Inside In, Outside Out, Up, Down and All Around with Mike Gordon November 9th, 2002 - Hear/Say By Jesse Jarnow Mike Gordon is the bassist for Phish. Take 'em or leave 'em (and there are plenty that do one or the other with aplomb), Gordon has pursued an idiosyncratic line through mediums in chase of a fluttering and colorful weirdness. In his bass playing for Phish; his filmmaking in Outside Out (a homemade excursion into the mind of weirdo bandleader Col. Bruce Hampton) and Rising Low (a recently released documentary about the making of Gov't Mule's star-studded From The Deep End LPs); and his implacably creepy book of vignettes Mike's Corner, Gordon's vision has been equally informed by bluegrass musicians and surrealist filmmakers. Gordon's work comes to its fullest flowering yet with the release of Clone, collaboration with cult acoustic guitar legend Leo Kottke. Despite a large handful of carefully placed and spot-on contributions to recently reunited Phish, it is the first time on record that Gordon's musicianship has even come close to center stage. The results are equally warm and hilarious, a marvelous soundtrack to a twisted Sunday morning with some coffee and a crossword. hear/say: You mentioned yesterday that you were in the studio mixing. What are you working on? Mike Gordon: Too many different projects going. (Laughs.) It's called Inside In, it's the music for my movie Outside Out. It's pretty mixed sounding to start with, 'cause I've been working on it for three years. Malcolm Burn is the engineer, and I've been a fan of his, so we're working on it. It'll come out next year. h/s: How altered is it from what was in the movie? MG: Pretty altered. There's a whole handful of instances where we took background music and I edited the jamming into songs with verses and choruses and wrote lyrics. The lyrics are loosely based on stuff going on in the movie, but not exactly. Some things are a little more similar, but most of it's kind of different. The idea is for them to exist on their own. You didn't need to see the movie necessarily. h/s: What themes do you see running through all your projects? MG: Yeah, there are some. The themes that run through all the projects is Mike's quest for understanding what makes the magic in music. That'd be the broadest way to put it. I don't know how to get a shade more specific from there. I don't know. That's a starting point. It's Mike's quest, Outside Out is a dramatic thing, but it deals with issues of different kinds of music or music as a metaphor for personality or that sort of thing. Rising Low deals with it in a more literal way, where there are people making music and talking, since it's a documentary, about what makes it work or not at different moments. Then, making an album with a new situation, a new relationship, is a way of discovery for me also, on a much more personal level. I tried to see what works for me, and I tried to apply some of the things I learned. h/s: And growing out of all of that was Clone. Going back to Phish, you wrote songs, but you were never a prolific writer, but then with Clone, you've suddenly got this huge batch of stuff. I was wondering how that happened? MG: One way that it emerged is because I spent all last year on Rising Low, and it's a film about making music. After a year of that, I thought "I really want to be doing the making of the music" and not working on filmmaking for a while. I'm just looking for different ways to balance my careers. When this year started, in January, I knew I was gonna go out and see Leo. I thought "I'll just go get myself a new office, and go everyday, and write a song a day". I cleared out enough other projects from my life at the time that I had time to do that. It wasn't a lot of time each day. I found an office in the Woolworth Building in Manhattan, one block from Ground Zero, and went in every day, this empty place with a bass and a tape recorder and a microphone. I wrote about 50 songs over the course of about six months and used a few of them with Leo, and there's a possibility that Phish will play a couple, and then it's time go back to the drawing board. Trey [Anastasio, Phish guitarist] was saying the same thing, that it takes about 10 songs to get a final keeper. h/s: Was it literally as formal as that? You just walked in and started working in the office? MG: Yeah, because originally it was gonna be two hours a day, but then it ended up being one hour a day. I would go in, I might have an idea in my head, or would have some stacks of lyrics from my friend Joe [Linitz, songwriting partner], or maybe old notes of my own. One of those things could sort of be a concept, or maybe it was just a bass riff or something. I would sit down and record it. I have a tape recorder that's a hard disk recorder that's got drum pads built in and a CD burner. I would figure out what the rhythm would be and the bass. I used a lot of different methods. For example, one day I would go in and play randomly on the bass with no structure. Then, I'd go in one measure at a time, or one beat at a time, and harmonize another bassline to that first improvised one. Then, I would have two tracks of bass. They're kind of jazzy and free, but there are two of them doing the same thing, so it sounds intentional. From there, I would make up some lyrics that would fit in and weave in and out of the basslines. That would just be the approach for one day. Then, the next day, I would do something different. h/s: Did you find any methods yielding better results than others? MG: Yeah, definitely. I'm still refining it. For example, this is sort of interesting to me, when I brought the stuff to Leo, he said "I really like the fact that you're writing with a drum machine." I was making up some of the patterns, and there's lots of different patterns you can choose from. Often, I would take one of those patterns, or make one up, but either way it's a drum machine. He said "I really think that it's good that you're doing that, because it means that you can play yourself and leave more space." He thought that was cool. Then, the first time that I got together with the band after rekindling things with Phish, I played them some stuff. We all played stuff we've been working on. They all said "this is pretty cool, there's some good stuff here, but one thing that might make it better is if you didn't use the drum machine", because they thought that I could stand to cut to the essence more, of what I'm doing. If what I'm singing is the essence, then why does there need to be drums at all? Or if the bassline is the essence then why does there need to be drums and this incessant pounding is not adding. That was interesting, too. Trey had made some four-track recordings recently. I ended up copying his idea. He used a Roland drum pad. You can make loops, but you can play it live. You can assign different sounds to all the pads. It's very high quality, both the sounds and the pads themselves. He was making four-track or eight-track recordings with Tom Marshall. His rhythm tracks were canned, they weren't real drums, but they'd be played live so that the rhythm is not so cold and perfect. Because of the rhythm being played like that, I wasn't sure that there wasn't a real drummer - much more with his than with mine. With his, he had actually played all the hits, it was just on a pad. I've been toying with that a little bit, though not much. So, that was interesting. The moral of the story is that if you wanna get good at something, you have to dedicate a lot of time over a period of time to it and then keep trying things. Now that I feel like I just got my feet wet in terms of songwriting and there's a lot of different things I'll wanna try. Carving out room in the schedule is probably the first thing. It's gotten a little crazy. h/s: You've established a bunch of different musical relationships in the past few years - Leo, with Warren Haynes, and with the drum machine - if that counts as a new relationship... MG: (Laughs.) Yeah, my new friend. h/s: How do you see your role changing from relationship to relationship? MG: Hmmmm. Well, with Leo, since it's only one person, each person has to do more than if there were four people. My role had a chance to thrive, in that I could do a lot. A lot needed to be done, and I had to do half of it. Whereas, with the band, on average, I probably only have to do a quarter of it. Just a feeling of confidence grew from doing a different sort of thing, from something that sort of stemmed from my idea or my initiative. That would be a way to put it: from my initiative. With Warren, it sort of centers around the film more than anything, but I've been sitting in with them a bunch of times. I really like it, for some reason. I don't always expect that I'm going to like it, but it's been very consistent. Sometimes, their part of the show, I'll like more on one nights than other nights. Some nights, I won't like it, sometimes I will. My part, sitting in, has been consistently fun for some reason. Again, it's another feeling of confidence. It's just a learning experience. When you're with the same group of people for 17 years, things are a certain way in subtle ways that you wouldn't even want to bother taking the time to analyze. Like, in our first five years, the groove stemmed from Trey's guitar playing. In the second five years, the groove stemmed from [drummer Jon] Fish[man]'s hi-hat. This has changed, but things are a certain way and it does get that specific about what the dynamics are. But then to put yourself in a whole new situation, like playing with Warren and Matt [Abts, Gov't Mule drummer], it's just remarkably different, the way that people get softer or louder in different parts of the song, or what the purpose is of singing in a certain way, or playing a solo in a certain way. It can be subtle, but it's very broadening. Then to go back and play with Phish and have these other experiences, which we've all been doing, is really a great thing. h/s: You mentioned schedule juggling. Do you envision Phish becoming as much a part of your life as it was before? Like a full-time thing? MG: Actually, in a way, I envision it becoming more of my life. Because, in the last four years that Phish was together, I was spending more of my free time working on Outside Out than musical stuff - though, for Outside Out, I was also working on soundtrack stuff, so that was musical, and it sort of jumpstarted the songwriting thing. So, now I would like, as these other projects... some of them will keep on going. I'd like to write a screenplay at some point and make another film, and I'd like to do more stuff with Leo, and we both seem to be enthusiastic about continuing... but I have so many different things going that I'd like to carve away more time to concentrate on my main thing, which is Phish. In terms of the touring schedule, it might not be as much, or might be almost as much. We're just trying to feel it out. h/s: In Phish, you always sort of fantasized about having the chance to reinvent yourself and your repertoire. Now that it's come time to do that, do you actually plan on doing that? Or are you gonna spend time relearning the old stuff? MG: We're trying to figure out some of those questions still. There's some new stuff. Usually, with old material, it doesn't make much group time to go over it. It's almost like an individual responsibility to sit with the CD and relearn your parts. We play the stuff. Sometimes, it doesn't hurt to get together as a band and, if some arrangement was always a little lame, to improve it. But I don't think we'll know 'til we're actually playing, how much we're feeling new/old and what the balance will be. In a way, it's how it always was, which is that we spend more time on our own working on new stuff than on old. h/s: At the Jammys, you talked about going back and looking at your journals. I was wondering how often you go back and look through them? MG: It's too time consuming, but I want to make a thing out of it. I'm such an archivist. Next year, my thing might be to look through old photo albums. It was just nagging at me that I hadn't given my personal choices for the [Live Phish] series, so I really wanted to do it once and for all. I made a document, it's 50 pages, I typed it on my computer, and I sent it to the Phish offices. It's all of my favorite, and a couple that I didn't like, mostly my favorite gigs from '83 to present. I typed it from my journals. The idea was not to go too crazy with descriptive stuff. It's really just information they were looking for and some things about songs and which set I liked. But I ended up putting in some descriptive things, like "oh, by the way, at this gig, Trey walked [his dog] Marley around the corner and witnessed a gun shooting and that influenced our playing" or passionate feelings. I would take little parts of sentences and put them in this 50-page document. Some gigs would be, "oh, I liked the first set, it was great, we were really grooving on this tour." It was really an emotional experience to read them all. I couldn't believe how fun it was, how intense it was, to have a career blossom like that and still be all passionate about it along the way. h/s: And having the document to be able to go back... MG: I would strongly recommend, for people who do keep journals, sometimes, every once in a while, go back and read through them. h/s: Leo doesn't come from an improv background, which obviously informs a lot about what you do... MG: Yeah, that's true. It's very interesting, actually. At one point, I just explained it to him. He was at my house for a week, practicing. He said, "y'know, with Phish, you're doing these long jams and you're improvising, so what happens if it just falls on its face, the jam does." I said "well, the fans so much appreciate the taking of risks that they just expect that that's gonna happen". Jerry Garcia said the same thing in interviews: we're lucky to have fans that understand that taking risks means it's not always gonna be good. And that's why they go on tour, because they know that it's different from night to night, and they want to catch the good ones. We sort of click together when we play, so it'd be nice to have improvised sections that weren't necessarily like that on the album. He loves to play, so he's always on the road. He's out there now playing. A few weeks ago, he called me, and he said, "I've been trying this jamming thing. I took a couple of my songs and decided to extend them. The audience really liked it, and I think I see what you're getting at." (Laughs.) Not that he's oblivious to that, he listens to a lot of jazz. It's just interesting to talk about it like that. h/s: You worked in the office on some of those songs that you ended up bringing into the sessions. How much did they get mutated after you brought them in? MG: To varying degrees. Well, "Car Carrier Blues," that one was... they all had drum parts. That's the biggest difference, actually. All the ones I did with Leo had drums. We weren't gonna use drums. There was even the feeling that some of them should have drums, and should we bring in a drummer, but we really didn't want to. We wanted to keep it very organic and spare. We ended up imitating some of the rhythms with his guitar strumming or the percussion stuff and letting it become a new thing. The basic form was probably used in most of the cases. Like that one "Clay," which is that weird sort of spacious one. I'm trying to remember how that was on the original four-track. With the other ones, the four-tracks were things I played for people a lot. With that one, it's so distant that I can't even remember. What we did with that one is that we tried a few different things. What ended up working is that we played the bass and the guitar background randomly. We just made it up, with no structure, just a random string of notes within a scale, sometimes leaving the scale - D minor - I think with me playing two notes for every one of his, that's what we came across. It's totally random. There are some implied chord changes over those notes, since it's all within the scale it fits anyway. The middle section is sort of different. We added a few effects. I think I ended up singing through a Leslie, which is not the first time someone's done that, the rotating speaker. I think I did two tracks singing through the Leslie. Leo's known for his slide playing, but he didn't play any slide on the album. Except in that song, he sort of just made that scraping noise on two tracks with a slide, without even fingering a note, just left hand only. We just kept adding those effects. It definitely built up in the studio. That one, just 'cause I'm on it, I'll tell you the whole history: Joe called me, Joe Linitz who writes lyrics with me, he said: "I had a really cool dream. I was just driving and I realized that there was this face in the woods and it was looking at me, so I just pulled over and looked at the face." I said, "That's really cool, that's a really cool image, you should write a poem around it and we can try to turn it into a song. That's a really good song idea." Then, maybe a year a later, I get a stack of stuff, and there it is in there, and it's called "The Traveler's Dream." I really liked some of the words that he used, but the way that it was structured, I couldn't relate to. First, I did a version, where I took his words and I changed a couple of them. It wasn't really working for me. Then, I tried it again in the office, where I just decided "I'm gonna write this again myself, from scratch, but I'm gonna use Joe's dream and I'm gonna use some phrases from his poem and have the rest of it be my own words" and it came out nicely. There were some drums in it. What we were doing with the guitar and bass had something to do with the drums. There's something in that where the drumbeat - which no one will hear 'cause it's just on the demo - I tend to use juxtaposed rhythms, like three against four, so it had something like that going on. I played Leo all the stuff, and there was something about that one that he really liked. We recorded it and I kept thinking, "well, this doesn't really fit the rest of the album" and Leo kept saying, "y'know, this my favorite one." One time he said, on the phone, "I just listened to 'Clay' again and it makes me squirm, and there's nothing else that makes me squirm like that." So, we ended up putting it on. h/s: It sounds like, in the last few years, you've used a whole of different creative processes to get at these things. How many of those do you envision bringing back to Phish? How literally do you see bringing them back? MG: The biggest challenge for me is figuring out ways to get intensely creative in the context of working with other people. I work with a lot of other people on these projects, but Leo and I just have a magical bond. Phish... well, we have a magical thing when we jam. Leo and I almost have a magical thing when we songwrite, like Trey and Tom do. The band's done some of that together. I'd like to do more. I'd like to try to have some of that intensely creative work, intellectual creative work, in the context of the band. At that point, it could be anything, it could even be designing an album cover, just reinvesting myself in the band. At that point, it'll just be trying different things: try this, try that and see what happens and find a place where I could do little things in the music, album cover, where there's room for me to stretch myself. h/s: Have you ever thought about going into the studio like The Beatles and never playing live? MG: It's come up. Every few months, someone says, "Hey, do you think we should be like The Beatles and never perform again?" Maybe every band thinks that. But, on the other hand, we love playing live, and jamming, and the whole concert thing. It's hard to imagine that going away forever. It's possible. It's not the current plan, but we've talked about it. h/s: Does it ever feel like a hindrance to you that when you want to go out and be Phish, it's such a huge production and you've gotta play a place like Madison Square Garden and there are all these people who are gonna base their lives around it? MG: You know, the Rolling Stones, on their last tour, they did an auditorium, an arena and a stadium in every city. It's possible to mix it up like that. It's fun to play at Madison Square Garden, actually. It's big and it's round. (Laughs.) It's something to look forward to. In some ways, some of the gigs in bigger rooms, because we got better at it, felt more personal than the ones we had done in smaller rooms years back. I think we have a sensitivity to the organization issue, where things can get overorganized or overplanned or overstructured. That was one of the handful of reasons that we wanted to take the hiatus in the first place was to sort of break apart the infrastructure and the expectations about how things are run: soundcheck everyday at 5, practice three weeks before a tour, record every one-and-a-half years. You reach a point of structuring where the creativity can't be like it was when we were in a college dorm with all the time in the world to just work on a part of a song for weeks with no album, no tour, no goals except to make it good. h/s: And maybe some midterms. MG: Yeah, that's true. Engineering, for me. h/s: Do you have things in place that you hope will prevent that from happening again? MG: Most of it has to do with talks between the four of us. That's been our biggest key to success: being able to communicate well with each other. We're doing that. And talks with our manager John Paluska, reflecting on what the hiatus did with us, what things were like before, what things could be better, just keeping tabs. There are more specific things. Like, making it so we can record albums in Vermont more like we did Farmhouse, so we don't necessarily have to go somewhere, or scheduling tours so they're not too long, and finding easier ways to do things - finding what we enjoy doing and would enjoy challenging ourselves to do, and cutting away the other stuff. Maybe we don't want to take six months to make an album and overdub lots of guitar solos. Maybe what's fun for us is to make an album in one day and see how it comes out. And maybe next week we can make another album in a day and see which we like better and put it out. Try to find what we like doing and what we don't. If we're happier with what we're doing, then we'll do it better, probably. h/s: Related to that, Wilco just did this thing in their home studio... MG: Didn't they just have a movie? h/s: Yeah, there's a documentary. MG: I don't know much about them. h/s: It's about the whole debacle with their record label. MG: That's right. h/s: They've got a home studio, and they tried making an album a week for a while. MG: Really? h/s: They'd come up with a concept, like a list of song titles, and assign them out. MG: Did anything come out? h/s: Not yet. This is real recent, like in the spring, so nothing's come out of it yet. MG: Huh. That's pretty wild. I'll have to pass that along, tell my bandmates. [Note: In the week that elapsed since this interview, Phish recorded 20 new songs and will be releasing (some of) them as an album called Round Room on December 10. The new batches of Live Phish that are going out have advertisements for it.] h/s: So, one more Phish-related question, then another Clone one, then I'll let you get back to your business at hand. I guess it's the biggest one: what made you finally say, "It's time to do this again"? MG: It was a combination of things. The bandmembers had times to express themselves in their own ways and discover their own personalities. Something was satiated there. Then, people were listening to some Phish tapes, partly around these live albums, or watching videos, or me reading my journals, and sort of feeling nostalgic and really getting excited to do it again. On top of that, if there were any sort of issues or gripes at the end, before the hiatus, even little things, those sort of faded away and got forgotten, because by going out and doing something else with new bands, we were able to look back and think, "Well, those little gripes didn't matter - look what we created, this chemistry between four people over 17 years and this new stuff I'm doing is great, but it's hard to compete with 17 years of working and getting along" - a new appreciation just sort of grew from that space and time. All around the same time, we were making phone calls to each other and we just started talking a little more. h/s: Sort of a culmination of stuff. So, getting back to Clone. You were a Leo Kottke fan for many years before playing with him. And, as the story goes, you gave him a tape of you adding bass parts to his stuff. So, when you gave him the tape what did you envisioning happening? And how did that stack up when you actually worked together? MG: Well, I was going on a gut feeling that occurred to me while I was driving, and the gut feeling was "I could play with this guy." The reason it's significant for me to have a gut feeling like that is that I've never done it before. I've played on people's albums a tiny, tiny bit around Burlington, but basically I had no real reason to think... People might want to play with me 'cause I'm the guy from Phish and that might sell albums or who knows what, but in terms of making a genuine musical connection like that, it takes a leap of faith to think that this guy who's been my favorite musical acoustic guitar player, and who - for 30 years - has been playing alone onstage. He doesn't seem to be a person who wants to team up with anyone. I had a gut feeling that it was just too perfect, because his sense of humor, and the way that his melodies and his harmonies on the guitar move around, it all just seems to resonate with me. What I thought... I didn't really have any expectations. I thought maybe he'd get a kick out of listening to the tape and that'd be fine. But I did have a feeling that we could record together, maybe this would lead us to being able to record together. I liked what came out of the tape, otherwise I may not have even introduced myself at all. It was just a test to see if I could make something I liked that fit in with one of his guitar tunes in a non-conventional way. So, I gave it to him and thought maybe that it would open a door, and maybe that door would be recording. I never thought that it would be onstage or I imagined that that would be a possibly, but sort of unlikely, 'cause he's so complete sounding by himself. And, me being onstage would mean that I couldn't go see him play and sit in the audience. Although, I still can, in a way, from my side of the stage, four feet away. The recording thing seemed like the gut feeling was right. And I was dedicated to following through with it to see if it would pan out and it did. The doing things live is more of a surprise that it's gonna happen. Even, while recording, we didn't know if we were gonna do that. That was a maybe. I'm used to having a drummer, and he's used to having no one else. I'm used to having a huge bass amp, and he's used to having not even a guitar amp, just a guitar and a microphone. We're still working out the kinks. But I think we jam together well. And I think we can let loose when we figure out how with some of the songs we have. So there's still a discovery period there. h/s: Out of curiosity, have you heard about this band The Phix [a Phish cover band currently touring nationally]? MG: Yeah. I heard about them a couple of weeks ago for the first time. h/s: What do you think of that? MG: I think it's pretty cool. It's very flattering. That's the main thing, when someone does something like that. I haven't heard their stuff. I really would like to, though. I just get so curious. Sometimes, with people who cover Phish stuff, I feel like if I check it out, I'll be able to learn some new, better basslines for Phish songs that I never would've thought of myself. But, potentially, it could be cool. h/s: I went and saw them when they came to New York. MG: What was it like? h/s: Um, the word "necrophilia" was what sprung to mind. MG: (Laughs) h/s: They focused more on the older, more complicated stuff, which impressed me. MG: That especially makes me wanna check it out. Whenever we hear Phish stuff on albums, it's never the intricate stuff. There was this album, the Bluegrass Tribute to Phish, and they started to get into it, but they only went part way. There are two of them now. They're different, but neither of them really get into the intricacy of it very much. h/s: The thing for me that was really interesting about it is that they go up there, and there are four regular guys onstage, it's not like they're dressing up like you or anything, and they play these songs. You watch them do these things... I feel like there are a lot of aspects of Phish that I grow out of your personalities, like these little idiosyncratic things... MG: So, like the bass player might do some Mikeisms? h/s: Right, but it's not you doing it. MG: God, that sounds so weird. h/s: Yeah, it's kind of dislocating. I got a different sense of what your music was about from listening to that, but it wasn't always pleasant. MG: Weird. Well, that's what happens sometimes with tribute bands. We don't always hear... we hear ourselves as an influence, but we don't always hear the good things necessarily. We hear a mixture of good things or bad things. People end up copying the bad along with the good - or, not the bad, but the things you wish you could change about yourself. It makes it funny, at least, or it makes it entertaining. I'd like to figure out a way to check them out. h/s: Yeah, I'm sure it'd be a good evening, slick your hair back. MG: I've done that. I did that when I went to go see Phin. h/s: Is that another one? MG: Yeah, Phin. P-H-I-N. It was a long time ago.