Errors-To: et-admin at blackcat dot demon dot co dot uk Reply-To: et at cs dot man dot ac dot uk Sender: et at cs dot man dot ac dot uk Precedence: bulk From: et at cs dot man dot ac dot uk To: et at cs dot man dot ac dot uk Subject: Elephant Talk Digest #321 E L E P H A N T T A L K The Internet newsletter for Robert Fripp and King Crimson enthusiasts Number 321 Wednesday, 18 December 1996 Today's Topics: From the moderator TEN SECONDS/BILL FORTH INTERVIEW ------------------ A D M I N I S T R I V I A --------------------- POSTS: Please send all posts to et at cs dot man dot ac dot uk UNSUB/ADDRESS CHANGES: Send a message with a body of HELP to et-admin at blackcat dot demon dot co dot uk, or use the DIY list machine at http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/aig/staff/toby/et/list/ ETWEB: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/aig/staff/toby/et/ (partial mirror at http://members.aol.com/etmirror/) THE ET TEAM: Toby Howard (Moderator), Dan Kirkdorffer (Webmeister) Mike Dickson (List Admin), and a cast of thousands. The views expressed herein are those of the individual authors. ET is produced using John Relph's Digest 3.0 package. ------------------ A I V I R T S I N I M D A --------------------- From: Toby Hi, this is a special edition of ET, devoted to Anil Prasad's interview with Bill Forth. Many thanks to Anil for releasing it to ET. If you haven't yet heard TEN SECONDS, I'd heartily recommend it. As you might expect, there have been many many responses to Adrian Belew's post in the last ET. These will be gathered together into a special ET, coming soon. Best wishes to all Toby ------------------------------ Subject: TEN SECONDS/BILL FORTH INTERVIEW Date: Sat, 14 Dec 1996 00:42:39 -0500 (EST) From: innerviews at pobox dot com (INNERVIEWS) *--------------------------------------------------------------------- BACK AND FORTH WITH TEN SECONDS An interview will Bill Forth by Anil Prasad Copyright 1996 by Anil Prasad *--------------------------------------------------------------------- This interview is being posted for usage only in this edition of Elephant Talk, the Robert Fripp and King Crimson discussion digest. It may not be reproduced or retransmitted in any other form, electronically or otherwise, without the sole permission of the author. *--------------------------------------------------------------------- A version of this interview also appears on the INNERVIEWS MAGAZINE website, located at http://pobox.com/~innerviews You'll find a wide array of graphics, rare photos, web links and other enhancements not available via this text transcript. As well, you'll find interviews with Bill Bruford, Adrian Belew, Trey Gunn and tons of other Crimson-oriented musicians on the site. And coming soon, an in-depth interview Tony Levin! Innerviews is well worth checking out for the Crimso-phile. *--------------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks to Steve Kerns for his transcription assistance, Toby Howard at Elephant Talk for plugging me in, Mark Perry and Michael Tedesco at DGM/Possible Productions for their support and Bill Forth for his patience and enthusiasm. *--------------------------------------------------------------------- Kneeling at the shrine of creativity can have a high price. Every artist that's true to their craft is familiar with the personal, emotional and financial sacrifices that result from a devotion to channelling inspiration. Bill Forth is one of them. At 40, the California-based guitarist and songwriter has just released his debut CD under the guise of _Ten Seconds_ -- a duo effort with composer Jeff Fayman. The self-titled release [on Discipline Global Mobile Records] is a dark and jagged avant-rock effort that explores the delicate balance between disaster and delight that is the human condition. With its cascading soundscapes, crunchy guitars, processed vocals and powerhouse rhythms, the album continuously moodshifts back and forth between the icy and fiery. Ten Seconds' sound mimics the feelings that pulsed through Forth as he put the album together. Friendships were forged and lost, promises were made and broken and musical focus splintered in many directions -- all while money swirled down the drain like an industrial urinal on auto-flush. This in-depth and varied interview with Forth discusses the trials and tribulations of making Ten Seconds a reality. Included is a look at the disc's cast of stellar guest musicians -- including King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, ex-Jethro Tull percussionist Mark Craney and Ministry drummer Bill Rieflin. Forth reveals several fascinating stories involving these players -- ranging from the tragic to the hilarious. This piece also chronicles some of Forth's various lives outside of music-making. He's worked for advertising agencies as a writer and creative director, designed websites, served as Robert Fripp's road manager and written magazine articles on UFO hysteria. But wait, there's more! He's been a travel agent, an earthquake survivor, and hell, he even appears as an extra in Arnold Schwarzenegger's new Christmas movie _Jingle All The Way_. That's right -- Bill Forth, thespian extraordinaire. *--------------------------------------------------------------------- AP: Tell me about your early days as a musician. BF: I was 18 or 19 and on the other side of the alleyway where I lived in Sun Valley, L.A., there was a guy who was practicing guitar. His name was Rory Kaplan and we started playing music together in high school -- dances, playing at lunchtime, that kind of thing. Rory and I were involved with a group that was not exactly signed, but financed and rehearsing at A&M Studios. We even played a chili cook-off with Van Halen back then - before they were starting to go anywhere. So we thought we were going to be rock stars. And it went absolutely nowhere. I also played in a band called Clarity in 1981 -- an afro-psychedelic-jazz sort of band. Rory kind of hung in there and I went back to school. Rory later went on to make more money than I'll ever see. He worked for Michael Jackson for many years, toured with the Jacksons on the Victory tour, he did the Bad album, he just did Belinda Carlisle's album -- just the most commercial direction you could imagine. AP: You also put in some university time along the way, right? BF: I went to Pierce College where I majored in English. I subsequently went to Cal State-Northridge where I majored in Communications. It was nuts and bolts kind of stuff -- film theory, that sort of thing. I started working in advertising. I kind of fell into that as a creative and copy writer when I got out of school. I was never really that serious about the music thing, but was always sort of torn in my life. But I got involved in the Guitar Craft courses around 1985 or '86. AP: And you were concurrently working in the advertising industry? BF: Yeah, I was working in advertising at that time. I kept going back to Guitar Craft courses, and, eventually, I was the registrar for the courses in North America for four years. AP: How did that evolution occur? BF: Mostly from necessity. Things were really changing with Guitar Craft and Guitar Craft services, which was centered at the facility that we used at Claymont. It was dissolved at a certain point so that the people who were involved could move on to other things. Robert [Fripp] said, "There is some work here that needs to be done. Do you want to take it on?" So I did for four years. From there, it just got back to what was real and important to me in terms of the playing. AP: What first drew you to the guitar? BF: I began playing bass. That was what I really wanted to do. I think probably because I saw The Who live. My family was not necessarily really musical, but it was a really musical environment. Actually, my dad is a good singer and he was a soloist in a choir when he was a boy and he performed in the Albert Hall. Both my parents are from England and they emigrated to America. AP: And at some point you saw John Entwistle... BF: That was it pal. I thought it was awesome. You had to be there. At the time, I was really young, but I stood on the side of the stage and saw the show. I believe it was just six weeks or so later that they recorded the concert for for the _Live At Leeds_ album. It was that period of time. I must have been 12 years old, this was back in '69. It was awesome. That was the first live rock & roll band that I had ever seen. I can really go back to that moment with tremendous clarity. It had a big impact on me, definitely. AP: You did better than me. My first concert was Mr. Mister... [laughs] BF: No kidding? That was Pat Mastelotto's group. AP: Yeah, pretty funny isn't it? It's interesting how things have come full circle. And if you had told me a couple of years ago that Mastelotto would go on to play with Sylvian/Fripp and Crimson, I would never have believed you. [laughs] BF: The story of Pat getting into Crimson is pretty interesting. Steve Ball [guitarist and graphic designer] and Sanford Ponder [multi-instrumentalist] were working on an album called _Prometheus_ and asked me to come down and do some vocals on it. So I did that -- there's a few little places that are still in the mix. We did a lot of vocals. I did a few sessions with them and some of it I think they never included. But there are some backing vocals here and there. Actually, I heard some of it the other day at the Possible Productions office and I thought, "Oh yeah, that's me there." Anyway, so Sanford had given me a tape to learn songs, and Pat Mastelotto played drums on it. So I'm learning these tunes, and at the same time I had an old Leslie organ I wanted to sell that I had bought from Mark Perry. I put it in a classified ad and this guy calls me up and he comes over to buy the Leslie. It turns out that it's Pat Mastelotto. I said, "You won't believe this, but I have been listening to your playing lately because I have been learning these tunes." So, from there and just shortly thereafter, we did some jamming and some recording stuff. Shortly thereafter, this opportunity came up with this Sylvian/Fripp album. And Pat just totally went for it. You know, called Trey [Gunn], and pursued it, bought his own ticket, carried his own gear, went to the rehearsal down at Realworld [Studios], and just knocked them out. The rest was rock & roll history. I'm not sure that they knew his work, but he was persistent and certainly his qualifications would be without question. That was totally cool. He just bought his own ticket and flew out there and rented a car and drove down and knocked them out I guess. AP: He's certainly a worthy addition to the group. This current touring line-up of Crimson is probably the hottest show on the road at the moment. BF: I would have to agree. Yeah, it's really true. AP: Okay, we were talking about Guitar Craft. You said you had served four years as the registrar. What happened between then and Ten Seconds? BF: A lot of these things kind of overlap in time, so it's not that sequential. AP: Let's just go for a rough sketch then. BF: Sure. Jeff Fayman [keyboardist for Ten Seconds] and I had been friends for many, many years. I met Jeff when he was playing drums with Peter Banks [former Yes guitarist] around 1985 or '86. It was an album project called _Empire_ and I auditioned for that, but got turned down for it. And then, as fate would have it, Peter and I wound up being friends anyway and living near each other in Sherman Oaks, California years later. Anyway, Jeff and I played in sort of a prog-rock kind of band called Infinite Silence, and that's about what came out of it. It was really bombastic kind of stuff with mellotrons. But let's fast forward to Ten Seconds. For this particular thing, Jeff contacted me and he was really the guy who started the ball rolling. We both had really agreed that we were excited about the energy of industrial music, but it wasn't really going anywhere harmonically. So that's what we kind of set out to do. We were listening to things like Skinny Puppy and Ministry. I just liked the balls-to-the-wall approach of a band, say like Pantera. But again, you know, harmonically, I just felt that it wasn't really happening in an interesting way. In other words, it was very formal. Kind of almost as formal as metal is. So we started experimenting, making tapes in between Guitar Craft courses. We wrote tunes and worked at Jeff's apartment studio. He does a lot of trailers and film music. Every now and then I see films and trailers, and it's unmistakably Jeff. He's just really into that whole world. I think he's inching towards doing features. He's making a really good living at it and really enjoying it. Okay, so where were we? AP: You were throwing tapes together with Jeff at his home studio. BF: Yeah, we did that. Robert [Fripp], during one of the Guitar Craft courses, asked me what I had been up to. I gave him a tape of what I had been working on and he listened to it driving in his car up to London. He sent a note to me in the mail saying that it occurred to him that he would like to play on it. By the time that I recovered consciousness, Jeff and I pooled our resources. [laughs] We were able to find a little break in his schedule where Robert had to come to L.A. anyway. So, we brought him over for some sessions. AP: Out of curiosity, what does Fripp charge for sessions? BF: Like just about everybody on the record, he wound up probably pretty much paying to do it. [laughs]. All of this was completely fly-by-night, pulling favors, recorded in the bedroom kind of thing, you know - totally with no money. A completely shoestring kind of thing. And pretty much nobody in the industry was interested at all. So then Ten Seconds just went completely dormant for a while. It just kind of sat there. We had complete songs. They were polished demos. Robert probably tracked on four or five pieces. AP: What sort of scenarios did you encounter when you were shopping the tapes around? BF: Well, we hooked up with a music lawyer who would sue me if I repeated his name. [laughs] Actually, it was a really good guy in the industry named Jeffrey Light, and Jeffrey made a really good effort to try to get us a deal, but it was pretty much summarily rejected everywhere he took it. AP: On what grounds? BF: Well, I can tell you the comment that came from a guy at a big label. And the comment was, "I love this. I listen to this all the time. I can't sign this." Well anyway, it just didn't really go anywhere. I considered it kind of a dormant project and it pretty much just sat like that for a year or so. AP: How do comments like that from major label A&R sharks impact you? BF: They make me laugh. It's funny, I mean, you know... it's not a surprise. It's just a comment from an A&R guy... you know, whatever. AP: Just another music industry automaton. So, Ten Seconds was in limbo for awhile. BF: Yeah it went dormant for awhile, and I considered it another one of those projects that didn't go anywhere. Then, Mark Perry [of Possible Productions] approached me about releasing an EP, because he had heard some of the music and wanted to put it out. I wasn't really too keen at first, but he said that he would finance a little studio time for me. So, I jumped at the opportunity. I went in and kind of stripped it down to its bare tracks and actually started kind of re-recording it from the basic tracks upward. In other words, I kind of built a new Frankenstein. Where there were drum machines, I stripped those and used real drums. Where there were bass samples, I stripped that and used real bass. Where there were guitar samples, you know, same thing. If you listen to the record, the last version, or the second version of "RealSide" -- what we call "The Video Mix" which is basically titled that because it sounds like television to me -- that's what the band started out sounding like. AP: There's an actual video too, right? BF: There is a video with two versions available. Two versions of the music too. Anyway, that's what the band sounded like before I started monkeying with it. Now, which version is better, I don't know. I know Robert prefers that one. I like my treatment of it better. Jeff was not involved at that point. So, I pretty much just went into the studio and tried to piece together what we did have on tape and balance it with improvisations in the studio. Mark was a little bit disturbed by what I brought back. [laughs] It wasn't what he expected. AP: What did he expect? BF: I think he expected everything to sound like the video mix of "RealSide," -- which is more like everything else that he had heard - or slightly improved, but not radically redone. Anyway, what happened from there is that I took it to England and worked with David Singleton [producer and mastering wizard], who is really a genius. David was able to take all these various, sort of disparate sounding tracks that were recorded in different places under different circumstances and build some continuity. We really had a lot of fun for a week. Robert was away at the time, and we did lots of experiments, like pulling individual tracks off the record and, you know, spinning them out and bringing them back into the final mixes. We just really had a lot of fun with it and sequenced it all together and tried to give it some sort of flow and connection. So David's really the guy who pulled it all together. I should mention here the contribution of Bill Rieflin [Ministry drummer]. About that time, I saw Bill playing with Ministry and I was just completely blown away, and he expressed an interest in playing, so naturally, I jumped at that. AP: So, the album was very much a string of random incidents. BF: Absolutely! A long, convoluted series of circumstances where it was done with credit cards and impossible situations and promises. How it ever really wound up seeing the light of day is a great surprise to me. AP: Yet, here you are with a very polished and cohesive record. BF: That's amazing that it comes off that way, because it really was a long, agonizing process in lots of bits and parts. It was done over two years in all kinds of different places with no money and it cost at least two friendships and probably everything I had that I could put into it at the time. AP: Cost at least two friendships? BF: Yeah, at least. AP: Is that something want to elaborate on? BF: No, I'll leave that as it is. AP: Okay. And you say you sacrificed everything else -- money-wise? BF: Yeah, and sort a facade of stability as well. My returning to music derailed my career with the advertising agency I was working for. They said "You are putting too much time and energy into your music." The eventual outcome is that I do whatever freelancing I can pick up or whatever gigs I can find. At the moment, I have been building websites and doing whatever playing I can do. AP: Is Ten Seconds a proper band at this point, or is it just the name you're using for a solo vehicle? BF: It's a band name. The name originally was Ten Seconds To Midnight, and that was Jeff's concept. He wanted to convey an idea of urgency. We were a duo, so there's two digits there, and it's a "1" and a "0," so it's binary. We were thinking about the digital culture that we live in. The name just kind of stuck. That's what we put on the demos. But everyone was calling it Ten Seconds. Anyway, so Jeff left. And when half the band left, I kept half the name. AP: Why did Jeff leave? BF: What happened is that Jeff really had enough and found it very difficult to work with me. AP: I take it that this is one of the friendships that dissolved. BF: That's a safe bet. I mean it's fair to say, though, that when you have been friends with somebody that long, there is still going to be some kind of linking continuance. I mean we're in touch and we're talking. Whether or not we'll do any work in the future, well... the door's open for that kind of thing. AP: Specifically, why didn't he want to work with you anymore? BF: Well, some people find me difficult. AP: In what way? BF: You'd have to ask them. [laughs] AP: Well, you must have your own perceptions of the situation.. BF: I'll tell you a story about Paul Barker. He's one half of Ministry. I was having dinner in a Thai restaurant with him, Steve Ball and Bill Rieflin. Bill Rieflin was in town because he was recording with Revco -- The Revolting Cocks. Paul Barker was sitting down at the opposite end of the table. His wife had just had a baby and he was handing out little, tiny cigars. And he gave me one. I said "Well, thanks very much." Anyway, we had to wait for a table, you know, they were all seated and Steve and I had to wait because we joined them late. Bill talked to me the next day... I mean it was just very pleasant, very light sort of conversation. And Bill said to me the next day, "You know, Paul Barker said he would have liked to talk to you more. He thought you were real interesting, but he got the impression that you were a real hothead." [laughs] AP: You're not really telling me a whole lot there Bill. [laughs] BF: You know... it's the "You can tell he's got a real temper" thing. Well, you know it's just that kind of thing like when you have a working relationship with someone for a long time... Jeff and I got to a point where we couldn't work together and we were still trying to sort out the aspects of the friendship that we had. AP: Was it more of a creative conflict or a personality conflict? BF: I don't see the distinction between the two. The main sort of conflict... well there were a number of conflicts, but probably the main one was that I saw a necessity for Ten Seconds to be working live, otherwise it just wasn't going to go anywhere. Jeff wanted to keep it a studio project -- that's his environment. I have the highest respect for the guy, and he deserves all the courtesy in the world. I don't want to misstate my feelings about it. It was a wonderful experience working with him, writing these songs together. So, there it stands, for the time being. AP: There's very dark imagery in Ten Seconds' music and artwork. Is there a conceptual underpinning you want to discuss? BF: I think all the songs and all the music are about finding an equilibrium. Most of it was done during a very difficult period of my life. For example, the place I was living in was completely wrecked in an earthquake [in L.A.]. I was really lucky to get out of there. I lost my job at the agency. So, there were a lot of things under the surface there... my working relationship with Jeff collapsing. All of those kinds of things. So, about the only thing that was kind of really keeping me going at that time probably was the music and my girlfriend. So, the songs are all about finding equilibrium. They're not entirely dark. "RealSide," I think is fairly whimsical really. I don't think that's too heavy-handed. And again, it comes back to this idea of finding an equilibrium. The lyric goes "Where is the real life?" Where was my real life? "Who are these people who live in my home?" I was living in an apartment. All this racket going on around me. "Where is the money?" I was broke. Jeff contributed the line that answered the question of that song: "Where is the real life?" Jeff came up with "To live like a human, and wait from the dream." And that's his contribution to the lyric. I think it's a real positive message. The idea there is just silliness, fun and psychedelia, but the idea behind it was looking for a kind of awakening of the feminine consciousness in the male psyche. I mean, that's kind of what's going on there. I think that's what we need at this time. It's a very out-of-balance culture we have right now, and I think that the only way we will survive into the next century is by finding the right point of balance. In our culture, we really squash all of that. It's not coming from a sort of wimpy perspective, but more of a concept of being open to intuition and creativity and so on. AP: How do you believe our culture is out of balance the moment? There's a big question. [laughs] BF: It is in almost every aspect. Look at our squandering of resources. We will keep sucking all of the oil out of the ground there is until it shuts off, put it in the atmosphere and suffer for it. It's really getting to the point where it's absurd. Remember, I live in Los Angeles. There is a lot of particulate matter in the air right now. AP: How did you hook with Mark Craney for the album? BF: Craney and I were roommates, and we shared a house in Woodland Hills. Actually, Mark's really a great friend of Jeff's. That's where I met Mark. Mark, you know, I mean, God, his list of credits. He's played with Jean-Luc Ponty, Jethro Tull and Jeff Beck -- the list just goes on and on. AP: How would you describe his presence? BF: Well Mark has total confidence, and he will attack anything. For example, a piece like "No Way To Paradise" with its insistent 15/8 figure. Mark listened to it twice, wrote out a chart, and sat down and tracked it. Yeah, just like that. All the changes, everything. No punches, no overdubs. He's that good. He's just really an amazing character. Very sweet guy. AP: I've heard Mark is quite ill at the moment. How is he doing? BF: Mark is very ill, and needs both an immediate kidney and pancreas transplant. I have just begun to organize a benefit concert in L.A. for him probably mid-to-late January. We did a similar benefit several years ago, where all the drummers in town who could come joined in -- Terry Bozzio, Steve Gadd, Greg Bissonette etcetera. The approach this time will be to present bands in addition to drummers. Mark is highly respected, so I'm hopeful that we can attract some exciting talent -- both young and old -- and raise a healthy stipend to help him over this hurdle. I think it's likely that Ten Seconds will be there too. AP: What approach are you taking with the live version of the band? BF: The format of the live band that we're putting together now is with Bill Rieflin and Steve Ball. The jury is still out on the bass player. It'll be a lot more hard-hitting live. Bill's got some really great things happening with samples and, there'll probably be a lot of improvisation. The three of us have played together. And from the moment we played together we really had some chemistry. So, it's much more of a band vibe rather than a recording project. We're looking at dates in the spring, rehearsals are ongoing. It's all a question of money right now. AP: How will you compensate for Fripp's absence? He's a pretty dominant presence on the disc. BF: Well, Steve's a good player. We'll play the parts where and how they are appropriate, and hopefully, it'll be a band that has a life of its own that Robert can come along and plug into from time-to-time. AP: The album art is pretty interesting. Why do you have a knife stuck in your head? [laughs] BF: The guy who did the photo montages and also the mixed media assembly on the inside -- his name is Joel Levicke and he's my oldest friend. He's a good friend from since we were about six years old. I asked Joel if he would find some images that could communicate... what I wanted to get across was a triad, and this is what he came back with. I said I wanted it to communicate that Jeff and I were a duo and that the band had changed later down the line -- and at the same time communicate that there was a triad at work. So, what he came back with was the two high-altitude guys. And the mixed media piece of myself with all the wiring and all of that stuff. What he did was, he went to a neighborhood we used to live in L.A. and he walked around and found objects and then incorporated them into his painting. He found things and brought them home and worked with those textures. So, that's Joel, he's quite an amazing painter. AP: Okay, but why do you have a knife stuck in your head? [laughs] BF: Well, I've known Joel for a long time, and there's lots of reasons for covert hostility. [laughs] But I love him dearly. He's a great guy. We were altar boys and everything. I'm better, now. I'm on top of my temper. AP: Ten Seconds was released on Discipline Global Mobile [DGM]. Other than its association with Fripp, many people are unclear about the label's structure. BF: The structure of DGM is such that it works in the favor of the artist. But it's a little double-edged thing, because we pay our own tab as well. So, there isn't quite the same kind of support in terms of advertising budgets that you would get from a label -- even from an indie label. It's just that we are not paying for A&R guys' $300 lunches and that sort of thing. So that's what I mean by "we pay our own tab" as we go. But the structure of it is such that, I think that Robert is able to sustain the other projects that he's doing, like Crimson -- and keep himself able to work by his solo releases. It's probably more fair to say that it's a logo rather than a label. It's a way of organizing releases. It's a really unconventional way of working. AP: How so? BF: Well, there's clarity, for one thing. I mean anyone can go look at the books. Good luck trying to find another record company that will do that. And all of the publishing goes to the artist. It is a really radical concept. The copyright is retained by the artist. I think DGM will facilitate a lot of music that wouldn't find a channel otherwise. You know, certainly the Ten Seconds record I don't think would have come out any other way. What Mark [Perry] had in mind when he approached me about releasing it was to put it out on something called Possible Records. And I didn't really feel that it would be up to DGM standards. But Robert listened to it as David [Singleton] and I were working and said "This is better than anything I've heard so far. I'll put this out," much to my delight. AP: How has Fripp influenced your musical development? BF: Well, we wouldn't be speaking here, if I hadn't seen King Crimson performing "Larks' Tongues in Aspic" in San Monica back in '74. That was an awesome experience. Definitely on my top three list for motivating concerts. Robert has been tremendously kind to me, and really, practically helpful to me as a player, because my chops were really at a terrible ebb when I first went to Guitar Craft. When I complained to him that my playing was getting worse, he said "Well, it's not really, but it really is bad." [laughs] I love Robert's sense of humor. AP: He has one? [laughs] BF: He's so funny. It seems like few people get to see that. AP: Very few. BF: He's a serious, avant-garde guy -- this weird Calvinist from Mars. He's really funny. He makes me laugh all the time. I'll tell you about a funny incident from the last Soundscapes tour in California -- the one Robert's album _A Blessing of Tears_ was recorded from. Tom Redmond, who's a good friend and a guy who's attended lots of Guitar Craft courses, was helping out with the tour. Robert, being the professional that he is, doesn't like to eat before a gig. So the problem is always trying to find where there is a kitchen still open after the gig so he can get something, and he is a vegetarian. Tom was really looking forward to the concert this one particular night in San Juan Capistrano -- the show at the Coach House. And just as the show was going to begin, just as the guys were walking onto the stage, I said "Tom, what I want you to do is to go to the Mexican restaurant next door and pick up this order for Robert, so he can have something to eat when he comes back." See, my thinking was that the food could still be hot when he got off the stage. He would have a real meal. And Tom was annoyed because he wanted to listen to the concert. So, here goes Tom steaming off, pissed off about having to get Robert's dinner. The concert continued, Tom comes back with the food. The next day, we were riding in the car, Tom, myself and Robert in the backseat with his eyeshades down trying to get some sleep. And he seemed disturbed to me. And I said, "How was your burrito, Robert?" And he said "It was fucking wretched!" And I kind of side-glanced at Tom and said "What did you get him?" He said, "I got him a burrito." "You don't have to whisper!" said Robert in the back. And I said, "Well, what was wrong with it?" And Robert said "Well, a tuna burrito, can you believe it? A tuna burrito?! Bill knows I'm a vegetarian. He wouldn't bring me anything other than tuna. So, alright, I ate it. It was fucking wretched." So, Tom now is absolutely tight-lipped and later, I asked him "What was it?" He said, "It was chicken." I said, "Don't tell Robert." [laughs] So, that's the story of the tuna burrito. Poor Robert. I hope it didn't give him feathers. AP: We should mention the fact that you were working with Fripp as his road manager during that tour. BF: We did a few tours here in California, yeah. One League of Crafties tour, a Soundscapes tour and the Robert Fripp String Quintet tour. AP: What was it like to work with him at that level? BF: I learned how to get it to a point where it was really easy-going and would take care of itself. Robert's a gigster. And as long as he doesn't have any hassles and has a place to practice, coffee and maybe some cake after the gig and people don't get in his face, he's really fine. So, I just find him very easy to work with on that level. And having Tom along on the last tour was wonderful, because he's really organized in a business sense. AP: But not in a burrito sense. BF: Don't ever ask Tom for food! [laughs] AP: Fripp has mentioned the "vampiric relationship between audience and performer" on occasion. You must have had to deal with that sort of thing first-hand as road manager. BF: There are always problems. I think if you want to play music, if you want to hear the music, you just put up with it, whatever it might be. Promoters and photographers from the newspaper showing up when you ask them not to, people recording shows surreptitiously, promoters adding people to a bill when you've asked them not to, you know... there's always something, but it's the kind of thing a professional just puts up with. And Robert puts up with whatever he has to in order to keep working. He really does it for the music. AP: The general impression is that Fripp is pretty cold to his fans. BF: Oh, gosh, I think that's pretty extreme. I mean, this is the kind of thing I see in the press, but I've stood outside the Coach House while he signed autographs and talked with people. I've seen him sitting before a show and signing autographs. You see, it's really more a question of the appropriateness of the moment. He's not adverse to communication with his fans at all. I think he really welcomes it and enjoys talking to people. But a lot of people are just really not courteous towards him, and I don't know why that is. But I see that happen often. I mean they get in his face and there are a lot of pressures on the road, especially if he's been traveling a long time. I shouldn't probably be speaking for him, but from my perspective, I think it's kind of blown out of proportion. I know his nature to be a lot more gentle than it's projected. Yeah, people have had bad experiences. I can visualize circumstances in which people would come up and get in his face and start asking him "When is King Crimson's _USA_ coming out on picture disc?" when he's trying to have some peace and quiet before a show -- you know, maybe have a moment to himself. He's done this for a long time, and knows what he does it for. And the circus is something that really kind of gets under his skin -- the photographers, the glamorous sort of aspect of it. I've never seen him be rude to anybody. But he has a strong sense of himself, and that can rankle people sometimes, because it makes them look at themselves. AP: You've been part of the Internet for five or six years. How has it influenced your life, both at a personal and musical level.? BF: On a personal level, it has helped me make new friendships. I communicate with people from all over the world. And it's helped me keep in touch with old friends too, who are now plugged in. I pretty much begin my day with a little surfing. It's just a wonderful leap forward for all of us I think. The potential is staggering. AP: The Ten Seconds website features an exclusive "web mix" of "RealSide." BF: I don't see it as having any sort of impact on record sales. But if a surfer is intrigued enough, they'll want something that sounds good and hopefully buy the record. So, it's not necessarily advertising, but kind of along the lines of making something available. Alternative music distribution via the Internet is further down the line, I think. The RockSlide server [which Forth was once the creative director of and where the Ten Seconds website resides] has a Realaudio license, and we tried experimenting with music distribution, but sonically, it wasn't really up to standard. But I think there's a future for alternative means of distribution via the 'net. AP: You're fairly enthusiastic about the Internet. But you're also involved with _Adbusters_ -- a magazine that has a lot of negative things to say about who gets access to the Internet and who doesn't. Their point of view is that society is being split up into "information haves" and "have nots." They believe there are dire consequences of such a division. BF: Well, you know, there are growing pains. Things are going to settle. I think the 'net has the potential to kill advertising. AP: Tell me about your work with _Adbusters_. BF: I did some parody advertisements for them. I haven't done anything for awhile. You might have seen the one for the Lincoln Town Car they've run a few times. "Vrooom. That was your life, pal." That was the tag line. There was a Hertz parody ad with O.J. Simpson's white Bronco. I did a number of them for them. AP: _Adbusters_ has a very left-leaning point-of-view. Is yours in line with that? BF: Well, I think it's pretty much... I'm suspicious of advertising because I worked in it for a long time. AP: Kind of ironic, isn't it? BF: Sure, that's how I got there. Most of the work that I was doing was for food accounts -- frozen entrees and that kind of thing. And I was on a Guitar Craft course, there was a woman named Josie, who was doing the cooking and she was just a phenomenal cook. She was sitting across from me at the table, we were having dinner. She struck up a conversation with me and said "What do you do for a living?" And I said, "I work in advertising." "Oh, what do you do?" she said. I said "I'm a copy writer and freelance creative director." "What kind of accounts?" she asked. I said "Well, principally I've been working on..." and I named some of these food accounts. And she said "Oh, what you do is lie for a living." Wow. It never occurred to me that I had never tasted one of the products or brought one home. So I did, and I couldn't eat it. [laughs] AP: What was the product? BF: Boy, you really want me to go to court here, don't you? [laughs] It was a terrible, famous frozen entree. I was working for an agency that was doing some collateral advertising and making brochures for the food industry. So there was a real fundamental experience about something I was involved with on a day-to-day basis. Really tasting something is a different way of experiencing it, you know. We do bamboozle ourselves with language continuously without direct experience. And when I had that direct experience, I couldn't really go back to my job in the same way. AP: But you did you go back to the job... BF: I did go back to the job, sure, for a period of time -- but, by attrition. I eventually didn't go back anymore. _Adbusters_ was kind of that infantile thing of biting the hand that fed me. AP: Perhaps I should get you to explain what _Adbusters_ is for people who aren't familiar with it. BF: They lampoon advertising. They're pretty left-of-center with their politics. It's much more than just a parody of advertising, though. They have a hidden agenda. I think those guys really want to see a destruction of the commercial culture entirely. I won't go quite that far. AP: With an ultra-glossy magazine... BF: Yeah, and at the same time selling an ultra-glossy magazine, so, you know, come on! Robert [Fripp] did say something to me about advertising once. Now, this is not him speaking, but someone he was quoting -- a French writer, I believe. The writer said "the only thing that advertising really does is teach children that adults will lie for money." [laughs] You know, I'm not completely anti-advertising. I think that it also has a fundamental necessity. But, coming back to your question about the Internet, I think it can kill advertising, because we're starting to go back to the power of word-of-mouth. AP: You were an extra in the new Arnold Schwarzenegger flick _Jingle All The Way_. How did that come about? BF: The central issue or big pain I've had to deal with this year, like I guess most musicians do at some point, is finding a way to hold body and soul together between gigs. The extra work on _Jingle All the Way_ was just a means to an end. I have no interest in acting, unless someone wants to overpay me for it. Jeff Borgeson, who engineered some of the Ten Seconds sessions in L.A., was working on the movie and helped me get the work. I'm just a face in the crowd, also a cop and a TV cameraman. I worked twenty-odd days on it, and it helped pay the rent. AP: What can you tell me about the experience? BF: It was long hours, low pay, prickly heat and sheer Hollywood insanity, but I was grateful for the work. We played summer for winter -- that is, Minneapolis in December on the Universal set in L.A. in July. This meant sweltering in winter clothes in 100-plus-degree summer temperatures with fake snow and Christmas decorations all over the place. The pay was $40.00 for eight hours, with donuts for breakfast and something called "lunch." The food was always much better on days when the first unit was shooting. Second unit days were diet days. If you worked longer -- a normal day was 14 hours -- you'd get time-and-a-half after eight hours and bring home a little more money. Every day was madness, but on a few days we had hundreds of extras on the set for a big parade scene, and then it was bedlam. At breakfast one morning, a crazed hippie rode a rickety old bicycle onto the lot wearing only an American flag and began furiously hurling bowls of breakfast cereal around the tent, until the Universal security police arrived on the scene and chased him down the hill on his bike. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he was an ex-musician who finally cracked under the strain. [laughs] To return to how gigsters often have to find unconventional ways of staying alive, I met a guitarist on the set, Kim Shaheen, who played at one time with Traffic on _John Barleycorn_ and Genesis on _Nursery Cryme_. So there we were, a couple of guitar players standing in the hot sun all day in winter clothes like silly buggers for forty bucks and donuts, talking about strings, axes, amps, deals and chicks. AP: What was Schwarzenegger like to work with? BF: Just what you would think. He's a consummate professional. We never spoke. An extra would never approach a star. Those who did did not return to work. I did get the impression that he is a genuine guy with a sense of humor. Arnold would often race around the set in a golf cart and suddenly screech to a halt, sending frightened extras jumping out of the way at the last moment. I thought it was a great way to liven things up. AP: You wrote a very interesting piece debunking the burgeoning obsession with UFOs in the _The Skeptic_ -- Toby Howard's magazine. ["La Dolce Saucer," Volume 9, Number 6, 1995] What spurred your interest in the field? BF: Maybe it was all those monster movies I saw as a boy, or all the puzzlement I got in response to my earnest questions at parochial school. I just respond to anything that shakes a belief system. If you live in California, you meet lots of people who believe in UFOs. Science-fiction, and its correlatives in popular culture like Scientology and all that New Age stuff, are just part of the landscape. What I find more interesting is that criticism of the UFO myth is taken as damn-near heresy. That's the inspiration for the "La Dolce Saucer" article. I see the current popular belief in UFOs as symptomatic of our abandonment of religion, and symbolic of our yearning for coherence. UFOs are described as round, luminous, hovering, mysterious, powerful, transcendent, swift, dangerous and ephemeral because they are contemporary religious symbols. Plus, we've become so conditioned by television, that we believe that there just has to be a deus ex machina operating in the universe somewhere to tie up the loose ends of the plot before the next episode, which in our case is millenial. I don't doubt that many people see flying saucers, but I very much doubt that they exist. I also suspect that the majority of the reports of alien abductions and medical examinations are the result of individuals seeking an equilibrium from a traumatic disturbance, such as familial abuse. Incidentally, the first creative project Jeff Fayman and I worked on together was a parody of Erik Von Danniken's books, titled _Charities of the Gods_. I faked a lot of UFO photos for that, and once you begin looking at the whole UFO ideology as absurd, it only gets more so. Fayman thinks they exist, by the way. AP: I must admit, I'm endlessly astonished at the near-hysterical level of public interest in UFO's. The line between "real life" and _The X-Files_ is blurring to a frightening degree for more than a few people these days. BF: I think there are a number of reasons why the "alien life" theme is prevalent in our popular culture right now, but the central ones are a resonance with fin de siecle events, and a yearning for religiosity. The century is winding down, and spinning more out of control by the second. Popular culture craves a real spirituality, but doesn't buy into conventional faiths any longer, because media, consumerism and technology have replaced it. Add conspiracy theories and special effects to the mix and you get _Independence Day_, _Star Trek_, _X-Files_, on and on. Most science-fiction media and entertainment originates in America. And with the impact of our rapidly changing immigrant population, I sense that there is a considerable amount of xenophobia churning under the surface -- aliens, indeed. In the 50's we Americans believed that there was still space in this country to define ourselves -- gas was cheap and you could drive a big car and buy a house with a few thousand down. My mother, fresh from the U.K., won enough cash on Groucho Marx's _You Bet Your Life_ show for the down payment on the house I spent my childhood in. In that time and place, the Western, with it's open frontier and simple conflicts, was the predominant myth. Today, the Western has been replaced by science fiction and confessional freakazoid talk-shows. I think this reflects a more internal landscape being revealed through our popular entertainment, and expresses a wish for deliverance from our fractured, perilous age. In what other decade could we find advertisements for the world wide web, phone-sex and phone-in psychics on the same page? AP: Are you "a believer" on any level? BF: No. A good friend of mine is convinced that there are pyramids and a huge rock face carved in relief into the Martian topography -- a kind of Martian Sphinx -- and that proof is hidden in "suppressed" NASA photos and ancient Sumerian texts. He also believes that we humans are sort of colonials, planted here by advanced beings in ancient times. I fall over laughing at this, but I don't doubt my friend's intelligence or sincerity, any more than I would poke fun at someone's religion. I expect that UFOs are about as likely as the existence of Santa Claus. There is plenty of proof to his existence, after all. Respectable airline pilots report seeing him. Children everywhere mail hundreds of millions of letters to him, and receive gifts with uncanny accuracy. What do you think the CIA isn't telling us about what is really going on at the North magnetic pole? At the same time, the evidence of bacteria recently found in the Martian meteorite was a stunning discovery, and anyone with an open mind would concede the possibility of intelligent, even humanoid, life elsewhere in the universe -- even a skeptic like me. *--------------------------------------------------------------------- Since the bulk of this interview was finished, Forth began to iron out his differences with Jeff Fayman. The two are now writing together again, and Fayman plans to join Forth onstage when Ten Seconds plays the benefit gig for Mark Craney discussed earlier. This is what Forth had to say about the situation: "Just recently, Jeff invited me to try and finish a couple of songs that he has been working on for another artist. We are "testing the waters" at this point. We haven't entirely reconciled our differences, but that is what friends do -- overlook their differences in favor of optimism. Plus, we are both different people than we were a while back. For example, I'm getting married soon -- that's a global paradigm shift! I suspect that Robert [Fripp] was craftily instrumental, sorry for the pun, in getting Jeff and I on the same page again by placing us at the same table at the House of Blues for Crimson's appearance there, and again next to each other at The Greek Theater concert." *--------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1996 by Anil Prasad To contact Anil Prasad, send e-mail to innerviews at pobox dot com *--------------------------------------------------------------------- Visit INNERVIEWS, your link to in-depth and exclusive interviews with the world's most interesting and innovative musicians! Recent interviews include Victor Wooten, Alain Caron, Kit Watkins, Rory Gallagher and David Torn! http://pobox.com/~innerviews/ (Netscape 3.0 or Internet Explorer 3.0) *--------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ End of Elephant-Talk Digest #321 ********************************