THE TAPDANCER & THE COOK Grinderman
Nov 26, 2010
Nick Cave's other band hits it a second time.
BY A.D. AMOROSI
It's a deathly humid afternoon in Manhattan with raindrops as thick as boxing gloves and skies as gray as Vladivostok covering the city; a rotten day to be outside. George Steinbrenner died that day too. For Nick Cave, it's not much better inside. Though newly shorn of his maw-hugging mustache, he's unwell and looks it. An earache may have manifested itself into an infection and a doctor's house call is required. All Jim Sclavunos can do is hanging by his laptop and bid for vintage microphones on eBay.
The pair - the singer/lyricist/guitarist and drummer for the Bad Seeds and Grinderman - are here, despite all ails and sales, to celebrate Grinderman 2, the second volume of scorched earth psych-blues from the tight-knit quartet under the Bad Seeds umbrella. While it shares a name with the band's eponymous 2007 debut, G2's progressive sound is still raw-knuckled avant-garage rock yet more spaciously expansive, while its improv-based lyrics have evolved from sex, death and more sex to pernicious high anxiety, sex, history, sex, violence and sex. Talking about it doesn't help Cave, whose speaking voice gets higher when the nagging pain. But by chat's end, he and Sclavunos - friends since the days of Cave's Birthday Party - hug it out playfully.
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BLURT: When did you guys know there'd be a second Grinderman album? Where did it fall amongst projects like Bunny Munroe-the book and music-Bad Seeds' Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! and The Road soundtrack?
NICK CAVE: Pretty much as soon as we'd done the first one, we really wanted to get on with another record. We just had that other stuff to do
JIM SCLAVUNOS: The spirit for it was fast and great. But we didn't; then we couldn't; then we did.
.
I heard you on satellite radio when you mentioned wanting to make G2 more serious than the last one. The last one was pretty fucking serious, gents. What was that initial goal?
NC: I think because there was a comic element to that record a lot of people saw the whole idea as something of a joke. This record then became about more serious things. Ah, I don't know if serious is the right word. This record was meant to be less broadly comic.
Blackly humored. Nothing slapstick. This record also seems more existential than the last one-paranoid too. "Heathen Child" is downright abusive.
JS: The themes are darker but are more subtly rendered, with more complex interaction. The musical aims were bumped up a notch.
The first record seemed to have its lessons in my mind; that sex permeates the aging process; that we are meant to feel as if we're disappearing as we grow old. Are there lessons to be learned on this one?
NC: I'd hate to think we were teaching lessons. We're not school teachers or pedagogs.
Maybe you were taking the piss during our previous interviews-talking about mid-life crises and how age makes one often less relevant.
NC: Society's particularly cruel to the elderly but I don't think I'm that old yet, mate.
JS: That may be true but I'm not sure that message is part of G1. That might be something deeply inherent in a personae that Nick's created and maybe some of that personae overlap into Nick's idea personally. But these aren't philosophical treatises. No matter how sophisticated the ideas may be there're elements of ambiguity as well.
Why do you think the 2000s have been so much more adventurous and energetically prolific than the 1990s were for you guys?
NC: In the last ten years I've felt very freed up about things; even more so in the last five years. I'm less prone to hesitation about things than I used to be twenty years ago. I'm not sure why that is. It might be because I don't take drugs anymore, although I'm not sure if that‘s the case. I mean, I used to do just fine on drugs. But I do find that I‘m more effective at what I do now. I think I got organized. I'm able to produce more work. I still have doubts - just not the same doubts that I used to have.
How important is the concept of morality within Grinderman? Or is it the lack of morality that makes Grinderman what it is?
NC: Morality, hmm. The narratives are not so closed off; it's not the same as the Bad Seeds. Some of the Bad Seeds is structured on that classic English ballad where there's a moral at that end. Grinderman is more about creating dark atmospheres - dark neurotic anxious atmospheres so it's more joyful full-hearted music Grinderman is. There's a lot of anxiety and violence. I don't think there's room for morality. There used to be a time when I'd talk like this to journalists and they'd say, "What do I have to be nervous or angry about?" What kind of beautiful days are we in that there's no need for that question now?
We all live with levels of anxiety.
NC: Chewing your fucking arm off levels of anxiety we do. Now, Jim here has no moral center.
JS: I do. I'm just not judgmental.
NC: You're just mental
You guys are like a vaudeville act.
JS: No wonder vaudeville died.
NC: He's the tap dancer. I'm just the fucking cook.
I'm not talking about trend or anything topical but when was the last time something recent crept into the work. Not to mean to make you seem arcane, but like Bad Seeds, Grinderman seems untouched by newer influences musical, lyrical and technical, It's not as if I expect a Ke$ha record to turn you on or your paean to the oil spill to follow - but...
JS: Well, we do mention Oprah and plasma TV screens. We're not in an ivory tower or in medieval times.
NC: I think we are what we love - the music - and we bring those things into the writing and into the studio.
Do you feel as if this record has more of its male or female characters on top? Certainly you've got "Worm Tamer," Heathen Child". I'll say G2 is more feminine.
NC: I'm really interested in looking at the female role in songs always. There are songs on the first one that have fixed female protagonists-"Electric Alice" for example.
JS: There're songs here about the absence of women.
Then you have a song on the last one, "Love Bomb" where the woman seemingly makes the male invisible. That was my point about age in your songs.
NC: That was more meant to be about isolation, an inability to connect with anything, but I see what you're seeing.
Then there's "When My Baby Comes" - your Inception if you will, with stolen dreams and character narratives crashing into the next one.
NC: There're probably several different narratives at work. It also plays with shifting times and sexes of the protagonists.
I found a surprising big difference between Grinderman and Bad Seeds on this new album - there are no ghosts to be found in G2. Bad Seeds is littered with them.
JS: Do you mean baggage?
No, I'm talking about spirits. The characters in Grinderman songs are all very vividly alive.
NC: That's a nice question though. With the Bad Seeds I have a sense, even when I try not to, of cumulative history. Different people through different bands; different places that the music has gone. It has and can be quite daunting - still is - to write for them. The new Grinderman isn't that. We come to Grinderman more naked, without ghosts, very much from the ground up.
Is Grinderman an easier release then?
NC: It's all taxing. I have to pay the piper one day for all this
JS: When Nick is doing Grinderman as a lyricist, it starts off in a more spontaneous place. He's ad-libbing in the studio. He's tapping into a different source for ideas and images rather than being alone and working in isolation as he does in Bad Seeds. Working in a more fastidious way, he's got to deliver words and ideas on the spot during Grinderman sessions. It's a different platform for him different wellspring than if he were working alone. Sorry to speak of you in the third person, Nick.
NC: I feel like I'm in the third person.
JS: Are you falling asleep?
NC: I was with you al the way.
You guys seem pretty inscrutable. What intimidates you?
NC: Illness
Q: OK Maybe it was a bad time to ask. G2s slower in spots and more spacious - I know both bands share membership. Do you feel that G1 inspired Dig and in turn opened up G2?
NC: Everything affects everything with these people.
JS: You pick up the threads where you left off. Influence reverberates in the background.
What made you write a song called "Kitchenette"?
NC: You know that's not the first time it's been mentioned in a song. Brian Eno talks about it in "Cindy Tells Me". That song came to us very quickly.
JS: Right out of the raw initial sessions. Pure unadulterated Grinderman.
Is there any Birthday Party left in you, Nick? I ask only because this record shares some of that absurdity - the occasional slapdash lyric, the frenzied rhythms.
NC: I did that a long time ago. I'm the same person, yes. Yes. Does Grinderman sound like that - no.
What do you guys remember most about playing Porter Waggoner's last show when you both opened for White Stripes at Madison Square Garden?
JS: I liked him. The show was sad to watch because he was on his last legs but he was great. And the Garden was an interesting experience. It wasn't our most finessed performance but it had that feel of the old days where there was a palatable sense of antagonism and resentment, mannered as it was that night.
NC: Because no one wanted us there.
JS: It was real get-the-fuck-off-the-stage stuff in the past. People didn't want to hear our art noise. Audiences are too tolerant now. I miss the days of having to have netting in front of the stage so you didn't get pelted with bottles..
That's the Birthday Party shit I was thinking about - the wild child stuff. Tell me about "Bellringer Blues." It's my fave from G2.
NC: That's one of our songs that came from a jam - then we cut out things. I had a huge amount of lyrics for this song that I edited edited edited. That's the mathematic of turning chaos in to a song.
JS: When Nick's improvising that's built in. There's more ellipsis...
NC: It's a little on the nose. You know when you spoke before about how we don't write or think about anything current. Well, there was a sense that this song that it was about something more. A statement - something pedagogic, something didactic - and I don't feel comfortable with that. So I edited. And now it's some more hallucinatory.
JS: That fits the music better - it's swirly and dazzling. The lyrics are confused - starts off with questions...where have all my compatriots gone. The resolution is quite apocalyptic.
NC: Jim is known to be expansive (laughs)
How about "What I Know?"
NC: I think that's our most texturally beautiful song - a nice bit of space within the record.
Going in to G2 was that the deliberate idea - improvise then let it breathe with texture and space?
JS: Yes, actually. The live shows required for the first Grinderman record made it so. We only had only album so when we did festival dates we extended a lot of the songs.
NC: On stage, it became even more improv. We became expansive - we had a jamming feeling.
That just sounds weird coming from you guys.
NC: Yes but rather than be indulgent, it removed the need for us to compact what we were doing. It gave the songs room to breathe. We could start a song in an abstracted way and move into clearer focus. What became a way to lengthen the set, taught us to be more free with the structures of songs for the nest record.
It's psychedelic in the best way.
JS: Is there a bad way?
Yes. Oh yes.
NC: A lot of those bands sucked. Even the psychedelic bands that weren't supposed to suck - did suck when you listen to them now.
Then again everything sucks on some level.
Grinderman's North American tour resumes tonight in Vancouver and wraps Nov. 30 in Los Angeles. Tour dates at the official website. You can read our review of the band's New York City concert on Nov. 14, along with exclusive photos, elsewhere on the BLURT site.
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