Mayo Thompson by Keith Connolly

KCWhat is it that attracted you to Art & Language?

MTArt-Language, their journal. They were the fastest conceptual guns around. When I got to know them they were a large group. There was a bunch in New York and a bunch in England. And there was warfare between the two groups over who was in charge. In ’72 there was a conference of the two sections in New York turning on what they called “blurting.” A-L was conversational. The upshot was anybody who got involved was somehow in Art & Language. At that conference, I met Michael Baldwin and Philip Pilkington, who were in town for the talks. They asked me what I did. I gave them a copy of Corky’s Debt. They listened and said, “It’s kind of personal.” I said, “It’s a solo album. That’s what those are.” I asked if they had another idea. That led to Michael sending me some lyrics I eventually set. That stuff became Corrected Slogans [1976].

KCSo eventually the band becomes resuscitated in England post Art & Language?

MTYes but as The Red Crayola, with a c—trademark law being different in the UK. [Crayola covers Parable, and it’s Krayola for everything released in the US from God Bless The Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It forward. Crayola also applies to all UK and European releases.] Jesse Chamberlain, who drummed and sang some on Corrected Slogans, joined me when Radar gave us a deal. I reformed the band because Christine and I fell out with Art & Language. I had to get something going, so got back in the music business. Radar was rereleasing the International Artists’ stuff, so it was a natural for all concerned. It made sense to restart the group rather than pursue a solo music career.

KCWould you say you see Red Crayola as a product?

MTMike Kelley once told me that he was no democrat, but that we were going to have to have universal democracy before anything interesting could happen again. He was thinking about product, good product. Though he did not think art is redemptive, Mike was a utopian. He believed in progress. I don’t. And I don’t think anything is necessarily interesting. Something’s being interesting only serves those in whose interest it functions. Punk qua form wasn’t about making interesting music, rather about music as self-realization. Even poor punk was interesting, though, particularly if it sold. That’s what made the Crayola viable. Sales made it interesting in a broader sense. When we started we knew we couldn’t play up to the standards operative in those days but didn’t let that stop us. We made a virtue of what we could do that conventional musicians couldn’t do, and exploited that, with the idea of making them eat it thrown in. We were playing a theoretical endgame. We let the world know we couldn’t be bothered. You might say that was and to an extent remains The Red Crayola product. Our music expressed our aggressiveness, our attitude. When I heard The Beatles, Dylan, I thought, “Fuck, cool. If that makes it, I can sing too.” The Sex Pistols had the same effect, giving people a sense that they might empower themselves. People discouraged me when I sang as a child, said, “You can’t carry a tune in a bucket.” People still say that. Well, fuck it. I haven’t been trying to carry a tune. I’ve been essaying, expressing my interests in abstract terms, devil take the hindmost.

KCSo you do not consider the records that you have made to be works of some kind?

MTIf you mean artworks as such, no. I think of them as candidates for asymmetrical functional relations, open to interpretation.

KCHaving said that, would you refer to the band as a condition of a sort?

MTCondition? You mean like, pneumonia? No.

To my lights, it just represents instrumental potential inasmuch as its value is tied to its use. Music has been instrumental to my being able to put ideas in play, having more fun than you’re supposed to, that sort of thing. I’m no purist, and don’t believe authenticity or sincerity save anything, not necessarily. The game is to make things that have to be dealt with on the terms they instantiate. My stuff doesn’t carry or necessarily suggest imperatives for others. It’s not well-formed in the scientific sense. In personal terms, it entails a measure of shame, because it would be nice if everybody were as fortunate as I in doing what they like.

KCLet’s talk about record producing. There is still nothing that sounds quite like The Parable of Arable Land, after all these years.

MTLelan was great with us on Parable. He guided us through. Luckily too, the late great Walt Andrus—who, along with the equally great Frank Davis, made Parable the record we hear—was sympathetic. Looking back I see that International Artists wanted me to be a producer; they had me producing Johndavid Bartlett in mind. I’d no idea, though eventually I learned. I’m credited on God Bless The Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It [1968]. I played a role and so did Steve but we weren’t the producers. It was Jim Duff.

KCGod Bless has risen in my estimation as the most radical and particular of your Texas-era albums, containing not only discernible seeds of Corky, but also predicting in some way bands like Minutemen, or subsequently Unrest and Bastro/Gastr del Sol, which would not happen for decades.

MTPredicting? I don’t hear it like that. It was made to put paid to musical possibility as I understood it at the time. It represents the end of the game as it stood.

KCYou did eventually end up producing many records for other bands, starting with a great run of singles and albums for Rough Trade.

MTAt first I got the jobs that legitimately made me the producer of records later, I believe largely because bands liked the sound of the records Crayola made. I feel fairly sure that’s why Monochrome Set’s manager asked, “Would you like to produce a single for us?” Stiff Little Fingers had just asked Rough Trade boss Geoff Travis the same question. We decided to join forces. He had been in the studio when Radar backed the new Crayola. He had seen that I knew my way around enough not to be intimidated by the process. We wound up coproducing a bunch of records. We did that Monochrome Set single, then Stiff Little Fingers’ first album, The Raincoats’ first, sides with The Fall, a couple of tracks with Scritti Politti, one with Cabaret Voltaire... 

Part of production is encouraging people to think that what they are doing is feasible and worth doing. That they’re not wrong or insane daring to make a record. I twiddled knobs on a lot of those early things but an important part of the job we did was preparing the artists to live with the consequences of their choices, because they’re permanent. With The Raincoats, for example, I heard their violinist, Vicky Aspinall, a trained player, and suggested she think outside the box. I asked her if she’d heard The Velvet Underground, John Cale. She checked it out and added that string to her bow. 

I was also able to function in the role because I like the problem-solving aspect of it. With Primal Scream, recording Bobby Gillespie’s vocals was problematic. He could have a hard time singing “Hello.” He would get “hell” and blow “o,” then throw the headphones on the floor. He broke nine pairs and a Neumann U47 recording Sonic Flower Groove. We’d holler, “Bobby, no!” as he slammed them into the ground, hollering “Shite!” in tune. Pat [Collier] wound up tracking his vocals sometimes a syllable at a time. Track after track after track until we had all the bits of the vocal, then stitching them together, a syllable here, a syllable there, a word here, two, three, four in a row there. The drums were another kind of problem. The drummer couldn’t cut it so we hired someone who could. Then, the kit didn’t work for the sound we were after, so we used a sampler. The snare is Carlos Alomar’s snare off a Bowie record. The bass drum is John Bonham’s. Jim wanted a “sixties twelve-string sound” but tech had moved on. By that time Rickenbacker twelves were no longer stereo, and had two instead of three pick-ups, and amp sound had changed, so we had to simulate, track parts in one setting, then track them again in unison in another setting, and another, and another until we had something that sounded the part. Steve Albini can handle the whole thing, tech and soul. Rick Rubin gets stuff out of people they forgot they had in them. Me, I worked on others’ stuff the same way I worked on mine.

KCYou were actually a member of Pere Ubu for a bit in the early ’80s, a mark of some distinction.

MTWorking on the road together we got to know one another. Then Pere Ubu broke up. What I heard from [Allen] Ravenstine was that he and David [Thomas] went to a concert of Talking Heads, looked at each other, and said, “We weren’t that bad. Let’s start again.” They asked if I would play the guitar.

I jumped at the chance. Tony Maimone and Scott Krauss acquiesced. Ubu were managed by Cliff Burnstein at the time, and operated at a higher level of organization and possibility. The band was infinitely more popular than Crayola. Rough Trade got to be their label and, in the couple of years I was there, we made two LPs, The Art of Walking and Song of the Bailing Man, and a single, Not Happy/Lonesome Cowboy Dave, and toured, playing places and gigs in the USA I’d never otherwise have seen, plus there was money in it.

It was a trip working with them, not least on account of our all being American but their being homeboys, my being an expat. Add in the relative differences in our pasts, how uniquely each of us had been enculturated, and you get a sense of the motley. Say, the psychological environment was unique, there being not only differences in worldviews but attitudes to music. It all came out in the wash.

David had his own ideas of things, and set the tone. There was camaraderie but it wasn’t always easygoing. Nonetheless, we got things done. We recorded in a great studio in Painesville, Ohio, and touring was always interesting. Just two examples, we played a few shows in Italy. One I remember was in a circus tent in Ravenna, a town well run at the time by communists. We arrived in a timely fashion but had to sit on our hands and watch our tour manager—Mark Kostura, a great guy—play missile command, while negotiations went on behind the scenes before we were allowed to take the stage. Had we been going to nuclear war, I’d have wanted Mark at the controls. He was a whiz. Eventually how the money would be worked was settled and we went on about two hours late. The public had also waited patiently. I’d never seen anything like that.

The other show that made an impression was in Bologna. We were booked to play a theater with a thousand seats. At sound check we worried, hoping to fill seats at least back to the mixing console, which was thirty plus rows back. By showtime, the joint was filled to the rafters, standing room only. More than one bootlegger had set up a big reel-to-reel tape recorder and stereo mics, right out in the open—Ubu were famous for not minding bootleg recording. It was such a jam, they were turning people away, and there was protesting, some so violent the carabinieri were called in to keep order. We were wooden, playing the tunes but without flair. In the middle of the third number, Mark hollered, “Heads up.” I was walking around picking. It wasn’t like “Duck and cover,” rather more as you might when a fly-ball is coming in and somebody hadn’t noticed. I looked up and there was a firework arcing toward the stage, sparking and sputtering, heading my way. I moved out of the landing area, continuing to play, and it hit with a bang. That moved us.

The Ubus are good guys; it could be real good crazy fun playing with them.

KCHow would you say that your approach to the Crayola differs from that of David Thomas/Pere Ubu?

MTDavid Thomas is a unicum. He is a sovereign entity. All things Ubu revolve around him. Me, I’m a group player. I’m prepared to revolve around whatever’s happening. So we were made for each other in some sense. I had writing chops that he liked. We also had a common interest in certain kinds of intellectual stuff. But he is also a deeply felt American kind of fellow. I probably come from space.

KCSo eventually you relocate, from London to Düsseldorf in the late ’80s where a new phase of The Red Crayola begins.

MTI met Markus Oehlen, whom I first knew as the drummer in Mittagspause, the best of the German punk bands, at least as I saw it then. One night Markus said to me the same thing that Frederick Barthelme’s brother Steven had said to me back in the day: “You should meet my older brother.” Eventually I did meet Albert, with whom I went on to make Malefactor, Ade[1989] and another bunch of records.

KCIs it true that you also made some commercial jingles while you were in Germany?

MTThanks to Diedrich Diederichsen and Michael Schirner I got commissions to make some. I did pieces in an array of generic styles for C&A, a clothing store based in the Netherlands. I made them à la reggae, heavy metal, rockabilly—even some I called semiotic monsters—using hip-hop drums with Swingle Singers voices and funny other bits. I could pastiche pretty much anything. I had a guy from Holland who could sound like James Brown, or Ray Charles, and a German lady who could conjure a number of famous females. One of the best was an ad for Adidas. They were coming out with a sporty body lotion for men. For that I got a keyboard player whose name I can’t recall and pirated Beethoven. He said, “Oh no, not Beethoven.” I said, “It’s for money.” He played. The voiceover was cool—Claus Biederstaedt, an absolute pro, one take. It was fun doing such stuff because you’d go to the cinema and there the pieces would be, up on the big screen before the film.

KCThe art world, so to speak, in Germany was pretty happening at that time.

MTArt is fly for Germans, generally. I got to know Martin Kippenberger, Werner Büttner, lots of others. I was living in Düsseldorf, but went out, and socialized most in Cologne, which was the center of the art scene. I learned later that it was Martin who booked the Soldier-TalkCrayola into the SO36 [in Berlin].

KCWas it in Cologne that you met Michael Krebber, with whose current painting exhibition your show at Greene Naftali coincides?

MTOne night we were sitting in a bar waiting for some opening and there was Michael. We were introduced. He had just stopped working for Baselitz, I think. I heard Michael had gotten rid of all of his books and was living an ascetic life. When we started talking somehow we clicked. We’ve gotten to be friends, and he has played a big role ever since in my thinking about art. I count his person, take, and stance to possibility beautiful.

Back then I had written a little piece called “Vitrinization.” Michael was interested in using it, offering to trade it for a work, and asked if I would write something for Cosima von Bonin, which I did—on Joan Jett. I chose a monochrome from a show at Christian Nagel’s gallery, and was amused to learn later that fifteen minutes after he gave it to me Martin Kippenberger tried to buy it.

KCThat’s fantastic.

MTThat was how I would eventually meet Carol Greene, who came up to me one night saying she really liked “Vitrinization.” I thanked her kindly, and continue to.

KCHow do you view your current exhibition in relation to the work you have done as a musician with The Red Crayola?

MTFor me, visual art is another world. I observe and respect the differences between music and art as formal schemes, where the kinds of necessities are understood to have their own characters, and see differences in them when it comes to objects. I will say the two modalities are related, and strike me as analogous in terms of affects, but that’s it.

What I like about music is its psycho-physical working, that it unfolds in time and space, and that it is ephemeral—unless you play or imagine some, or put some on, there ain’t none, and when it’s over, it’s gone. I appreciate how it is different with a visual object, say, a painting, which is “on” when you look at it, and otherwise is merely an object hanging there. I’m interested philosophically in those differences. They are telling when it comes to bringing pieces of music or paintings under ART, the concept, as experiences, whatever they have in common relative to, say, orders and kinds of mental representation. I see too that there are structural similarities involved in the ways their histories bear down on our experiences and uses of them. I should point out that I’m no historicist—meaning I don’t think it’s possible to fix value relative functions. There is only projection. That said, I feel the pressure of history, and respond to what is afloat at a certain moment—zeitgeist and meaningfulness, stuff like that. I feel constrained too in theorizing, by there being nothing like scientific proof.

In terms of what passes for theory in music, with regard to material potential, I think I did all my theoretical work on musical possibility in the ’60s. The first five records sum up everything I ever had to say in theoretical terms. When I started, listening to Cage, Stockhausen, and other modern Europeans, it seemed plain that what was left of the Western canon after, say, twelve-tone, was fully articulated. Let me be brutal and overly reductive: Cage had resorted to chance, thumbtacks, “noise,” and “silence” in an attempt to get a last drop. Stockhausen was making jokes that remind me of Conceptual art, where in living through the music there is meant to be some understanding that one is living out culture, in terms of the beautiful and the transcendental. I say this as a preface to explaining what I mean about the first five records.

Parable, to my lights, sums up musical possibilities that began in the cave. Coconut represents possibilities extending from those facts. Live 1967 covers performance and free expression outside standard structures. God Bless picks its way through the rubble looking for feeling and meaning, senses of share. Corky embraces the personal and treats the instrumental power of music for the sake of expression. Records have been made since of course, but, as I’ve tried to explain, making them was precipitated and driven in the first instance by existential necessity. After Corky, song form became the main deal, with some other things thrown in, for example, what counts as “noise” and how attitude figures in terms of effects. I like to write music, of course. I’ve done soundtrack stuff for a Bruce and Norman Yonemoto film, and music for a few pieces of Bruce’s, works he deploys in the fine-art context. Since ’81 I’ve been working on Victorine, an opera with a libretto by A&L—we did a few scenes during the 2012 Whitney Biennial. Lately I wrote and played some piano music for Mike Smith’s ballet, turning on his quest to find the Fountain of Youth. In general, making music has become for me stuff tied to opportunity. Albert Oehlen and I got a chance and made some stuff; and I did some music for advertising. Jörg Schlick made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: to play Crayola in Graz at the Kunstverein. Off that a few other gigs were strung together. Kaspar König had us to the Portikus, and we did a show in a gallery in Cologne. That’s how it goes. Opportunity knocks. I respond.

In the abstract I will say that I do get the bug from time to time, but always have a beady eye on distribution. That’s how I got involved with Drag City. After Graz I got the bug again and started to play the guitar more, wrote five or six tunes and recorded them four-track with an eye to hitting up a record company for a deal and along came a chance. Now I have the chance to have a go at visual art, and am finding it an interesting, because particular, kind of trip.

KCIn the ’90s there was a bit of a Crayola renaissance, via Drag City.

MTOne day David Grubbs rang. He asked what I was up to and I gave him a dub of the four-track stuff, telling him of my plan to go to the bank. He asked if he might send it to Drag City in Chicago, urging me to hold off getting back in the mainstream grinder. It turned out Dan Koretzky and Dan Osborn liked the stuff. During Christmas ’93, when I was home in Texas visiting my mother, Dan rang. He was able to persuade me to give Drag City a chance. I swallowed my qualms about working again indie style. Eventually, Albert and I went to Chicago and did our first work with the label, a song called “Columbia,” maybe another. Ultimately we made the eponymous LP at Steve Albini’s studio, building the set around the tunes from Germany, David playing, along with John McEntire from Bastro, Tom Watson from Slovenly, and Stephen Prina—an artist I’d gotten to know at the Pasadena art center. I won’t name everybody. The names are on the cover. Sure enough things kind of clicked and we got gigs. I should say too that I met Jim O’Rourke then, but didn’t know at first what to do with him. I’m glad to say we were able finally to get him involved. 

Except for David, I continue to call on the Drag City folks when there’s what to do, and, over time, we’ve added a number of products to the line. You’ve got to love them. Well, perhaps not everybody has to, but I surely do. They’re straight-shooters, honest as the day is long, and only trade in what they like, which, I like to think, is how I run.