32: How are you, Bob?

RQ: Okay. A little groggy... I just woke up.

32: Same here, so we're on the same track.

RQ: What time is it over there?

32: It's noon.

RQ: [surprised] Oh! Where do you live?

32: I'm in Toronto.

RQ: Oh, okay. My wife was under the impression that you were in Texas.
Toronto's a nice place.

32: Yeah, I'm still settling in here. I only moved here six months ago.

RQ: I don't like touring too much, but when I've been in Toronto there's
always something to do. Always a lot of bookstores, record stores. Always a
place to go, and people are friendly. I'm always amazed, you know, out of
all the touring I've done, that the only places I've been given a hard
time, at customs or such, when they see a band coming through, is England
and Canada. It doesn't make any sense to me. With the Voidoids once, we
went over and played Toronto for a weekend. We were in a van, and they
literally took one look at us and pulled us over and dismantled the van,
while we sat there watching them do it.

32: [laughs]

RQ:  So anyway, I appreciate you calling me. I don't know what kind of
approach you want to take for this. My only problem is that I've done a
bunch of interviews, a couple of which are on the Internet already, and how
do I avoid repeating myself? You know?

32: Well then, you know what? Let's just talk about whatever the hell you
want to talk about.

RQ: I have to be led. [laughs] I'm sort of a... I always get a little
nervous when I'm doing an interview. My wife mentioned that you're a
musician. Are you a guitar player?

32:  My main deal is singing, but I do play guitar, piano, all that stuff.

RQ: Do you have a group together?

32: I had a small thing going on for awhile, but that
ended when I decided to move to Toronto.

RQ: So I guess ultimately you'll settle down and then meet the right people.

32: Already in the process. So how's life?

RQ: It's okay, really. Anybody who follows me at all realizes that I
haven't been working as much in the last four or five years. I've been
working more than people would generally know about. But you know, I can't
remember the last time I played on an entire album. A couple tracks here, a
couple tracks there. Demo sessions. I've been working with
singer/songwriters who finally got me to go out and play in clubs in New
York. I hadn't done that in almost 20 years. And I stayed with them long
enough so that we'd get a good night, and there were record company people
there, but then there was no result. I'm 58 years old, and it was very
discouraging for me, and discouraging for them as well, 'cause they'd be
good. Real good. So yeah, people like Michael Maxwell and Jenni Muldaur.
They're both very talented people. But I guess I've been spoiled. I've been
playing in bands since 1961. In the early days, I'd have a car to lug my
amp around. Then by the time I started making any money out of it, around
1976 with Richard Hell & The Voidoids, there were roadies to lug your stuff
around. I got spoiled. Dragging an amp into the streets, with your guitar
and a bag of effects, just hoping to get a cab... And then sometimes I'd be
afraid to not make my fare! Nobody has a car in New York. So it was just a
lot of energy that I decided to expend elsewhere.

32: And where's this energy been going?

RQ: I have a fairly soundproof studio in our loft. I mean I couldn't have a
band in there, but it's soundproof enough that I can play loudly with an
amp. That's what I do right now. When I'm at my best, I'll get on a kick
where I'll just go into this room around one or two in the afternoon and
just play straight six or seven hours. And I never play simply to amuse
myself. I just put on a CD, usually a particular track. It could be jazz,
or just a blues, and I put the track on repeat and end up playing with it
seven or eight hours, which is either really retarded or really... I don't
know. It's like having your own band. What happens is I get lost in it. I
know a lot of people who don't enjoy sitting down and playing and can't put
in the time. What I tell them is that if you spend at least three hours a
day playing, what happens is that you start boring yourself to death after
about an hour and a half. And you know in the back of your head that you
have to do this for at least three hours. You've got a clock there, and you
cannot leave for three hours, so your subconscious, out of desperation,
will come out with new things. Hopefully new ideas. Doesn't always happen.
But you know, I'll be fooling around and I'll make a mistake that actually
works. I say "Woah! What was that?" and I'll back up. So I'll use it, and
hopefully remember it the next day. A lot of my best stuff has come out of
mistakes.

32: Did you ever have anyone to help you out when you first started playing
guitar?

RQ: Well that's the thing. I never really had a teacher. I just got a
guitar in 1958. I tried to take lessons but back then there was nobody to
teach you Rock'n'Roll. I was forced to play "Yankee Doodle" on a single
string. I gave that up immediately. It was about a year and a half later
when somebody showed me an E, an A and a B7th chord. At that point I could
play along with a Rock'n'Roll tune, so I just took it from there. Back
then, not only wasn't there anyone who could teach me, but I didn't really
know anyone who played electric guitar, or anyone who played guitar at all,
for that matter. It's not like today where everybody plays guitar. So I
sorta learned my own way, right or wrong. There are a lot of things I don't
do properly, but they ended up working for me. Like for example, on my left
hand I don't use my pinky finger very much. I use it on scales or chords.
And when I'm playing barre chords I'll grip the lower E string with my
thumb. If you look at videos with a lot of people like Jimi Hendrix, Roy
Buchanan, they're doing the same thing. All these things have worked for
me. But basically I've been going through a period of trying to accept the
fact that there may not be that much work for me in the future. I've gotten
through these periods before. Certainly in 1974, when I decided I wanted to
play again, there were a couple years that were discouraging. I'd go to
auditions and based on my appearance alone, they would reject me. My
playing, well, I never meant to be different, to have a different style,
but I guess I did. People wanted to hear what they're used to, and they
made no secret that they didn't appreciate what I was doing. Then the
Richard Hell thing happened, probably out of luck. After that was over
there was a year of not much going on. The Lou Reed thing happened and that
was good for four years. I made a lot of money, and became fairly well
known, on a higher level. All of a sudden people would actually interview
me. Guitar Player, Musician, things like that. Then when I quit Lou Reed,
again there were some discouraging periods. Then came the '90s and there
was a lot of work then. My albums with Lloyd Cole, Matthew Sweet, and other
sorta pop-oriented people. And some of these sessions would last well
beyond two weeks. It was nice, 'cause I've always preferred playing in a
studio over playing live.

32: This is a point you've stressed a few times.

RQ: Well, yeah. There's just way too many problems. The touring itself is
just impossible.

32: There's also a certain reassurance and comfort of being in a studio.

RQ: That's the thing. You never know how a live stage is gonna sound, even
if you're using the same soundcrew. On a long tour, every hall is different
acoustically. The stages are different acoustically. It's difficult to hear
yourself, and sometimes with Lou Reed, we were playing at such a high
volume, even though I had a loud amp, I still couldn't hear myself. The
only way to hear myself was for them to turn up my stage monitor. It's
always been a very unnatural thing. The longer tours, you end up sorta
sleepwalking through them. I've always given my 150%, whether it was a good
or bad night. That's why you're hanging out at the airport all morning,
hanging around the dressing room for four or five hours, putting up with
soundchecks, getting dinner, if you have time for it. Soplaying is all you
really have to look forward to when you're touring.

32: It's where the frustations come out.

RQ: Yeah. Something does happen live. A certain adrenaline kicks in while
in front of an audience, and it is a valid thing. But you know, sometimes I
make statements just to outrage people. Like: "Rock'n'Roll has been dead
since 1961," which isn't really true. Another one of my favorite statements
is that there hasn't been any need for live music since recordings have
been invented. I'd much rather be home listening to music with headphones.
But then again, I can sit here and tell you that I saw Buddy Holly play, I
saw a lot of those great early Rock'n'Rollers. I saw Miles Davis at the
Plugged Nickel. So I have a lot of experiences from some of the people I've
seen that I wouldn't trade for anything. So I don't really mean these
things. I have a sort of strange sense of humor and sometimes I pull these
kinda things off with a straight face and if people don't know me, they can
either think I'm insane or they'll be offended.

32: When did you see Buddy Holly play?

RQ: This was like in October 1957. It was the only real Rock'n'Roll show in
the '50s that I had a chance to see. I got shipped off to prep school in
1956 and it was sorta like, you know, prison. They wouldn't even let you
have a radio in your room, which was pretty brutal, 'cause you know,
Rock'n'Roll was just happening for the first time. One time my roommate and
I had gotten hold of a little transistor radio and we spent an entire
Saturday afternoon hiding under one of our beds listening to this one-inch
speaker. It was one of the high points of that year. But with Buddy Holly,
it was one of the very few shows I ever got to see. It was one those
standard things where there was a stage band. Buddy Holly & The Crickets,
Fats Domino, Chuck Berry. I remember he opened the show, loosening the
crowd with his duck walk. La Verne Baker, The Drifters, Frankie Lymon who'd
just split from The Teenagers. So yeah, it was an incredible experience,
and I wish I'd seen more of those shows. But being imprisoned in prep
schools from 1956 to 1961, I didn't really get to see much aside from local
bands when I went home. I switched prep schools because I was thrown out of
the first one. No big reason, my grades weren't that great, and I went to a
place in Niagara Falls, which was much more relaxed. We could go out on
weekends and get drunk, go to clubs. I'd hear local bands. Nobody famous,
but you'd see unknown great guitar players that you'll never forget and
unfortunately never see again. I couldn't even tell you their names, but
these are experiences that really influenced me. Hearing somebody for the
first time playing a guitar way too loud and hearing the amp really
distorted, saying to myself, "Wow what the hell is that?" It's a lot of
obscure experiences like these that affected me as much or even more than
seeing some of the big stars that I saw.

32: More so than Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens was quite an influence on you,
wasn't he?

RQ: Well, I had just started going to this second prep school in 1958. This
one actually let you have radios in your dorm room. "Come On Let's Go" was
a hit early that fall. I was just immediately taken by that whole sound,
that Del-Phonic sound. I mean, it's never been reproduced since. Nobody's
really followed through on it. And then I bought that 45, with "Framed" on
it, the Leiber-Stoller hit. Around Thanksgiving, "Donna" came out, which I
appreciate more now than I did at the time, but I flipped it over and heard
"La Bamba" and I was just blown away. At the same time he had this
instrumental 45, "Fast Freight." It was certainly not a hit, but I wore it
out, playing it so much. That was when I first started getting duplicate
copies of records. By the time he died in early '59, I had duplicates of
all his 45s, 'cause I'd literally worn out my first copies. He was my hero,
and I'd never even seen a picture of him before he got killed. It all
happened so fast. He wasn't really known at all until September '58. When
I'd see pictures of him, he certainly didn't look the way he sounded.
Hearing about his death was a big deal to me. There was this fairly hateful
guy that came to my dorm room that morning and said "Ha ha! Your hero
Ritchie Valens got killed in a plane crash with Buddy Holly and the Big
Bopper!" I turned on the radio and they were playing "It Doesn't Matter
Anymore" by Buddy Holly. That wasn't a good sign. But anyway, his sound,
his talent... It was just shocking what a major talent he was.

32: Especially for a kid of his age.

RQ: Well there was really no telling, you know? A lot of these guys died
young. Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, those were tragic losses. But at least
these guys had four or five years to record. Ritchie had like six months!
So it would be interesting to know how he would have dealt with the changes
that were coming with Rock'n'Roll. Especially in 1959, when the payola
scandal sorta made everybody hate Rock'n'Roll. It made the predictions seem
like it was coming true, that Rock'n'Roll was going to die. All you'd hear
at the end of 1959 was "Mack the Knife" by Bobby Darin. Literally, that's
all you'd hear...

32: ...So naturally, you ran away. Is this where jazz came in for you?

RQ: Well I'd always been exposed to it, you know? My parents would have
parties late at night, and my father would be playing Louis Armstrong,
Benny Goodman. So I grew up hearing a lot of jazz, and some of the things I
could sit down and appreciate. Like all the Boogie-Woogie piano players. By
the time I was into Rock'n'Roll and blues, I'd listen to these 78s, from
some of these guys. By the time I started getting into guitar, my father
took me aside and said: "Well listen to this." And he played me some
Charlie Christian off the Benny Goodman records and I could appreciate
that. When I was 14, at my birthday, they gave me a Django Reindhart
record. And there's no way, no matter what age you are, if you don't like
that music, you're in real trouble. The spirit, the vitality. I don't know
if you caught that jazz special?

32: The Ken Burns thing?

RQ: Yeah.

32: I don't have cable, so I didn't catch any of it.

RQ: Well there were ten two-hour segments, and they never mentioned Django
Reindhart. Never mentioned his name. It's incredible. How is that possible?

32: You can tell where his biases are. Even though I didn't see any of it,
I did read quite a few things about it. Did they even go into some of the
later-era Miles stuff?

RQ: They did, but they just dismissed it. They interviewed some guy who
said "Well, these guys aren't even playing together, listening to each
other..." and they just dismissed it. But overall it was worth watching.
With something like that, you're never gonna make everybody happy.

32: Well of course. With a universe as broad as jazz, to document
everything that's ever happened, you'd have to go on for fifty episodes.

RQ: Yeah, and obviously you're into jazz. I don't like to offend people or
make enemies, but near the end of the show, they had about another hour to
go before it was over. So they got to 1975, and Duke Ellington had died,
Louis Armstrong had died, Miles Davis went into retirement, and they quoted
Miles Davis saying: "Jazz is dead." And then they go on to show that in
fact it isn't and that there are all these players such as Joe Lovano and
Wynton Marsalis. Let's take those as an example. They play very well,
they're excellent players. I don't believe they're innovators in any way,
and I don't think they would make any claims to being that. So near the end
of it, they sort of admitted: "Well we're looking for some new genius to
come along and change things with some new music." I ask how is that
possible? Every combination has already been tried, from outright drones,
which Eno has done. I put some of the Eno drone stuff into a jazz category,
whether some people agree with me or not. Even some of the Miles Davis
stuff was just drones. Electronics, that's been done. Combining jazz and
funk and Rock'n'Roll, that's also been done. Going into total outer space
using electronic instruments, or somethinglike Albert Ayler. You've got
Miles Davis, with some of those live recordings in '75, and then the Velvet
Underground with what they did and what they accomplished. I just don't see
where it could go. I also actually believe that Rock'n'Roll is finished. It
will always be making money because there is always a new generation coming
along. It will always be a million-dollar industry. And rap, I despise it,
I hate it, but it will not go away, because it's too moronic and too
simple. Whereas jazz, you know, I remember it was hip to college students
around 1960-61, but they didn't really understand it and they'd buy a Dave
Brubeck record and pretend to understand it. So then the next year, it
became hip to listen to folk music, then the Beatles came. All of a sudden
a lot of jazz musicians who thought they could actually make a living
playing jazz and had reason to believe they could do it, couldn't do it
anymore. Rock'n'Roll, if it's Rock'n'Roll, is a simple music. It's based on
a limited number of chords, unless you get into that Emerson, Lake and
Palmer thing...

32: Which we don't wanna get into...

RQ: No, definitely not. So how many times can you recycle these chords,
these melodies, hooks and riffs, basic things that are valid, into new
things? It's fine with me if Bob Dylan and Lou Reed, pioneers who are
geniuses, continue to do it. They've earned the right to do it. Sometimes
I'll turn on the TV and see this Sessions show and I'll see somebody like
Sheryl Crow. I haven't bought any of her records, but she's taking those
things and making something as fresh as she can out of it. I find it
enjoyable to listen to. I know I'm coming off like an embittered old guy,
but I'm not. I'm really not, and I think there is a point to what I'm
saying. When I make a statement like "Blues is dead," obviously I don't
mean it, but there is some element of truth to it. It will always be a
valid music, but almost all the real innovators are dead at this point.

I took a few lessons from a jazz guitar player, Jimmy Raney. He had his
heyday in the early '50s, late '40s. He was one of the first be-bop
players. And once he just stopped and said: "Well, I realize that what I'm
doing is like a classical music. It's from a period that's gone now. And
that's what I do, but I'm still gonna try to make something fresh out of
it." And that's sort of what I try to do. The people that I work with, most
of them that have any talent at all, they respect and have taken what they
can from valid things that have happened before. Whether it's Bob Dylan, or
the Byrds, or whatever, and try to use it and make something new out of it.
That can happen to a certain extent. I can take my knowledge of this and
aside from whether or not someone digs my playing, I know a lot about the
music I'm interested in. Rock'n'Roll, jazz, blues. I know really nothing
about classical, reggae, country. I know very little about country after
Hank Williams. I try to use these influences. You can draw on them. You can
draw on Ritchie Valens, you can draw on Link Wray. When people first
started interviewing me, they said: "Oh you must be influenced by Richard
Thompson or Phil Manzanera." I said: "No, not really. I just share the same
influences that they did." They're more or less the same age as I am.
Somebody like Jeff Beck or Jimmy Page, they listened to Scotty Moore with
Elvis Presley. If you can get your own spin on that, and your take on that,
then you can come up with something worthwhile. I know that at my best, I
can take my influences and come up with something that's my own at least.
I'll never be anything more than a footnote at most, but I do have a style
of my own.

32: Now do you think that someone can come up with something of their own
without any outside influences?

RQ: Well, I think if you deliberately set out to do it too
self-consciously, you're gonna end up not always with the greatest thing in
the world. I've read of musicans, and I've known people who've shut
themselves off from all influences for a period of six months so they can
come up with their own thing, and I just don't see that. There's just no
way. You have to take these influences. I'm still attempting to play my own
version of Chuck Berry and I can't do it. It just comes out my way. And
it's gonna come out your way, no matter what you do. The bottom line is
that whatever you're meant to do, it's gonna come out whether you want it
to or not.

32: Exactly.

RQ: Now what kind of jazz are you into?

32: Well, I had "Bitches Brew" playing just before I called you.

RQ: With Miles Davis, you can't go wrong. I would argue that after he came
out of retirement in 1981 till his death, the stuff isn't that interesting,
but there's always something worth hearing. I think that at that point he'd
given up on trying to carve out any new territory. He'd done it four or
five times. Give him credit. From 1944 to 1975, he changed music four
times. Not many people have accomplished that.

32: Ornette Coleman has also been on rotation a lot in my apartment these
days. I don't relate to it as much as say someone like Zorn does, but
there's definitely something to listen to in there.

RQ: I love the way those Atlantic Records were recorded, with no echo. And
something like "Ramblin"... Lou Reed was into that. It's just a one-chord
blues thing. Sort of a clue to listening to Ornette Coleman is his first
album on Contemporary, where he's actually playing with a piano player,
playing chord changes. And hearing his aproach. I mean here's this guy
who's really out there playing be-bop in a strange demented way with a lot
of R&B influences. The tone, the approach, it's all there.

32: The Plugged Nickel...

RQ: Yeah, I just happened to be in Chicago due to a bizarre set of
circumstances around Christmas 1965. I can't claim I understood what was
going on. It was so new. I'd recognize "So What" or "My Funny Valentine,"
but they were stretching it so far out that I didn't know what was going on.

32: So where did The Velvet Underground come into the picture? Were you
already on the West Coast?

RQ: I became a fan of theirs sort of late, like 1968. People had played me
"White Light/White Heat," and the banana record, and at first listen I
didn't like it at all. But then I really got into them. Somebody was
setting up a concert at Washington University in St. Louis, where I was
going to law school, and I turned him onto The Velvet Underground, so he
had them come out there. It was Taj Mahal and The Velvet Underground. I had
actually bought a cassette recorder the day before. The sound was sort of
muddy. It was literally a basketball gym, and it was pretty echoey. So I
taped that. After I passed the bar exam in late '69, I moved out to San
Francisco, which was ultimately a mistake, and they came out there. It was
easy to have access to seeing them because they just weren't that popular
in general, especially in San Francisco. You know it's too bad about San
Francisco, because I was out there in the summer of '66, when all this
stuff was fresh, when it was just starting to happen. The Filmore was in
this black ghetto, and you didn't have to wear a headband or have long
hair. By the time I moved out there in '69, the hippies were more
conservative and conformist than the alleged straights. So it was a mistake
for me to go out there. Anyway, as a general rule, they didn't have a lot
of use for The Velvet Underground. The band didn't have all that many fans,
so it was easy to talk to them. The first weekend, at the Family Dog, it
was basically just a bunch of hippies there. They brought their
tambourines, harmonicas, and were playing along. I made tapes of that stuff
that came out very well. It was a large place, so they could really turn up
the amps. Then they went to The Matrix for a couple of weeks, and that's
where I really got to know them, 'cause in the beginning, they'd start off
on a weeknight around 8:30 and sometimes there'd be two or three people in
the place. So they got to know me, and we'd get talking. I asked if it was
alright if I taped the stuff. They said it was alright. Sometimes I'd sit
around at their rehearsals and tape the rehearsals. Ultimately, I taped
over the rehearsals. There was nothing really spectacular going on in them.
They'd just work out new songs, but it was interesting to see them in
rehearsal, to see how they worked together.

Sometimes there'd be a lot of time to go before the show, so we'd have
dinner at this hotdog place across the street, and that's where I got to
talk to Lou Reed a lot, you know, asking him questions. He certainly
appreciated the fact that I understood his music. He was pretty open and
friendly. It was generally a very nice experience. So I taped all those
nights, I think I missed one night. I remember the next day, he said: "Oh
you should have been here last night, we played 'Candy Says'." Which was a
song they never did. I asked him if they'd play it again that night, but he
said no. There was another performance I missed in San Francisco. They
played a jazz club which once a week had Rock'n'Roll, usually some funk
group or something, and they opened for some blues group, playing to an all
black audience. That's something they rarely did. Lou Reed would just say
things that he didn't mean just to get people going. He'd say: "We don't
play blues, we don't like blues. And in this next song I'm gonna play a ten
minute guitar solo and I'm not gonna play a single blue note...." You know,
he'd just do deliberately perverse things like that. But there is something
of interest going on now. I think I can talk about this, 'cause it looks
like it's gonna happen...

32: Are you about to talk about these tapes you've been hiding from us for
all these years?

RQ: Yeah.

32: Please. Go ahead.

RQ: Well, I never wanted to talk about it before, 'cause I didn't know if
it was gonna happen. I had certainly been approached many times to bootleg
the stuff and I would just never do that just on moral grounds. Lou Reed
and I haven't really talked in about fifteen years. I knew that if I ever
did something with the tapes it'd have to be kosher. So then my friend
Michael Carlucci of Subterranean Records told me about this "bootleg"
series Polygram was coming out with. The tapes I had, what happened was
that I was listening to those tapes incessantly in 1969. And back then,
cassettes themselves and the machines were pretty primitive, and it wasn't
uncommon for you to be listening to a tape and suddenly something would be
sounding pretty weird and the tape was being eaten. So this had started to
happen. So I said woah, waitaminit. I knew this stuff had to be preserved.
It was good that I did it when I did. I transferred the best of the stuff
to a four-hour reel-to-reel tape.

In a small club like The Matrix, I had to learn the first few nights where
to sit. If you sat directly in front of the band, in the front row, you'd
miss the vocals. I had a special table, where I'd get there early enough
and capture the best sound. So I just put together the best four hours on
this tape, and then I felt free to listen to the cassettes and wear them
out. There's a couple really good classic things. Some one-of-a-kind type
things. There's a very slow version of "Waiting for My Man," where he's
making up new lyrics, and whistling in between verses. It's a classic. That
alone will make people happy.

32: What other kind of nuggets can we expect?

RQ: Well, there's three "Sister Ray"s. They didn't do that one often. One
from St. Louis, one from The Family Dog, and one from The Matrix. That last
one from The Matrix, he takes this incredible twelve-minute guitar solo.
That was well recorded. So I went into Edison, New Jersey, where Polygram
keeps their tape library, with Bill Levinson, who puts this stuff together.
They put the stuff on hard disk, and the tapes sounded better than I
thought they would. We took out the CDs of "The Velvet Undergound Live
1969" and compared them. Some of those performances I attended, a lot of
them are from The Matrix in San Francisco, and they were recorded in stereo
by the club. My stuff is mono, but sounds pretty good.

But one thing I really didn't know much about was the simple act of
cleaning a tape head. If I'd taken like thirty seconds once in awhile and
taken a Q-tip and some rubbing alcohol, it would sound a hell of a lot
better. There are some points where there's a lot of high-end missing. It's
really not as bad as I thought it was. You can hear it especially on the
cymbals once in awhile, where they kind of cloud over. So basically we
squeezed almost four hours of this stuff on three CDs, sent it to the band,
and got their approval on it. Which I was relieved about, 'cause you know,
Lou Reed and I...I don't know. If I ran into him now, it'd be nice to sit
around and talk to him.

32: When was the last time you saw Lou?

RQ: I hadn't seen him since I quit his band in '85, but I ran into him in a
guitar store and I didn't know what to do. It could have been unpleasant,
so I just walked out. But I guess I should have said hello. 'Cause we were
friends for a good six or seven months before things got tense. He is a
genius. I think once someone is a genius they're always a genius. Some
songs are better than others, some periods are better than others. But
anyway, I told Bill Levinson: "I don't know. Maybe he really hates my guts,
and if you mention my name in regard to this he'll flip out and say he
doesn't want this released if Quine had anything to do with it." But no,
far from that. Apparently he said some nice things about me. Aside from
being relieved about that, it was nice that he doesn't harbor that many bad
feelings about me.

32: Well, in retrospect, you gave him his best album....

RQ: "Blue Mask." Yeah, like I've said many times, I wish it'd gone on like
that. Obviously it didn't. But that album is my consolation prize. They put
it out on CD, and it sounds even better. It's such a real thing. I've been
on so many albums, take "Girlfriend," for instance, with Matthew Sweet. I
did that entire thing through headphones. I just went in, and I had to put
myself in the frame of mind and pretend that I was playing with people. I
think I did a good job of it. But the "Blue Mask" was a rare occurrence,
where the people are actually playing together and playing the songs for
the first or second time, having never rehearsed them. There was some
tension there, because the bass player, Fernando Saunders, and the drummer,
Doane Perry, they were definitely taken aback by our guitar playing. There
was no question about that. They were polite and nice. You know, Fernando
Saunders had just been working with John McLaughlin and Jeff Beck. You
could see him and the drummer exchanging glances once in awhile probably
thinking: "What the hell is this?" But they really rose to the occasion and
everybody listened. It went by without a hitch. There was so much intense
concentration involved in listening to each other, and by the end of it, I
was just completely exhausted.

32: Was there a lot of tension in the studio while you guys were recording
this?

RQ: It was a positive tension. There was tension on "Legendary Hearts," but
it worked against the playing. It's funny, over the years, I've realized
that when you're playing live in a studio with another guitarist, it always
works better if you're side by side, sort of looking at each other out of
the corner of your eye, instead of facing each other. If you're facing
someone, looking at what he's playing, there's this mirror thing happening
where everything is backwards. When we did the "Blue Mask," we were sitting
side by side, just sorta once in awhile looking at each other. By the time
we did "Legendary Hearts," there was starting to be tension between us. He
didn't like certain parts I was coming up with, and would tell me not to
play any blue notes here, or not to play any seventh chords there, etc.
Don't do this, don't do that kinda thing. I would attempt to follow those
instructions, but if you have too many of these things to remember, it's
gonna inhibit you. I remember we'd be facing each other in a circle this
time. It was more confrontational. But yeah, there's a certain magic that
happens with a live band in a studio. One of the best things I've done in
the last four or five years was this record I did in 1996 for a Swedish
singer named Corin Curschellas. That was an amazing band. Bass player named
Damon Banks, J.T. Lewis, a drummer who'd played with Lou Reed, and Marc
Ribot and I on guitar. We did everything live there too. It's so rare and
happens too seldom in studios nowadays.

32: How do you interact with keyboard players?

RQ: You talk to most guitar players, and if they're really honest and frank
about it, they'll tell you that they generally have very unfortunate
experiences with keyboards. Two guitars playing together, you can clash the
notes and it'll mesh better. I like to play dissonant chords. If someone is
playing an open E or an open G chord, there's no reason for me to play the
same chord. It isn't The Ramones or Weezer. I'll voice it differently. If
I'm playing G, at the very least I can put a capo on the third fret and
play an E position and it's gonna be voiced differently. In Lou Reed's
case, he was playing a lot of the songs in D, and I'd drop my tuning a
whole step. It makes a difference in how the record sounds. But to voice
chords with keyboard players, the ones I've worked with, tend to be more
conservative. They're more knowledgeable about music than I am. I can't
read and I don't know what the hell they're talking about. They'll say,
"Well you're playing a diminished 7th and I'm playing an augmented 9th
here, and it's not working." And I know it's working. I have a pretty good
ear. On the last tour with Lou Reed, there was a keyboard player, a guy
named Peter Wood, and we just didn't get along musically or personally. On
the Lloyd Cole tour in 1990, it was the same thing. I told the sound guy
that I didn't want to hear the keyboard player, and the keyboard player
said he didn't want to hear me. That's an unfortunate thing to do in a
band. Believe me, I'd rather be interacting with the musicians, but
sometimes it's impossible. If it's just a one-day session, you hope you get
through it, and you leave it in the hands of whoever's in charge. But now
if you're doing a ten-month tour, or even if you're gonna be recording with
this person for two or three weeks, then you have to make more of an
effort. It's your responsibility to get together and at least compromise
the voicing of the chords.

32: How do you feel about your work with Zorn?

RQ: A lot of his music I don't understand. He does a lot of different kinds
of music. There were a lot of great experiences he exposed me to. He has a
very large record collection. He'll expose you to Indian disco, Vietnamese
heavy metal, just things you'd never know about. Once in awhile, I'd turn
him onto something. He was great to be around. We shared a lot of the same
influences, people that are not that spectacularly known, like Lee Konitz,
who did an album called "Motion," which is one of my favorite records in
the world. I had just started playing with him, and I was at his house, and
he'd just gotten this CD reissue of "Motion," which is actually what led me
to buy a CD player in the mid '80s. He picked up his alto sax and started
playing along with it, note for note. He can really play. He can do it all.
I've taken part in sessions where he'd point his finger at you and you'd
play something for six seconds and then he'd point his finger at someone
else and they'd play six seconds and so on and so on. I understood it more
as time went by, that I was not actually just supposed to make noise, I was
supposed to listen to what had gone before, and hopefully feed the next
person he'd point to, and give them something to go on. He's into classical
music, and I'm totally ignorant about that. It's a music I know absolutely
nothing about. I love Bach, I love Bartok, that's it. I tried to listen to
the Beethoven symphonies from the time I was six or seven years old, I just
don't like them. At this point, I am capable of understanding a lot of this
music, but I just don't care for it. So someone like Ornette Coleman is a
big influence on Zorn, and I had never quite understood Ornette Coleman. I
loved the earlier records, the sound of them,the true gut-bucket R&B sound.
I know enough about the music, it's like: "There's no particular chord
here, just let the bass player intuitively play what he feels should go
with the music." I've always been more chordally based, whether there's a
keyboard there or not to guide you along. Like on "Motion," Lee Konitz
plays standards. It's just bass and drums, but they're following chord
changes. I can understand the Coltrane stuff, the farthest out Coltrane
stuff. Same with the farthest out Cecil Taylor stuff. So as for Zorn, there
is a lot of music he did that I just didn't understand. But on the other
hand, he couldn't use me in a lot of the stuff he did, even though he'd
like to, because there were a lot of types of music he did that I just
wouldn't fit in on. So he'd use me sometimes if there was some sort of
rock, blues, or ambient element to it. Or some sort of, even though I can't
play jazz, some sort of jazz feel to it. I could maybe contribute something
to that. But it took him a while. I'd been playing with him for a year and
a half when he wanted me to do some jazz comping behind a John Patton organ
solo. Just like you'd hear on a Jimmy Smith record from 1956. I said: "I
really can't do that." I know a lot about jazz, and I can talk like I know
a lot about jazz, so I guess he just assumed I could do it. He convinced me
to attempt it, and then he said "Okay, Quine, you're right. You can't do
that."

32: Would you have wanted to become a jazz player?

RQ: I used to want to be able to play it, but I wasn't meant to do it. It
just wasn't meant to be. Even if I'd stuck with it and had more discipline
and learned to read music and learned more theory, I would have been a
mediocre jazz player. Whereas I think I'm an above-mediocre rock player. I
at least have my own thing, for better or worse.

But you know, it was just a lot of nice experiences with Zorn. They were
always totally different. I got to play with a lot of great musicans. Bill
Frisell, who I was already friends with. I met Marc Ribot doing soundtracks
for a Japanese kiddie cartoon show, and various soundtracks for obscure
movies. There was always a different situation and always a different
challenge. I remember once, Zorn had written out chords for the guitar,
with ten notes in them, knowing it was impossible, of course. Fortunately,
Ribot was there, and he can read music. He can do anything. What he'd do is
that he'd voice things out for himself and then he'd say "Okay, Quine, when
we get to this point, put your fingers here." And it was a very trying
experience. But the end result, when I heard it six months later, it
sounded great.

32: I'm really digging "The Bribe."

RQ: There were one or two really good moments for me on that one. This one
rock riff I came up with was great. The CD didn't come out until recently,
which was almost ten years after it was recorded. I had forgotten about it,
really. When you think that we did that in two days, maybe three. There
were so many pieces in there. It was very strenuous and taxing, and Zorn
would force you to be creative. He'd drag things out of me that I didn't
think I was capable of. To sit down ten years later and relax and listen to
it, you say "Oh wow, this plays pretty well. This is pretty great!"
Meanwhile, your memory of it is that it was very difficult, very trying at
the time. Like I just told you about that session with Ribot.

32: You and Ribot seem to work well together.

RQ: That's the nice thing about Ribot. Having him around. He saved my ass
many times. He can play any style and he can read. I mean, we always played
well together, and we were intelligent enough to listen to each other and
we really had something going. It's somewhat unfortunate that we haven't
had the chance to do more sessions for singers. I think we really have
something to contribute with this kind of thing.

32: What's it like to tour in Japan?

RQ: I toured Japan in 1993 (Sion) and in 1999 (Kazuyoshi Saito). You're
treated very well. You're paid very well, and how grueling can a tour of
Japan be? It's such a small country. Even if you venture off from Tokyo,
you either take the bullet train, or you take an hour-and-a-half flight,
and you're wherever you wanna be. The way you're treated in Japan is
incredible. I mean, it's the one place I could actually move to. I could
move to Tokyo, which I'm not about to do. But before the novelty wore off,
I could actually be working steadily for about a year and a half. It's
amazing how well known I am by musicians over there, musicians who are
doing very well. I know I could get a lot of work, but the culture is very
alien to me. I wouldn't last that long out there. It was an astounding
experience to be in a Tokyo Tower Records in 1993 and have people in the
store, not Americans, but Japanese, come up to me with copies of my albums
they'd bought and wanted me to sign, which doesn't  happen that much, even
in New York. It was a gratifying thing.

32: Now, on "Escape," the track "Flagpole Jitters." What's with the
double-speed thing? A buddy of mine slowed it down, and wanted to know
whose idea it was to quote "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"...

RQ: [Laughs] I wasn't aware we did that! Really. It was my idea to slow it
down. Jody Harris was one of the first ones to dig that electric Miles
Davis stuff. We were into that by then, and that was our sick, demented
aproach to that. On one level, as I joke, we wanted to make something as
unlistenable as possible. This was our chance to do whatever we wanted,
because we both were playing in other bands where we were sorta frustrated
with stuff. There was an extent to which we would be told what we could do
and what we couldn't do. "Flagpole Jitters" is not a track you'd wanna
start an album with. That's gonna make you want to take the record right
off, and that's why I put it there. So there was this definite perversity
to what we were doing.  It is a better record than I realized at the time.

32: You did a Guitar Player interview in uh 19- uh, a buncha years ago. You
described your playing as "just trying to play the blues." Does this still
apply today?

RQ: That was around '85-'86. And yeah, again, that was sort of for shock
value. A lot of people categorize me as this way-out guitar player, and
they talk about solos like "Waves of Fear" and "Betrayal Takes Two," like
I'm from outer space or something. The basis of everything is the blues.
It's the basis of Rock'n'Roll and jazz. I can play a decent blues, I think.
If someone can't sit down and can't play a decent blues, I don't see how
they're gonna do anything that's valid. And I've known people who can't do
that, people who've made names for themselves at The Knitting Factory.
Making a lot of "noise." That is one reason why I deliberately stayed away
from that scene. I could have put a bunch of people together and made my
kind of noise, and gotten away with it without any rehearsals. I can hear
the difference. Some people, they just don't have it. Anyway, going back to
my riffs, there's no way to avoid the blues. One way or another, you can't
avoid it. Growing up with early Rock'n'Roll and gradually becoming aware.
Getting a Muddy Waters album. Listening to that, then going back to the
country blues thing. There's no way around it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------


By email:

QUESTION: What's your main gear setup these days?

ANSWER:
Guitar:1996 '52 Telecaster reissue with Seymour Duncan Antiquities pickups
with a 4-way switch.
Amp: Fender reissue '65 Deluxe Reverb with replacement Eminence alnico
speaker. It's not my favorite amp in the world, but it's the most
practical. It's got a 12-inch speaker, and it doesn't weigh a ton. A good
Fender Twin Reverb or a Vibrolux Reverb are my all-time favorites.
Effects: Deluxe Memory Man, Prescription Electronics' Yardbox and
Experience, and various Tube Screamer-type pedals (Maxon OD 808, Voodoo Lab
Sparkle Drive, etc.).

QUESTION: Do you favor any of those Danelectro pedals? How about those
mini-ones with the silly names?

ANSWER: The Grilled Cheese mini-pedal is interesting; a fuzz, but the
"resonance" control is a wah-wah pot where a tone control would normally
be. So it has interesting duck-like voicings.

Quine's top five - 

ANSWER:
That's tough. I can't give you an overall list. It varies with what I'm
into. As of today, I'd say:
(1) Art Garfunkel: "Breakaway" (Columbia). Joe Osborn plays magnificent
bass on this album.
(2) Lou Reed: "Sally Can't Dance" (RCA). They finally reissued this on CD
in the U.S. (with bonus tracks). Guitarist Danny Weis is magnificent on
this underrated album.
(3) J.J. Cale: "Naturally." The most neglected living guitar player around.
(4) Pee Wee Crayton: "The Modern Legacy," Volumes 1 & 2 (Ace). A T-Bone
Walker "imitator," but for some perverse reason, I prefer his approach.
(5) Moondog: "Moondog" and "More Moondog" (both Prestige). Essential
listening for ANYONE. Hearing this stuff for the first time 40 years ago
had a major effect on me.




Copyright 2001, Eric Veillette. Reprint only with permission.