Bill Laswell (bonus)

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Whether printing complex mixes, section-by-section, through old Neve consoles without automation to 1/2-inch tape, or hauling recording rigs and generators into the mountains of Morocco, Bill Laswell embodies a fearless resolve in creating a discography that no one can touch in terms of depth, breadth or sheer number of records produced. I started digging Laswell in the early 1980s, and was particularly intrigued with his fluency in the languages of then-nascent hip-hop, as well as reggae and the electric rock styles of West Africa. His incongruous collaborations with musicians from different parts of the planet, as well as regular use of some of my favorite musicians from the worlds of Parliament/Funkadelic and reggae were always wrapped in sounds, textures, and rhythms just a few steps ahead of the bleeding edge of NYC club styles. Everything that appeared with Laswell's name on it was a challenge of some sort, aggressively demolishing notions of genres while always expanding ideas of sonic possibilities. Some of the most interesting people and projects Bill has produced include Ornette Coleman, Santana, John Zorn, George Clinton, Pharoah Sanders, Iggy Pop, Herbie Hancock, Buckethead, William S. Burroughs, Tony Williams, James "Blood" Ulmer, PiL, Praxis, Material, as well as re-workings of Bob Marley and Miles Davis.

I've been a friend of Bill's since the late 1980s, via his long time engineer Robert Musso, who had initially hired me to run his MuWorks label. I went on to run Bill's Axiom Records for the first half of the 1990's. Bill also pushed me into founding the Tzadik label with John Zorn, and got me on the payrolls of Rykodisc, CMP and other labels as a consultant. Bill's blessings allowed me to travel worldwide, become friendly with many of my musical heroes, and, most importantly, spend a lot of time in the studio with him.

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I've been a friend of Bill's since the late 1980s, via his long time engineer Robert Musso , who had initially hired me to run his MuWorks label. I went on to run Bill's Axiom Records for the first half of the 1990's. Bill also pushed me into founding the Tzadik label with John Zorn, and got me on the payrolls of Rykodisc, CMP and other labels as a consultant. Bill's blessings allowed me to travel worldwide, become friendly with many of my musical heroes, and, most importantly, spend a lot of time in the studio with him.

There was a time when a record was a budget and an idea, right? Obviously the ideas aren't going away, but what does a record mean these days?

A record means nothing these days. What means something these days is the experience of hearing the music and hearing the sound. A record is a receipt. It's like a document. Records now are just business. Music is vast. Endless. I think playing live is really important. Recording live music is really great — documenting live experiences is really important. As far as those days where you sit down and you craft the record and it takes Axl Rose seventeen years to make a record... That's good or bad — why? Records don't necessarily mean all that much. It's the experience and the memory. Records are just memory. Notation is memory. Tape recall is memory. Music should be experience — memory. Get past the 'solid' of it. I still like the graphics and whatnot. I still like hardcopies. The download thing — the only reason I don't like the download thing is because I like hardcopies. I like to have the thing. It's like, "Did you buy the painting, or did you hear about it?" I'm conscious of the money but I'm getting it other ways. I'm telling motherfuckers, "You owe me money." People say, "You're a national treasure. You changed my life." I say, "Good. Give me money." It's not business anymore. That shit wasn't business anyway. That was oppression. It was manipulation.

And always dealing with the bullshit because the traditional business model was so foul...

And dealing with people — on one side you have the artist, who knows exactly what he wants to do, and on the other side you have an asshole who has not a clue. So, what kind of relationship is that? There are very few exceptions.

So how does it work without money?

We'll get money. People say the economy is bad. Fuck the economy. People say times are hard. People are cryin'. I don't buy that. From the clean slate, you build the next music. You start from nothing. It's going to be the next phase of music — "entertainment" has very little to do with what I'm interested in. I just did this record with a Dr. Frank Lipman; he's an acupuncturist from South Africa who's treated many, many people — including [Nelson] Mandela — heavy people. His concept, when I met him, was in the West we either don't know, or we've forgotten, why music happened. It was for funerals. It was for weddings. It was for giving life. It was for killing. It was for all these heavy things. All of the sudden it turned into business, and it turned to dancing around on a stage, and that's not what it is. I hooked up with this guy and I did a record, it is called Spent . "Spent" means when you are just done. Well, I was spent. I couldn't walk. I related to the guy a lot. I got a call from yoga people that I know. They said, "You have a huge fan. He's one of the greatest doctors in the world. He wants to see about rehabilitating and restoring your muscle." It's hard to get up, even now. I have to use a handrail to get up the stairs. That shit was serious. So I made this record. It's called, Spent: Beats to Bring You Back . We did the cover. It's a compilation, basically, but I did mixes, cross fades and whatnot. It makes a lot of sense. I was thinking maybe that's the key to part of the future, of what's going to become. Because the music business is done. Major labels, big business, CEOs getting millions of dollars from sitting around doing nothing — that's done. Bands should be dropped. All bands. Keep ZZ Top. I like them.

Reminds me of some of the deepest kinds of music there is, like the deep Vodou stuff in Haiti — the only reason you bring the serious drums out is to take care of some business.

Yeah, the only reason. A lot of Africa is like that. A lot of India is like that.

I think of all the field recordings from Africa that you've done, my favorite is the first Gnawa Music Of Marrakesh record, Night Spirit Masters , on Axiom.

That was recorded in the Medina in Marrakesh. I had Billy Youdelman, who's a great engineer. We were there for the first time and tried to get the essence of it. I'm not sure we got the spirit totally of the music, but we got the sound of it, for sure. It's probably the greatest sounding Gnawa record that will ever be made. We had major gear; we took a lot of stuff with us. And I took a serious, world-class engineer.

And then you came home and mixed it big and fat, like a rock record.

Always. It's all rock music. If it's not, it's weak. And if it's weak, put it in the shitter.

My impression is that those "electric" Miles Davis records you drew from for Panthalassa were made with tape edits.

Edits, all edits.

The difference between recording Last Exit and Painkiller

With Painkiller you go for the bombast; hit the switch and turn on the noise. Last Exit had a little bit more interaction, more communication and a little more movement and dynamics. Painkiller was a sonic blast of noise, in the way that Japanese hardcore is. Sonically, if you know what you're up against, it'll translate, studio-wise. It's still better done live.

Making a record with Gigi, Bill's wife

It's not easy. We usually start with the melody, then appropriate the melody to a time, a tempo, and see if the tempo is in a certain time signature. Then we start to appropriate rhythms and gather musicians to play on it. Whoever can play at the time; sometimes you play all together, sometimes one at a time.

Remasters or Remixing?

The world doesn't just have to be reconditioned; it can be remade. Reconditioning is just EQ. We've had enough EQ; it's all ups and downs. You need to redefine a lot of this stuff. Just because it happened then doesn't mean we don't know about it now. We knew about it then, we just couldn't do anything about it.

Bahia Black's Ritual Beating System

Bahia Black started with Carlinhos Brown; he is from Bahia, Brazil. It was all kind of built around him, as this new artist, and this music that was going on in Brazil. It was based around the idea of African music in Bahia; it makes the connection of the African sound of Brazil. When it comes to Bahia, it's more like rock music and black music.

So what you were listening to was long jams.

Yeah. I knew the records really well. For me, when people talk about that project, and when they talk about Miles and the seventies, it all gets back to On the Corner . If you listen to that record, it's really two bass lines, two beats — it's cut up in a lot of different ways. In no way do those pieces represent anything that anyone was doing to create music in the studio. Nobody came into the studio and said, "This is my music. Let's record it and put it out like this." It's just cut up into a one-minute piece, five-minute piece and a six-minute piece; but it's all based on motifs, bass lines, and rhythms — there are about two through the whole record. There are six or seven reels of that information, which go in a lot of different areas, and those weren't used. It would take some time to sort those out. That's a two-record set right there — it could be great.

Did you always know where those edit points were on the original records?

No, I never thought about it. If you listen to Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival 1970 by Miles Davis you hear the whole band playing and, all of a sudden, it's in a different key and a different rhythm. I thought, "How can they do that?" [laughs] What's weird is that they were influenced by the recordings — the band would be playing, he would signal and the band would do something else. That's a direct influence from the recordings, from the editing of the music. Because a track like "Rated X" — I'll give Teo [Macero] credit for being ridiculous enough to push a solo button on an organ [track] and create these incredible breaks out of nowhere. It's like the whole band is playing, then just organ and then the band comes back. You can hear the click of the solo button on the record. That's pretty radical for the time.

Soloing an organ track does make me think about dub mixing.

There's a relationship. I don't know why he did that, or how that happened. I don't even want to know, but it's interesting, and it was Teo. Miles just recorded and extended his presence.

Apparently he really trusted Teo.

There are moments where he did, and moments where he didn't. It's business. Teo was the salary guy. It was business.

If Miles really didn't like him he wouldn't have been in there so long.

No, but he didn't have that many options; he was also entertaining an extreme lifestyle. The music was just coming out of the lifestyle. It was a pretty intense time — quite fun and profitable. Teo wasn't listening to nothing. Teo was working for the company. Teo was getting his money and probably putting it back into Wall Street.

No props for Teo?

Nah. Teo was a good classical and jazz producer, but when he got to On the Corner , he was out of his league. You can cut tape all day long, but it doesn't mean nothin'. Bass should be big; drums should be impactful. Things should be about dance and the big picture. He wasn't hearing a rock thing.

It's all rock music. If it's not, it's weak. And if it's weak, put it in the shitter.

Is it weird for you to work on a record that was produced by somebody else?

It's my music, in that I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for that music. I knew Miles. I knew what I could have done with him and we talked about a lot things. If I wasn't a part of that, I wouldn't be a part of what I'm doing. If I take that out of what I'm doing, I take away a big part of what I am. It's a real experience, not just a fascination.

It's not business anymore. That shit wasn't business anyway. That was oppression. It was manipulation.

What are the specific things that you felt needed to be done to the Miles records? The music is killer, but none of those records make me go, " Damn , that's a fat ass bass tone," or, "How the hell did they mic that drum kit?"

There weren't any extremes given to the low end, the impact of drums or the clarity of instruments because the people that did it were basing it all on a jazz perspective. When music is that texturally dense, you can't use those references. Somebody in 1970 could have said, "Why does Led Zeppelin sound like this, and why does Miles' record sound so little?" All you have to do is cross-reference and look at what's going on in the times. Think about a rock perspective, in terms of the size. What if Al Foster's drums sounded like John Bonham's? We're not traveling in time to do that. Why is Hendrix's record so interesting sonically — all that panning, clarity and bottom? It approached the same thing with Miles' records at that time. He had the wrong people in the studio doing the wrong things with the right music — that's the problem. That's an old problem that I'm just now fixing, in 1997. It could have been done then, but you're dealing with classical and jazz perspectives on recording — older people with older ways of looking at things. They're coming out of the '50s — they're hearing too much bottom, the meters are going like this [pegging] and that's not right [to their ears]. But Marley was different — that was later. Things had evolved, bottom end existed and there was a lot more clarity. Those records were well recorded.

What's the difference between the Al Foster/Michael Henderson grooves on the Miles Davis stuff you remixed and the Barrett brothers on the Bob Marley remixes?

Different relationships. With the Marley guys it was family, and with Miles it was all individuals. You can't break it down to ideas of a rhythm section because it's all individuals. Nobody actually pushed that far out in the Miles stuff, but there were enough people pushing a little to take it out. Miles was a presence that determined why the music was this way, because they were all working under the shadow of his presence.

Final words?

People say, "You put out too many records," or, "There's always so much stuff coming out, just because you can." None of them mean anything. It's just fun. It's not to be taken too seriously. It's just an experience. It might change somebody's life and somebody else might say it's garbage, but it'll be the same thing to me. Occasionally there are priority things, like remixing Bob Marley for Chris Blackwell or remixing Miles Davis. The rest of it's just fooling around. Records come out, sometimes just for money — to pay people's rent, get somebody a job, or get somebody a little further out of trouble. It's how musicians make money, you know?

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