Interview: Joe Gore.

Joe Gore is that rare thing, a relentlessly creative and successful guitarist (including credits on seminal Tom Waits and PJ Harvey recordings, as well as work with Courtney Love, DJ Shadow, Aimee Mann, Tracy Chapman, Kimya Dawson of the Moldy Peaches, the Eels, Les Claypool and John Cale) who also excels at a number of other pursuits. These include journalism - he was the senior editor of Guitar Player magazine for several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s - and large scale creative projects, like the gargantuan Clubbo website, a fictional record company with a deep back catalogue, all fake. I've admired Joe Gore's guitar playing and writing for many years, and am grateful that he agreed to answer a few of my questions via email.

You have a new project coming out this week - can you tell us something about this?

Mental 99 is a new band with my pal, drummer Dawn Richardson. We'd been wanting to do something together for years, and we finally got around to it. It's an instrumental duo, exploring the question of how much racket two players can create. 

There are a couple of things that I find exciting about the project, beyond the pleasure of playing with such a cool and creative drummer. 

1. Phantom bass syndrome. For various reasons, many of the projects I've been involved with for the last decade have had no bass player, and I've gotten increasingly into the idea of playing the bass and guitar roles simultaneously. Not necessarily in the Ted Greene/Charlie Hunter sense of true multi-voice counterpoint, so much as creating parts that straddle those two roles. I've played bari-guitars, or just low-tuned regular guitars, for ages, especially on the records I did with Tom Waits and PJ Harvey. Along the way, I just started hearing less in terms of bass vs. guitar, and more in terms of low/dark vs. high/bright. (Having said that, Dawn and I got to play a show recently in a quartet with Tracy Chapman and Flea, and it was exhilarating to play with a bassist again, especially one that talented!)

2. Pure sound fixation. For the last few years I've been geeking out on guitar sound — pure sound — to an unhealthy degree. I've done consulting/development work for various audio companies, some of which involved scrutinizing classic guitar tones. To better understand how those things work in the digital realm, I started building analog stompboxes and amps, and that became a parallel obsession. But it got to the point where I felt like a painter who had learned to mix amazing pigments, but never got around to painting anything. So one motivation for Mental 99 was to actually use some of the tools I'd worked on. 

3. Those who can't sing, don't. Playing instrumental music has always been a can of worms for me. I was a classical musician till my early 20s, and I still love classical music, though I don't play it. And while I dig jazz and have played it with some amazing artists, I've never really been a jazz musician. Plus, the jazz I'm drawn to tends to be highly arranged/composed stuff — I've always responded more to Ellington than to bop. (And I sincerely hate Real Book blowing sessions with round-robin soloing.) On the other hand, I love lots of kitschy instrumental music, like surf, easy listening, and Euro-cheese soundtracks. But my ear is too dissonant to play that stuff in a literal way. So I guess Mental 99 sounds at times like the Ventures playing Ellington, or Gang of Four playing the Ventures. Basically, people attempting music they have no business playing, sometimes with cool results. 

Anyway, I play everything on one guitar, a standard-scale James Trussart tele tuned down to CGCFAD (like regular dropped-D, transposed down a whole-step), into a laptop running Apple's MainStage. There are no amps or stompboxes, though the signal runs through a hardware looper before it reaches the mixing board/PA. I've done a zillion digital guitar recordings, but this is the first time I've been dumb enough to try it live. 

Here's a free song if anyone's curious. It was cut live in the studio with no overdubs — just drums and guitar/laptop going straight to disc. Though we did actually play a few minutes longer and edit out the boring bits. (Hey — Miles did it too!)

Could you talk about the Clubbo project from a guitar perspective? Specifically, how do you approach the faking of outdated guitar sounds?

Well, Clubbo was an over-ambitious project I co-created with Elise Malmberg, a great singer, composer, engineer, and audio geek. It alleges to be a web site documenting the half-century history of Clubbo records, complete with music, album art, biographical essays, and various "historical" debris. It's all fake, of course. (BTW, here's the secret page with the real credits.) The site is hundreds of pages deep — even many of the "external" links are faked, leading to other bogus websites we made.

Guitar-wise, it was fun, because it was an excuse to play everything I never would have been caught dead doing under my own name. Southern rock? Shred metal? Jam band noodling? No prob! 

As for the recording techniques, 90% of it created in software — mimicking various historic recording chains via digital distortion, EQ, compression, and effects. One secret trick: heavy use of impulse-response reverbs made from quirky/crappy old gear.  

You recorded seven albums with Tom Waits, a musician with a singular aesthetic - did he give you any directives about what he wanted from you?

The direction is continuous — he directs every part, sculpting your performance with his facial expressions, body language, and amazing turns of phrase. ("Make it sound more poor." "Not bluegrass banjo — death banjo!"). He never suggests particular notes or parts, but directs the proceedings so completely that it always comes out sounding like Tom Waits music. Example: I was thrilled to bits to track a couple of Tom's song with Stewart Copeland on drums. Tom had Stewart play one of his fucked-up old circus drums, and coached him on the performances. In the end, Stewart sounded pretty much like the drummer on any post-Swordfish Waits album — which is to say, fucking amazing! Almost all Waits recordings are first or second takes. He hates when it starts sounding too rehearsed, or like you've worked out the perfect part. Better to sound like you've never played it before, mistakes and all. And not using a tuner is a definite plus.

I've heard some of your looping with the Apple MainStage software - what are the advantages to working with software, rather than a standalone device like the JamMan or the Boss looper?

I did some work for Logic, GarageBand and MainStage. (For those who don't use the software, I'll explain: Logic is Apple's pro recording software, sort of competing cousin to Pro Tools and Live. GarageBand is a light version of Logic, based on the same audio engine, that comes installed on most Macs, though sometimes GarageBand innovations trickle upstream into Logic. And MainStage is a Logic spinoff optimized for live performance.) 

The latest version of MainStage includes a powerful looping tool, but I haven't worked it into live performance yet — I use a hardware Boomerang III looper instead. The all-software looper is more powerful and open-ended, but I find it difficult to drive onstage, in large part because no one has made an ideal hardware controller for it. (Apogee's GIO is a great-sounding I/O that performs fantastically onstage, but it doesn't have enough footswitches to operate several loops simultaneously AND switch programs.) I prefer the Boomerang to all other options because of its great ergonomics — creator Mike Nelson put a lot of thought into creating a device you can truly pilot in real time. I also use a Kenton Killamix — basically, just a row of controller knobs and switches. Summary:  I loop with the Boomerang, switch programs and toggle effects with the GIO, and tweak virtual knobs with the Killamix. It's all very awkward, and it's taken me six months to obtain the vaguest hope of making it through a song without screwing up.   

I find it a bit ironic that I'm even talking about looping. Like many musicians I know, I've moved away from looping over the course of the last decade. Today's zeitgeist just seems to be more about imperfect, realtime playing. It's been years since I used a drum loop on anything (except maybe Clubbo tracks making fun of bad drum loop music). 

Still, I find that looping presents huge challenges — both hugely exciting and hugely daunting. The biggest problem is that looping tends to lock you in a specific musical structure: Play a part. Add counterpoint. Get thicker and thicker, then go silent or fade out. You can compile stunning textures, but the process gets tiresome. It's harder to make stop-on-a-dime changes, alternate between contrasting sections, introduce variations, or deviate from the itinerary on the fly. Those are the things I work on these days. I haven't mastered any of them, but I'm slowly improving. Or so I tell myself.  

Your tenure at Guitar Player magazine, from the late 80s to the mid 90s, represents some of the most interesting guitar journalism of the magazine's long history. Yet you told Steven Ward in 2008: “In retrospect, I was probably a bad fit for the gig. I hated the music industry. I hated guitar heroism. I hated guitar collectors. My passions were music and culture, where guitar occasionally plays a role. I love making music on guitars, but I have no sentiment about them. They’re hammers and nails to me." Are you proud of your work there? For you, what is missing from mainstream guitar journalism?

Well, I stand by those words. But at the same time, I loved working at the magazine and always felt extremely lucky to have been part of it. It was amazing to get paid to do so much stuff I probably would have done for free. I don't reread my work unless I have to, but I suspect that if I did, I'd be of two minds: I'd wince at how self-important I sounded, but I'd probably give myself a bit of credit for documenting some great music while it was being made. 

What do I dislike about mainstream guitar journalism? The same thing every guitarist hates about it: It's doesn't always reflect my personal taste! But I feel the editors at the top mags are doing a stellar job in the face of the dual declines of the music industry and the print medium. Theirs is not an easy gig!

If I did anything valuable, it was being a conduit: exposing readers to something great they might not otherwise have encountered, be it a new player, a forgotten one, a great stompbox, or a cool tuning trick. Fortunately, players can now obtain all those things more easily than ever online. It's a trade-off — the "experts" usually can't make a living writing for consumer music mags these days, so we must rely on the amateur fanatics. The things we encounter online might not be especially well written or edited, but they're passionate and intense—and often shockingly good. 

Here's a personal example from when I started building stompboxes a couple of years ago. I didn't know electronics, yet I fancied myself an expert. I'd reviewed hundreds of pedals. I had access to amazing collections of museum-quality gear. I knew the big-name manufacturers and got paid to scrutinize their latest creations. I owned a formidable collection myself, and had used them in great studios with great artists, engineers, and producers. So I ventured into the DIY community with the most condescending of attitudes. I thought it would be, "I built me my very own Tube Screamer, and it's durn-near good as a store-bought one!"

Needless to say, I was a fucking idiot. 

I learned far more about stompboxes from the collective wisdom of the DIY community that I would have learned in 50 years at a guitar magazine. That's no swipe at the magazines — it's just that old-school print can't rival the depth of such a large and vibrant virtual community as the one at, say, freestompboxes.org. And I can't believe some of the amazing labor-of-love websites, like beavis audio and gaussmarkov! They're packed with great info, beautifully presented. So while it's bad time to make a living dispensing that information, it's a great time to consume it!

My thanks to Joe Gore for taking the time to answer my questions.