But hopefully more fulfilling in the long run. And that is perhaps what I'm starting to notice - that more people are warming to this record because it is not a one-listen-grabs-you kind of record. It takes a while to become attuned to the sonic style and musical content of this record. There is just as much or more "content" as there was in In Extremis, but it is being presented in an intentionally different way. If people want to hear the particular playing styles and tone of Dave Kerman or Bob Drake, then they really won't find it here. But it should be recalled that a young women named Maria Moran, who couldn't have been more than 19 at the time, played bass on almost all of the In This Life's material. Though very talented, she was certainly no Bob Drake. But it all works great, in my humble opinion. Bob chose to be the drummer for that record, and he is no Dave Kerman. But his parts were perfect.
So I'd like it if people could get past this thing about Drake and Kerman being "missed" in Thinking Plague. It's not really relevant. Listen to A History of Madness for what it is, and not what you might have been expecting. Because, as a composer, I have no obligation to follow any pre-ordained stylistic path, or to do what anyone expects. Even so, this CD sounds just like Thinking Plague to me!
JH: Well, Bob was the other principal in Thinking Plague. He probably was involved in the songs from the beginning, and he brought in a different viewpoint from yours.
MJ: Certainly, but not really in the actual writing of my tunes. He contributed his own pieces over which he exercised total control - "Four Men in the Rain," "A Light is On and Name the World," "Inside Out" (with Susanne), and other bits. He and I were usually both involved in mixing the stuff (except on In Extremis). He certainly worked with me to "realize" the songs, meaning deciding what kind of sounds, recording approach, sometimes instrumentation, synth tones, and of course mixing. He usually personalized the bass parts. He often created his drum parts, except for some key motifs - and his drumming then was decidedly not the standard approach. It was actually very musical and even orchestral. He sometimes wrote fiddle lines, and he definitely added a lot of his guitar ideas to "Les Etudes." He was our kind of artistic "quality control officer" - our aesthetic barometer, and main producer.
I can't say enough about how brilliant I think Bob has always been over the 26 years that I've known him. But, while he was so deeply involved in making the record, as I said, he didn't even play bass on most of In This Life. Again, I think it's often a mixing thing and a choice of bass sounds.
While on the subject of bass, I invite you to check out the very-soon-to-be-released live CD of Thinking Plague at NEARfest 2000 [Thinking Plaque: On Both Your Houses - NEARfest Records]. Dave Willey shows his wonderful skills and creativity on the bass, embellishing parts and making things "rock" in ways I never thought of.
JH: Although you may have always written most of Thinking Plague's music, I suspect Bob served as your sounding board as it came together - and that's also important.
MJ: All true, especially before he went to LA in 1989 - so the first 3 records were very much the result of a collective synergy, mostly between me and him, and frankly in those days, often more naïve and inexperienced, but still tapping into something... I think it's important for me to emphasize - yet again - that Thinking Plague was originally most definitely the joint creation of Bob Drake and myself. We had played in various bands prior to Thinking Plague, and we were best friends, I'd say. We had a certain chemistry, a process, that primarily started with songs that I wrote, including most of the parts for all the instruments.
But when Bob and I worked on these songs, he quickly developed ideas about how it should sound, a drum part, bass sounds, maybe some alterations to parts, some creation of parts I'd left undone, and an approach to recording and producing. He often started working on a song by laying down drums and bass tracks without me being there. As I say, he quickly understood what I was after, and often went past that into something he envisioned. Quite often his vision brought out the necessary element to capture the idea. I trusted him completely.
But, he was not really a writer of music in those days - for no other reason than he hadn't yet decided to really do that. He didn't until he was in LA well after our 3rd record, In This Life, was released. The ability was always there. But he'd sort of dedicated the decade of the 80s to facilitating the work of other composers - myself, Susanne Lewis, Bruce Odland, a very creative friend, Lin Esser, and numerous others. What he did for us all was invaluable.
But then he had to move on and develop new skills. I think he is an astonishing multi-instrumentalist and singer, a great composer of songs and really unusual complex art music. But I also think he's the best producer/mixer working in the field of progressive music. If I had asked him to mix A History of Madness, he'd have done it, and you might like it better. But he and I both felt that I should try making a Thinking Plague record without his involvement. He wanted me to learn more about the delicate art of mixing. I did.
JH: I'd agree with your earlier assertion that listeners need to accept A History of Madness (and actually, any record) for itself, and not load expectations onto it. And, of course, you have the right to compose your music in whatever way you hear it.
However, I also hear a stylistic conflict on this album, a conflict between sound and content. Though it may draw heavily from 20th Century classical idioms, your music still contains too much rock to be anything else.
MJ: I suppose I couldn't disagree. I never really claimed otherwise, "rock" being a very broad idea. And my real "training", as it were, and background as a performer was always mainly rock.
JH: The musical ideas on the CD seem to appear as well-defined sectional blocks in the manner of rock and pop, rather than overlapping or flowing seamlessly into one another. When you move from one section to another, you usually do so very clearly, and there's a big change in sound.
MJ: I don't agree with that assessment. Well not fully. Part of my style has always included a certain amount of what Bob and I used to describe as suddenly "changing the channel." That is one technique, but I'd say it is not the predominate characteristic on A History of Madness. If you learn the motifs and musical bits of the CD really well, you can hear the recurrence of themes, new material derived from themes, foreshadowing, etc. And also, I try very hard to make my sections move into each other in a way that is pleasing and logical to me. When I compose, I listen to my head, after playing or playing back a part, to "hear" in my mind what should happen next. Certainly, I have glued existing parts together, but not so much anymore, and only with great care.
JH: Specifically, A History of Madness's song structures fall into verse-chorus variations far more often than through-composed or Minimalist forms. Many of your songs have parts that sound like identifiable verses and choruses, although they may also go to all sorts of other places and may not obviously return to the beginning at all.
MJ: I do write "songs," mostly. But I never force myself to follow a predetermined structure, like ABACA, etc. A Thinking Plague song is more likely to be something like ABACDEBECFA, or whatever. And as often as not my songs turn into, or come out of, what could be called "through-composed" sections or "movements."
An example from A History of Madness would be "Blown Apart" - after a brief beginning of alternating sections A, A1 & B, let's say, it moves off into all new territory. When the kind of prog rock instrumental section in 5/8 comes in after the "big drum lick," it alternates a couple sections, then changes into something else, and from there on nothing recurs. Now one might say it's all just a bunch of random parts stuck together, but that's wrong. There are melodic and rhythm motifs from which all the material has grown. It is very cohesive, in fact, in my humble opinion, but not in an obvious way. But I never write strictly verse, chorus and variations. I am kind of trying to create rock influenced "art songs," like a new approach to Schubert's Lieder, i.e. "Die Erl Konig," etc. Ultimately, I don't think the form determines the idiom or genre. Nor do I think it matters too much.
JH: Also, you may write dense, jagged counterpoint and hocketed vocal parts, but they sound as if you built them upon homophonic chord progressions - again, such as one would find in rock - rather than hearing independent polyphonic lines as your initial inspiration, in the way classical composers are trained to.
MJ: Hmmmm, I'm not sure I follow. "Homophonic chord progressions?" Isn't that an oxymoron? If you mean that it sounds like I write the chord progression before the contrapuntal vocal parts, I'd say yes, often, but not always. As often, or more often, I have a bass and guitar figure, sometimes with a vocal bit in mind, upon which I impose chord material, or from which I derive chord ideas. For example, the "coda" at the end of "Blown Apart." I took the little theme that appears between the loud twitching "verses" in the first two minutes - starts with - don't know if I remember the actual notes - F, up to C, down to G, up to Bb, down to A, down to F, down to Db, etc. - and "rethunk" it with a chord progression totally unrelated to how it was presented prior. You might call that a "variation," I guess. It's something I like to do - and it's an "academic composer" thing. And if you listen to some symphonic movements of my favorite composer, William Schuman, you hear lots of chord progressions that are the melodic material, sometimes with obvious embellishments that do not seem related. Nothing wrong with that, I don't think.
But I do, also, write lines or themes that I use as starting points to create counterpoint - what a musicologist would call "development" - although I have never tried to do it to the length and depth that a great master like Shostakovich often did. I'm no "great master." I'm a dabbler compared to such personages, but in my humble opinion, I'm not a dilettante. I'm not trying to imitate anyone, and certainly not for the purpose of sounding like anyone else. I just use ideas that come to me, either from my own creative muse, or - consciously or otherwise - from music I've admired.
A brief example - the section just preceding the guitar solo in the big climax at the end of "Consolamentum" - introduced by a digitally altered trumpet playing a motif like diddle-la da da daaaaaaah... This is definitely an independent contrapuntal passage - a brief one - in which the trumpet motif came first followed by the counterpoint guitar and organ parts, sort of fuguing on that motif. The bass guitar part came last as a driving 8th note "groove," and I decided to just have thumping kick drum and accents on the downbeats using cymbals. I didn't "hear" the exact "polyphonic" lines, as you say, in my head, but I had a conception based on the motif. I knew what I wanted to hear, and just had to find it. I think this is more often how composition really works - except maybe for those geniuses with eidetic aural memory, perfect pitch and multi-track minds, like one favorite genius Shostakovich had. As to "dense" and "jagged" - well... I guess, compared to some stuff it is, but to me, it all sounds very "right" and sensible. You can't imagine how much time I spend getting those things just like I want them. I have a certain musical language that I like, and for which I inevitably, and often unconsciously, strive.
JH: And, while the bass and percussion may tend toward sparseness, at climactic points they burst out of that, lock in, and turn into a forceful rhythm section, in the manner of a rock band.
MJ: Yeah, they do! But really, if you look at the scores, they are no more sparse than our previous CDs - relative to what's going on in the music. Except maybe compared to the earliest Thinking Plague material. But, what you're talking about are things like placement, balance, "dryness" or "wetness," contrast, and so on. These are mixing issues.
JH: Furthermore, you use these sorts of rock and jazz conventions because they come naturally to you as something powerful and expressive - you don't toss in the occasional sly dash of them as calculated slumming the way a "serious" composer might.
MJ: Actually, the psuedo-"jazz" section in "Moonsongs" (I know that's a long time ago) was precisely that kind of "sly dash," more of a fumbling stumble, intended to make fun with (not quite of) a sort of jazz style. The highly popular and, in my humble opinion, largely silly piece "Les Etudes D'Organisme" contains the same kind of "having fun" but with Ska, Klezmer, etc. The older "Etude for Combo" did the same with funk, a little. We were most definitely having fun, almost poking fun. There was no conscious intent, just sort of making fun of ourselves in a way. Most of those styles did not come particularly naturally to us - especially Bob and I - or Kerman, where Ska or Klezmer is concerned. That was part of the fun of it.
JH: That’s interesting. If I read you right, you’re implying that you don’t play much jazz. However, your solos sound like the work of a jazz musician - the way you come up with meaningful lines on difficult changes.
MJ: Actually, I write most of my solos on CDs. I dislike most jazz, in some cases quite a lot - unlike most of my friends and colleagues (except Bob Drake). I don't like the seeming ethic of "tossed offness," relying-on-chops and using any old melodies as a basis to spew - like "Mary Had A Little Lamb" for the "head" - gack! On the other hand, I love some of the more creative fusion that happened by in the "good old days" - Mahavishnu, some of Chick Corea, some of Weather Report, etc. I mean, early King Crimson was very jazz influenced. I, myself, never had a jazz phase - fusion was as close as I came. And I never really learned the basics of jazz - sure I took theory and I know how to analyze stacked thirds chords, and I even learned a little about chord substitution - but I don't like it. Seems pointless to me to "substitute" chords. It only applies to the jazz practice of endlessly re-presenting old tunes. I just can't get interested in that. I want to present new things. (My apologies to any jazz fans - I know all jazz isn't like that, but there is an emphasis in jazz on improvising within certain harmonic structures.) When a lot of people as kids were entering their all-important jazz phase, I was going from loving Beethoven, straight to Beatles, and then later, from Hendrix back to classical, but in the 20th Century form - Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Britten, etc. At the same time I was getting into progressive rock, à la early Crimson, Yes, Genesis, Gentle Giant and others.
JH: What I meant by your avoiding the "calculated slumming of serious composers" is exemplified by the portion of "Consolamentum" from 3:22 to the end. This is not a deconstructed reference to a rock guitar solo - it is a rock guitar solo, the real thing, because the song called for that personal cry of agony. And you put it in there and played it without the self-conscious editorializing that a post-modern classical composer might have felt necessary. Someone like that might have played a bunch of disconnected rock clichés, or perhaps a gutbucket blues solo in the wrong key.
MJ: Ah, good idea! Also, I like the "cry of agony" bit. The key factor is that I am a rock guitar player, therefore when I play a solo on an electric guitar, I default back to my accumulated "feel," techniques and frankly habits of 40 years of playing electric guitar. I'm not a "classical composer," merely a rock guitarist who long ago slid down a different path, or took the "other fork" in the woods.
JH: In short: on a compositional level, your work comes from the popular music tradition and still belongs there - it may have convoluted sectional structures, harmonically complex chord-changes, and a groove that disappears half the time, but still it has sections, changes, and a groove. However…
MJ: I have difficulty with this business of categorization - "popular music tradition," "classical," "prog," "RIO" - mainly because I make no conscious attempt to adhere to any of those definitions. I draw from them, play with them, but in the end, these labels are placed on the music makers by the critics, reviewers, discussion groupies, etc. I think these labels have value for musical historians, ethnographers, musicologists, etc. But generally well after the fact and only as a way of explaining trends and movements. Popular music once meant that which is played for and by the "masses" versus the exclusive "art music" that was sponsored and pretty much wholly owned by the aristocracy. In the 20th century in the "West," it became more of an intellectually elite music versus the simple physical appeal of music inspired from African-American sources that was adopted by whites and disseminated via mass media - for profit. Which, of course, led to the corporate dominance of so-called "popular" music. It's all so intertwined now that I can't tell what the "popular" music would be without the corporate involvement.
JH: However, you arranged, produced, and mixed A History of Madness in a way that sounds much more to me like 20th-century classical chamber music, and I’ll also give the reasons for saying that...
MJ: It doesn't really sound like chamber music to me, except maybe for "Our Way of Life." It sounds like all kinds of styles at times, to me. Almost like Bossa Nova or Balkan music.
JH: To start with, A History of Madness's predominant texture is a web of criss-crossing lines, carrying on simultaneously or interrupting one another, and all given roughly equal emphasis. This sounds a lot more like classical music than rock, in which the vocals and rhythm section usually come first, then the guitars, then the other instruments, and so forth.
MJ: Yeah, cool huh? What you say is true, sometimes, but not all the time. But I do like the effect of everything being apparent, like if you were at an intimate live show. The band plays, and you hear all their parts - if they're in balance and mixed decently.
Mark McCoin and I may have failed to achieve adequate clarity in our mix, such as in some passages particularly in the first part of "Blown Apart." This is likely due to he and I having not yet fully arrived at a common vision for mixing. I probably could have let him mix it alone - I wasn't adequately equipped or experience in the virtual sound production world to do it myself. But then he'd probably have made it even more "organic" and less machine-like. I think it got better as we went, although we actually mixed "Rapture of the Deep" before the rest of the album for a Progression Magazine sampler. And I like how that song sounds - I might remix about 15 seconds of it, if I had the chance.
JH: Also, the bass and drums are frequently absent - not momentarily building tension by laying out and then resolving it by entering, but simply "not there." When present, they tend to take chamber-music roles: the bass serving mainly as the lowest voice in the harmony, the drums adding color and emphasis, and both often falling quite low in the mix.
MJ: Absent as in "Our Way of Life?" I just decided that I liked how it sounded without drums, so we never put any in, although Dave Kerman recorded some drums for an earlier incarnation of that song that never was completed.
As for "chamber-music roles," I think you're misinterpreting what's there. I refer you to the truly "monophonic" pounding bass throughout the climax at the end of "Consolamentum." Or the syncopated, but definitely "grooving" bass throughout most of "Blown Apart." Or in "The Underground Stream." And, yes, in "Lux Lucet," where the bass guitar and drums are generally locked. It's all about what I think is a "groovy" bass part.
Also, I do believe that the conventional idea of the bass having to "hold down the bottom" or only "groove" and not have melodic moments is very passé in the realm of so-called progressive music. Where would Chris Squire be if he couldn't do melodic bass lines? Thinking Plague does both, and everything in between with the bass guitar.
JH: In general, it has the sound and feel of a classical composer writing for rock band-like instrumentation, such as the Bang-on-a-Can All-Stars.
MJ: I think it must said that there is really no such thing as a generic "classical composer," if such a thing has existed since the days of Haydn, perhaps with the exception of students who are required to attempt to replicate standard practices. Some people would say that Philip Glass is a "composer" of "serious art music." I'd say he's one of the most uninteresting noodlers who ever tinkled out a three-note arpeggio. But, how can you compare serialists to neo-classicists, to neo-romantics, to avant gardists, etc.? And all of these can be much further subdivided, if one wants to milk the categorization thing. Nowadays you can go to a music school and be taught by the likes of Fred Frith. He's not gonna give many A's for one sounding like a "classical composer."
JH: To sum this all up, A History of Madness has the underlying compositional structure of rock. However, you gave it a sound more appropriate to "serious" art music.
MJ: Well, this may be presumptuous, but I think it is "serious art music." But it has also grown out of rock music - I have always believed that rock music can be serious. My whole musical life has been dedicated to that proposition. And anyway, while writing A History of Madness I didn't think about such things. I merely wrote some music I liked, had the band members learn and record the parts, and then mixed it with a trusted musical friend.
I just write music that I want to hear. I try to express things that I want expressed, and use instruments and sounds that I understand and like, or am interested in or intrigued by. But I have always said, with respect to Thinking Plague, that we were making music that blended elements of rock and 20th-Century classical, as well as - yes - jazz, ethnic music, electronic, even - because we liked aspects of these and other genres.
I will state categorically that I believe A History of Madness could have been mixed (and mostly mastered) better - in terms of clarity and perhaps "punch" in some places. That can be said about so many records. You might be surprised to know that I initially had problems with Bob's mix of the later material on In Extremis until I got used to it after a substantial time. Now I think it's great, but it's not how I imagined originally.
Meanwhile, I still think A History of Madness is a legitimate attempt to do something more organic and use more acoustic sounds than we used on In Extremis, while still using the language of Thinking Plague. It is slightly more "songy" in that I was going more back to the attitude we had on In This Life, but updated and with different people, different technology, different chemistry. It's also an opening up of previously unexplored methods for this band, like the soundscapes, the piano ensemble bits, the extended piano improv on track 9, the solo sax composition, which by the way, is Mark Harris's work and not mine. It was also a learning experience for me, Mark McCoin, Mark Fuller, and everyone else involved.
There will not likely be another Thinking Plague record quite like it. It is what it is, and it must be heard numerous times, like any "serious" music, to be appreciated.
© Copyright 2004 John Hagelbarger. All rights reserved.
Photo Credits:
Mike Johnson photo at top of article by Rick Cummins (retouched by Lee McCartney).
Thinking Plague montage photographed by Rick Cummins and others. Composite by Raoul Rossiter.
Mike Johnson photo near bottom of article by Jean-Luc Puteaux.