MIX (01/??/95) |
From: Misteradio (misteradio@aol.com) By: Mr. Bonzai BONZAI: This is a new console, isn't it? MOTHERSBAUGH: Fairly new, yeah, about a year old. It's a CAD, but I think they call themselves CTI, actually. I don't know what they call it - it's kind of confusing. But considering it has 240-plus inputs, it was probably as reasonably priced as you could find out there. BONZAI: In your arsenal of tools and toys here, what is your main composition contraption? MOTHERSBAUGH: I'd have to say the Macintosh. I'm on Opcode Studio Vision Pro. BONZAI: Is most of your work not scoring for television? MOTHERSBAUGH: It's all over the place right now. We're scoring five TV series: AJ's Time Travelers for Fox, Future Quest for PBS, Medicine Ball for Fox, and Beakman's World and Kevin's Kitchen for Nickelodeon. BONZAI: How many people do you employ here at Mutato Muzika? MOTHERSBAUGH: We're flexible - we're like an accordion. It depends on how many projects are going on at the time. On Beakman's World, for instance, we have a composer named Denis Hannigan, who took over the project from me, and he's been doing it for the last couple of seasons. We're up to episode 65. BONZAI: All done here in your studio? MOTHERSBAUGH: He does it in Topanga Canyon and modems it over on American (sic) Online. He sends his MIDI notes over, and we've duplicated his studio in this setup. He doesn't have the gear to mix, but he has the gear to compose, so Bob Casale just sets it up for "Denis' Topanga Studio", puts the disk in, and mixes it here. BONZAI: What medium do you record to? MOTHERSBAUGH: It's everywhere now, because everybody has different requests. We go to 4-track 1/2 inch for a lot of the TV stuff, and commercials - for some reason they like that format. Some people like DAT with a 2-pop. BONZAI: What's a 2-pop? MOTHERSBAUGH: It's a film term, when in the old days two seconds before picture started there would be a pop on the visuals and an audio pop so that they could line it up on the KEM tables. So we give 'em a pop on the tape, or we put a little dialog that they can sync up to ahead of time. Or else they want a DAT with time code. And some people want things delivered on ADATs, while others want 1/4 inch tape with center code. We also deliver in Tascam DA-88, because the pros haven't figured out what they like, the ADATs or the DA-88s. We'll supply anybody with anything they want. BONZAI: What kind of computer hard disk storage do you have here? MOTHERSBAUGH: We have all sorts of things, hard drives all over the place - inside the Quadra, free-standing gigabyte drives that get moved around. We have MO drives - four of these Pinnacles. BONZAI: Why do you need all the...? MOTHERSBAUGH: Memory? Because we record a lot of our sounds and samples. And in this room, in one day, I may work on four different projects. We're scoring a couple of films right now, an independent film called "Flesh Suitcase", doing TV commercials; Today we did Kahlua; yesterday it was Gummy Savers. The other day, we did Farmer's Insurance. BONZAI: Are you the main composer on all the works? MOTHERSBAUGH: There are some projects where people request me. On commercials, it used to be just me, but now it's turning out that my brother Bob is beating me out on some of the demos. J. Walter Thompson in Chicago, for instance, they always request my brother because ---MIX MAGAZINE LAYOUT-SCREW-UP DELETED THIS PORTION OF THE INTERVIEW--- but there may be time available and a possibility where we put albums of music on Internet and people can download them for a fee. BONZAI: What pieces of your gear would make the readers drool and lust for the power? MOTHERSBAUGH: I would worry about people who drool and lust for equipment, but I guess that's easy to say if you're making payments on just about everything. I think it's a great time because just about any of these boxes can do all sorts of things. A Kurzweil, for instance, the K2000 - you can both sample and play samples and also play back patches that already exist. The Kurzweil and these Roland samplers are all connected to the same SCSI chain. You can load off of CD-ROMs into any of these, and they are starting to talk to each other somewhat. The Kurzweil can read the Roland MO disks. It's wonderful that all the new stuff talks to each other, shakes hands, and there are universal computer formats now so that you know you're going to get a piano when you make a certain request, no matter what software you're using or what piece of gear you have. BONZAI: Do you still use any of the old Moog synthesizers? MOTHERSBAUGH: We've got a big collection of old analog stuff. In the old days, people were trying to figure out electronic music - like this TVS-1 here is a mutant, an Oberheim with a great little sequencer. It's the filters - there's really nothing that accomplishes that sound in modern synth sounds. The old sequencers weren't quantized, so if you didn't exactly tune each knob, you could get microtones. You miss that when everything is so cleaned up, even if you don't want it to be. BONZAI: Any new stuff that we haven't heard about? MOTHERSBAUGH: Actually, I'm interested in a new keyboard controller that throws away the concept of your seven white notes and your five black notes. It has what looks like those old stops on Wurlitzer organs that were like a little tab, like a little diving board, and there is a whole row of them in a horseshoe pattern. It has rows of seven, offset slightly. They had one at the last NAMM show, but it wasn't hooked up and working. I'm trying to get them to send me one. BONZAI: You had a couple of "Hard Core Devo" albums come out on Rykodisk a few years ago. Are there more things in the Devo beehives that people will have access to? MOTHERSBAUGH: I'm sure there will be. There are whole areas of our history that are parallel to what's going on now in music, including ambient and trance kind of stuff. There was a period of three years in between writing pop songs where our experimentation took place in an ambient, trancy kind of dance mode, as far as the style of the music. We have an archive, and it's just a matter of going through it and pulling out the best stuff. BONZAI: How many hours of Devo are in the Archives? MOTHERSBAUGH: Timewise, there are thousands of hours, but you'd have to go through it to find what you'd even want people to know about. Some of it would be humorous, especially because so many of our songs that came out on albums were often different earlier. Like "Dumptruck", nobody ever heard that, but it became "Girl You (sic) Want" at one time and made the Top 20. BONZAI: You made a lot of money with Devo, but you spent it all on the production and touring, didn't you? MOTHERSBAUGH: Yeah, we didn't know that you were supposed to keep some of it for yourself. We were totally having fun, making films that we financed ourselves, staging these great tours. We'd spend all our profits on an album having the record company do a die-cut, fold-out stand so you could fold this thing out of the back of your album and stand it up. That's the money that would have bought us our swimming pools and stretch limos. BONZAI: After that period when you were concentrating on your visual art, did you just decide to go and make some money? MOTHERSBAUGH: What happened was that Devo kind of broiled somewhere in the mid-'80s. We peaked commercially as far as music that related to the radio. Somehow in 1980, somebody thought that the guys who wrote "Mongoloid", "Can You Take It", and "Jocko Homo" should be allowed to sell out the Forum, Radio City Music Hall, play at big festivals and The Budokan, all over the world. It was great; it was a nice couple of years. I recommend it to anyone: Go ahead and be a rock star for a year or two. It's fun. Then after that, we wrote a song with John Hinckley. And it kind of turned back into where it came from. BONZAI: John Hinckley? MOTHERSBAUGH: You remember, he took a shot at Reagan and winged him. We had been reading the National Enquirer around the time that he was arrested. I liked the poetry that he was sending to Jodie (Foster), and we were at Cherokee working on an album called "Oh No, It's Devo!". It was kind of a dark period for us, anyhow, and we called up Bethesda Maryland Hospital where we read that he was staying. Wouldn't you know, just by being persistent and saying that we were with the band Devo - it either caught them off guard, or anyone could get to him - we actually got to John Hinckley and talked to him. He said that he was a Devo fan, which didn't make me feel good at first. He only bought the first album, so that was okay. We figured he had lost interest, so we wouldn't be next on his list. But he let us take a poem that he had written, and we used it for the lyrics and turned it in to a love song. It was not the best career move you could make. We had the FBI calling up and threatening us. They told us, "Well, you know he gets 500 death threats a week, and his fans are going to be your fans, and you better not publicize this song." Our record company called and said, "Wait a minute, we're getting calls from the FBI. Is this really the John Kinkly (sic) they say it is?" My manager said, "Mark, you can't do it. Neil Young never would have done it, Bob Dylan never would." None of his other clients would have done it. Tom Petty wouldn't. It was like, why did we do it? But if people told us we couldn't, that just gave us all the more determination...you know, Spinal Tap syndrome. BONZAI: When was the last time you guys performed together? MOTHERSBAUGH: About three years ago, we did a tour in Europe. It was Spinal Tap, deja vu. For me, I was in this horrible tour. Oh, it was okay, because the audiences were great and we hadn't played in Europe for a few years. They were excited, and it was fun, but we'd play in Sweden, and the next day we'd have to take a bus. It was supposed to be all planes, but the next day we were on a bus driving to Madrid. Stay there just long enough to play a show, and then we'd drive to Norway and then drive to Italy, then up to England. It was a ridiculous tour, and it went like that for 35 days. We were watching Spinal Tap in the bus and checking off the identical things that happened to us. "Yeah, they fucked our album cover..." We got up to about 30 check marks. BONZAI: Since you guys can so easily come out of the mothballs, I guess you must have billions of loyal fans? MOTHERSBAUGH: I don't know. There are people who grew up in the era when we were writing music. For me, it's the Stones and the Beatles, because that was my time period. Unfortunately, another generation got Devo instead of the Stones. [Laughs] That's their problem. But they are all over the place, yeah. BONZAI: As an artist, are you more or less fulfilled now? MOTHERSBAUGH: I'm in a nice part of my life, actually. I get to do all sorts of different kinds of things. I have an art show coming up in Detroit with paintings and prints. Musically, commercials can sometimes be great to work on, and sometimes they just suck. Sometimes, it's a bad idea from the beginning, but the best thing is that they only last a couple of days and everybody's really nice. What else...I'm working on CD-ROM projects, and I get to act. People call me up for the funniest stuff. BONZAI: What about your Muzik For Insomniaks? Any plans to release your solo music? MOTHERSBAUGH: Yes, I'm starting a label, MUTMUZ, and the first releases just came out. And there will be some Devo things. BONZAI: Do a lot of kids apply for work here? MOTHERSBAUGH: Yes, people are starting to find out about Mutato. They watch RugRats on Saturday mornings, or maybe they saw Michael Tolkin's The New Age. I guess they figure we're having some fun. Yes, people are looking for work on this planet. BONZAI: What advice would you give to the youngsters, composers in their formative years hoping to emulate your spectacular lifestyle? MOTHERSBAUGH: Learn your computer and remember your dreams. Q. Are we not men? A: We Are Bonzai |
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