Boo!
Don and I kept trying to make music in those, then, valuable intervals between his production career. Following Dinosaur and Spy in the House of Love, the market was wide open for us to come back with a great record and continue this legacy but at that point, he was getting paid an incredible amount of money to not be Was (Not Was).
It was the beginning of what would become the end for a while as our paths diverged and he became rich and renowned and I had to find other pathways to pay for house and home. Without having this mom ‘n’ pop shop we’d started, the hunger was deep in me to just keep finger painting. I waited like a bride at the altar for him to slow down, but it didn’t really happen.
Years later he finally spoke the words that I’d waited so long to hear: let’s rent us an empty space, bring in our gear and just go at it like we used to when we made Wheel Me Out. The two of us in a room trying to entertain each other, knowing that if we succeeded to our high standards, it would probably translate to someone else, somewhere.
Whatever else Don did over the years, in that ribcage of his beats the heart of a bona fide avant-gardist. I think there’s still nobody better. I admire a lot of hip hop production these days but if Don’s determined to do something outré, he still has that fresh heartbeat to lend it. Over the years the music business imploded around us and we were lucky to get Boo! out at a time when nobody believed they’d sell another CD again. Gone were the days when a record company could afford to spread copious amounts of money to radio to buy a hit record.
I think Boo! represents a cleaning out of the closet. Some of those tracks, for my money, should have remained private stock. But you know, we had to fill out a record. Don’s still got kids at home and he’s still making a living producing so it’s not like I could call him of a Tuesday and say, “yo I'll be there at noon, let's get crazy.” And both of us are pharmaceutically-neutral these days, which in the past certainly wasn’t the case and led to some of our more bizarre experiments.
If ever there was an art for art’s sake ethic, art becomes that at a certain age when you realise nobody’s paying attention at the level they used to. But we still have devoted fans who turn up when we play gigs and it’s like they’re singing along to campfire songs. They’re having a blast and it’s enjoyable to serve them, but it’s not the same as doing it when we were in a high stakes game.
Once you’ve succeeded at even the level of having a couple hit records, you think: let’s make more. That’s the hard thing to do, to strike the common chord, not to bend down to meet the audience at the floor, but to speak eye-to-eye and hope that you still have what they need.
Russia, early 20th c.
When Yevgeny Yevtushenko was a young poet he split a lot of time between writing poetry and playing football. A bunch of his poems were actually themed, metaphorically or not, around football. So he sent them to a sports editor and the guy stood up on a chair in the middle of the newsroom and declaimed these poems, then called an old poet friend of his to meet Yevtushenko.
The three of them were walking through a park with the old man looking critically through a sheaf of poems and after a few minutes he looks up at Yevtushenko and says: “so you want to be a poet eh? What have you to tell the world?” And the sports editor, kind of a wise old hand himself, interrupts and says “Nikolai, give him a break. Right now what he has to tell the world is ‘I am a poet.’”
And you know something? I think rock ‘n’ roll in general—or youth music if you want to call it— depends on the naïiveté, enthusiasm, blind passion and native instincts that fuel it before you get smart and look back to see if Eurydice is behind you in the cave.
Out come the Greeks.
My last personal chapter is kind of random. I discovered a true crime book called Fatal Vision, written by Joe McGinniss, based on the story of an army doctor who killed his family then blamed it on Manson-style drug-crazed hippies. The doctor even dipped his finger in his wife’s blood to write Manson copycat stuff on the walls: “acid is groovy,” “kill the pigs.”
I wrote to McGinniss and enticed him with the possibility that there was a way to treat this dark-ass, psychedelic era, helter-skelter murder in a musical way, like a musical drama. Now I hadn’t been obsessing over this for years, like, “I’ve got to turn this murder into a musical,” having always thought musical theatre was a little bit silly, an acquired taste... but I’m a sucker for a spectacle.
I realised while researching that there was a story within a story. MacDonald, the purported killer, had hired McGinniss to be his mouthpiece, to write a book that would not only pay his legal bills but would tell his innocence story. But McGinniss, after a long relationship with this guy, decided he was guilty and wrote what he thought was the truth, that the guy was a psychopath.
20 years after the book was published, Janet Malcolm wrote a two part essay in the New Yorker that was later published separately as a book called The Journalist and the Murderer, which addresses the issue of writers knowingly seducing their subjects to get out of them what they wanted. She used McGinniss and MacDonald as her focus and it’s the relationship between the writer and the killer that has become the seed of this narrative. I still don’t know what it’s going to be, except I’ve got the convenience of the doctor having blamed these crazed, drug-addled hippies, who I conceived as a combination Greek chorus/house band for the musical.
Having written song after song, letting them just go where they would, I always hungered for what I thought was the next stage, like rappers talking about taking it to the next level. For me, an old Grecophile and Hellenist, Greek tragedy was really the best rock ever written. Aeschylus and Euripides – talk about rock opera, they wrote in rhythm, rhyme and pitch, and dealt in the gnarliest matricide, parricide, etc.
Greek tragedy really strikes me as the true tuning fork of the human experience. it’s made to make you vibrate at every level of your being. So if songs, one by one, can move people to dance and maybe think a little bit, it’s time to graduate and this is going be my acid test, excuse the pun. 
Was (Not Was)’s Pick of the Litter 1980 - 2010 will be released 23 February, and you can pre-order it now!
Interview © 2009 Wheel Me Out. No part can be used for any purpose without prior consent. Please contact editorial@wheelmeout.com
