“The harmonies properly rendered make the melody a succession of feeling states rather than a succession of intervals.”
It’s been almost exactly a year since I did my last interview with Steve Kimock for Glide Magazine. As I mentally mapped out what I wanted to cover in this new one, it became immediately obvious that there’d be lots to talk about–he certainly had not let the year go idly by. Not only has he toured extensively in all parts of the US and Japan with the Steve Kimock Band, but also has done a number of shows with a variety of lineups and formats, and even has found time to sit in with other touring acts. In addition to all the live performance, however, this year also saw a number of other important production milestones: he’s started a download service, which features high-quality multi-track recordings of live shows; and he’s also initiated a new archival series of live music available on CD. Very recently, the band released its first DVD, a documentary of their New Year’s Eve show in Colorado and very soon a new “official” live release, entitled “Live in Colorado, Volume 2,” will also be available. But perhaps the most anticipated development is that the band will be releasing their first studio album sometime in the next few months.
But that’s not nearly all that’s been going on. Behind all the touring and recording, his lifelong striving to understand his art in ever greater depth also continues. Over the past few months, Steve has been particularly interested in the physics of tone. In particular, he is trying to understand the ramifications of how sounds are produced and received (heard) in nature and how that is different from the way the musical system in the western world, i.e., the twelve tones of equal-temperament, has represented those sounds. Above all, he has tried to come to some understanding of why those differences are important and what they might mean for the creation of new music and ultimately for our listening. Although he’s always been interested in this topic, it seems that this endeavor has particularly captured his imagination lately. I therefore thought that, in addition to getting his thoughts on some of the new projects, I also might try to have Steve discuss some of these more esoteric ideas in the interview, not so much with the aim of elucidating the concepts themselves, but more in hope that it would offer a deeper glimpse into his artistic process.
When I called Steve to do the interview, he was busy working on the final tracks for the new album in his home studio, also known as The Big Red Barn (and it is, of course, really a big red barn). He took time out from the recording session to do the interview. After some chitchat and congratulations about the family (he’s the proud papa of a newborn baby boy!), we dug right in to the interview.
MB: Well, I guess a good place to start might be to talk about the DVD you just released. I had a chance to have a pretty good look at it, and thought it was really well done. The sound and video are very high quality, and, by the way, the Cerletti (a custom guitar with a carved bronze top and fretboard made completely of mother of pearl) looks really beautiful on camera! Are you happy with the way it turned out?
SK: Well, yes and no. We knew we really needed to get a good video product out there. And I knew that we needed to record a lot more than we did in order to get the stuff out there that I’d like to have, though I didn’t get all the stuff I wanted.
How did you end up choosing the material?
You know, I’m not exactly sure. There’s a bunch of stuff I wanted, and a bunch of stuff everybody else wanted. Everybody kind of fought for this and insisted on that, and technically eliminated this, so you know, what ended up there was kind of through attrition.
You or your audience have made audio recordings of virtually everything you’ve ever played live since I can remember. Was the experience of video recording very different? Are you aware of being recorded as it’s being done?
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Oh my god, am I aware of being recorded? I don’t care about the microphones, there’s been mics on stage there for 30 years, but cameras, man, it was the most nervous I think I ever was in my entire life, including anything! It was ridiculous, I had no idea. I was so pumped up to do it and when I got there it was like, “aaaaaghh!” So, you know, it was not my bravest moment. [Laughs]
Well the quality of the video and the sound are both very good. I really hope it ends up getting the exposure it deserves.
Cool. Well, what I’m most interested in now is getting to do another one. I had some ideas going in, and had some feelings going in but I didn’t exactly know how stuff would cook up or would translate, and having gotten though the process once, I think I really know how to get it to go now. So, I’m champing at the bit to do another one. For the kind of thing we’re trying to present in the first one, I think it went really well. And I think for a first effort by the band to show us in performance, it kind of goes down the center—I didn’t want to make something too extreme one way or the other.
I saw a notice in the New York Times a while back talking about your appearance at the New York Guitar Festival. This sounded like a really interesting event, with an incredible collection of great guitarists all showing up for this “Guitar Marathon.” What was that like for you?
Yeah, I played a little bit. Well, first of all we only had like twenty minutes. So I played a little bit of improvisation on the Hawaiian guitar and did a little of the Elmer’s Groove [from the SKB tune, Elmer’s Revenge] on electric. You know, just to hit some spots that were in some ways representing the thing that I’m shooting for these days. Some intonation stuff on the slide, and just a little of the groove-oriented thing in a lopsided kind of way.
And this was a duet with Jim Kost right?
Right.
In terms of the whole experience, were there any players, or anything memorable that stood out for you?
Man, everything that happened there was just extraordinary. It was so much fun. And I got to hang out with a lot of really cool guys. It was really great. I hope I get to do it again.
Did you get to see the actual New York Times review? I’m not sure when the last time was you were referred to as “Mr. Kimock,” but you know the New York Times always refers to people that way.
[Laughs] It may have been the first, it may not have been the last.
Speaking of names, I also recently got my hands on an old Goodman Brothers Band recording—they made them available for download. It’s from the Lantern in ‘77 in Pennsylvania, and on the personnel list, they list you as Steve “Rock” Kimock.
[Laughs] Is Billy [Goodman] listed as Bismarck?
Uhuh. And John [Goodman] is John Boy, Frank’s [Goodman] nickname is there too.
Oh, man, yeah, “Crumble.” What a fucking terrible nickname. I can’t imagine where it came from. I hope it was some sort of hash reference.
It really brought back a lot of memories. Such great writing! Heck, they still write great stuff. A couple things struck me about the tape, though, maybe the most interesting is how completely different your playing is now compared to then.
Well, duh. [Laughs]
Well, of course, it’s going to be different, but I mean this is really different. Still really interesting, but almost unrecognizable in terms of the style compared to what you do now. Can you tell us anything about how you think your playing has evolved over the years? I know that’s a huge question, but I guess what I’m really interested in is the extent to which you make conscious choices to change, or is it more organic and just sort of happens?
Wow. You know, there’s lots of conscious choices along the way. The organic process beyond that is really dealing with the consequences of those choices. You know, you make one choice and it forces you to make a hundred other choices.
So, for example, in the context of the stuff that I was listening to at the time [during the late 70s with the Goodmans], I had to make some choice about what I was trying to present in the context of that music relative to what else I was listening to. And at the time I was listening to a lot of Eric Dolphy, and John Coltrane, and John McLaughlin and also really nibbling around the edges of enjoying listening to Joni Mitchell, the Band, and [The Grateful Dead’s] Europe ‘72 . So in the context of the music that we were trying to present at the time—which was more like the kind you want to listen to in the car, well that music is gonna be more like the Band, not Eric Dolphy. So there were conscious choices to emulate certain musical values and styles above others but also trying to incorporate some of what wasn’t be directly alluded to in that. So those are conscious choices.
And so down the road, those choices wind up having these—what’s the CIA term? “blowback?” Yeah, you know, the unintended consequences of my foreign policy [laughs]–aligning myself with this group of dictators and that group of dictators. So, down the road, some of the stuff I was listening to that I was trying to recycle within myself—that Roy Buchanan tone where it crosses McLaughlin’s tone in the early Miles thing, like there’s a Fender guitar with light strings and a Fender amp—places where that trip sonically intersected McLaughlin’s trip, and where that intersected with Garcia’s trip. So down the line, trying to sound like this guy, but ending sounding like THAT guy. But if I could consciously choose to not go through that process, I would not have gone through it, but of course, I did.[laughs]
On that Goodmans show, I’m really struck, for example, by the sheer speed you used, almost as a device unto itself, and then I compare it to what you did, say, with Psychedelic Guitar Circus with Henry Kaiser just a few years later–they’re very different. Your playing in the Kaiser thing is so much more deliberate, and much more “edited.” And Zero’s stuff maybe more back and forth between the styles, and now in SKB, it’s still very deliberate, largely melody-focused, but you will pull out the speed once in a while.
Well, yeah, but not much, though. I remember getting my Franz metronome as a kid, and there’s this little booklet, you know with tips about using the metronome. And one of the first tips was, “Avoid immature rapidity.” And I kind of said, “Oh, Fuck YOU! You mean I don’t set the thing at 208 and go?” [Laughs loudly]
Well, you know the rate of information thing [speed of playing], for me, kind of lost a little psychic battle to a couple of things. One was just the general concept of Zen that I brought in to the thing. You know, I read the Zen archer stuff and got the idea of the guitar as the bow, where it’s impossible to lift and impossible to draw, and the target is impossibly far off. And you pick the thing up that you can’t pick up and you pull it to a tension that you can’t pull it to and you aim at something you can’t possibly see it’s so far off. And so I said to myself, “OK,” so rather than having all this information equally accessible, I went to making it equally inaccessible. I put the action [the height of the strings from the neck] as high as I possibly could and put the heaviest strings I possibly could. I completely crippled the thing. So if I wanted to play a note, I’d really want to have to play it, and it was really gonna hurt. So that slowed me down. And that made it all a lot more interesting for me. It also brought the sonic thing [his now well-known focus on tone], more to the foreground, and also created some space in my playing.
So in some sense, maybe the facility, the speed, was getting in the way of the music?
[Suddenly over the phone an excerpt from the new album, a drum track, starts playing at a high volume, clattering my receiver and maxing out my recording levels—Steve says, “man those drums sound great, don’t they?]
I think there’s a lot of people–myself to a certain extent–that get caught a little later, realizing that the majority of their trip was that you just happened to be clever with your hands as a youth. That’s neat, but so what? I mean, yeah, people make careers out of it, and perhaps to some extent I did.
And you know, another real important dynamic in the thing –you mentioned editing before–that’s kind of along the lines of what happened. I think along the way you’re kind of reduced to what you’re doing. You’re not building up to something, you’re stripping things away to some essential place. That may be the entire thing, really, the stripping away.
So, let’s jump from the past to the present. You’re in the midst of recording SKB’s first studio album. How’s it coming along?
It’s moving along, we’re working on it right now. I’d be working on it right now if I wasn’t doing this [the interview]. It’s cool to hear the stuff coming back for real. But it’s a giant, huge pain. Oh my God I forgot just exactly how much work it is and how difficult it is just going in and playing and sitting around, and waiting, and trying to do stuff when you’re not warmed up, and trying to interact with a fucking tape –it’s a very different process.
You have literally hundreds of live recordings out there in circulation, which certainly capture the band well. Why was it time to go to the studio? I mean, what was important about doing a studio release in addition to those live recordings?
Oh, it’s been time to go to the studio for years, man. It’s just been logistically out of reach. It was physically, financially, just out of reach. So finally there’s just enough resources to squeeze something together. There’s lots of live stuff out there, sure, but this is just a different thing, and I really desperately want to make a couple of good records while I’m still kicking, you know. And this is the beginning of that process. So I’m hoping to really bang some stuff out in the near future that covers some more things that I like. I mean, obviously this is a Steve Kimock Band record, and so I like it for that, but I’d also like to make a more straight-up blues record, and a record of some acoustic music, and maybe one with some more “out” stuff. And I also want to do some more conceptual things — I’m really keen on the idea of getting people together, maybe writing and producing a record, more like an American Rock record, you know R&B; and blues.
How do you go about selecting material for an album? I mean, how did you decide what to record in the first place.
Well, I wanted to do some of the newer things, and some of the older things, but I wanted to split it up over the live thing we’re releasing soon, and have some stuff on the DVD, and then some stuff on the album. There’s a bunch of material where some of it’s presented better in one format than another.
And how far along is the project?
All the basic tracks are done, and I’ve done all of the overdubs at the studio where we did the basics. I’m doing some more overdubs here at the barn, where we’re using this incredible live rig. It’s just amazing stuff, I wish you could really see it here.
And I think you had told me that you’re doing everything with tape, even the mixing.
Yes, it’s all recorded to tape, some of the stuff I’m doing here will be done digitally so we can send it back to the studio, but it will get put back on tape to mix.
And even edited on tape?
To the extent that you can edit things, yes. I’m really not a fan of the whole ProTools [a popular digital recording and editing software] thing. I really won’t get into here—it would take a whole other interview to talk about just how far away it’s taken us from the whole process of recording music.
Do you have any idea of when it will be released?
Um, no. But it couldn’t be too far in the future. I intend to bang out all the overdubs over the next couple of days, and then try to get thing mixed by the end of the month [April]. So, assuming that we get—well, I should say, we’re laboring under the misconception that there’s some kind of concept for the cover art [laughs], which is a generally dangerous proposition anyway, but it should be out soon.
Of course, the studio allows all sorts of tricks and techniques. Can we expect anything along those lines, such as you playing several tracks over yourself?
There’s a little bit along those lines, but for my personal taste, there’s a little bit more along the lines of “how can this bit be layered sonically to good effect?” There are some chord sounds I like, or there are some clusters on the guitar that by the time I’ve executed them, like a 5th and a 2nd, you’ve used up a lot of real estate, so occasionally one of those chords will get backed up with a nice 4th or something. But it’s more of a layering, maybe more like Jimmy Page in the studio where the two guitars are working together without taking up a whole bunch of room.
So it’s still more in the spirit of a live performance with the kind of texturing as opposed to some bigger production.
Right, it’s not a Steely Dan record.
Will there be any surprises in terms of material or personnel?
I don’t know yet. It depends on what happens with the rest of the overdubs and stuff. It’s sort of like a poker game, where you get dealt a bunch of stuff, a couple of shared cards, a couple of wild cards, you know, I’ll wind up with 9 cards in my hand but can only play 5. So insofar as all the cards haven’t been turned over yet, I can’t say more than that. In terms of personnel, I can tell you that Alphonso is playing bass on everything. In a rare fit of productivity [laughs] we laid everything down with him in one fell swoop!
Well, I know we’re all very anxious to hear it and hope the final bits of production fall into place soon. I wanted to touch on a few more technical things before we wrap up. First, I know that you’re constantly experimenting with electronics and new gear. For example, you’re using a somewhat different rig these days, in particular, an old Fender Bandmaster head. How did that come about?
Well, I’ve been carrying some JBL 15s [speakers] around for years. I like the way they sound for some stuff, I especially like the way they sound for the steel [lap steel guitar]. But I always had to use two of them because they were so fragile, and two was just too much. I mean they sound so good, but then when I lean on them, they just sounded like crap, too harsh. So I called Bill Krinard from Two-Rock, and told him what I just told you. He said, “wrong transformer, too much power.” You need one of those little Vibroverb transformers, like Fender made for that speaker. You know like a Single Showman or a Vibroverb. So I said, “OK, just find me a Fender amplifier and let’s put one together.” So we went out and grabbed a Bandmaster, and hunted around for a Vibroverb transformer, and stuck it in there. And it’s got the little cathode bias thing, so it’s low power and it’s got a 16 ohm transformer that matches up with those speakers pretty well.
So for a while I was using the two 15 inch JBLs, one on the Dumble with an 8 ohm jack, which lowered the power a bit, so it wouldn’t sound so yucky when I leaned on it, but then I started missing my 12 inch sound. So I got out my old Vox cabinet with the old Celestions in it, and I played back and forth between [the 15s and the 12s] and wound up liking the Bandmaster with the 12s. And that’s where it’s been ever since. It’s kind of a delicate setup. What I’m using is the Fender preamp–the much modified preamp, or using the Dumble in front of it. The Bandmaster by itself is an amazing amp. It’s just a little underpowered for the big clean thing at a gig. So the 50-watt Dumble with the 15s and the Bandmaster on the 12s, it’s all covered really nicely.
You also showed me a little box that you’re using in front of everything, something a lot like the Dumblelator that Howard Dumble made for effects.
It’s something else Bill [Krinard] made for me. It’s essentially a stereo impedance matching device. And I can use it for loops on the amplifier, but I mainly use it in front of everything. But the way it works is that there’s a little bit of input gain, then a cathode follower, then a pair of bright switches–I don’t think I’ve ever had to use them both at the same time. But you know how the bright switch has more or less effect as you turn the pot up or down—the higher you get it the less bright you get? Well just by juggling the input and output and the bright switches you can get exactly the amount of little sheen you want to delineate the thing. So basically what it ends up being is a sort of anti-fuzz, kind of a “clean box.” Just dials up the clean sound on a guitar really nicely, and you can roll off the volume control and stuff stays, it’s just a real pretty sound.
I can usually tell when you’re using the Bandmaster, it does sound a bit different from the Two Rocks.
Yeah, but I go back and forth a lot. If I’m trying to do something, if I go to the gig and say I want to accomplish “X” with the production and I listen to the tape that night, I’ll go, “yeah yeah, I got it.” But if I wait even till the next day, instead of hearing what I wanted to do, I hear all the stuff that I screwed up, and then I can’t listen to it and the tape goes on to a pile. I’ll get real disgusted and want to rebuild everything and want to start over. Then a year later I’ll pull out the tape and say, “Oh My God that’s great! How come I can’t get that sound anymore, what’s wrong with me? I’m so stupid!” So I’m just constantly chasing my tail with that stuff. It’s a really funny process.
The last thing I wanted to touch on is your recent work with intonation. I know this is a really big interest of yours right now and we’ve had some very long conversations about it. I wonder if there’s any way you can try to explain it in a way that’s not too technical?
OK, well, it’s a little tricky, but I’ll see if I can get through it in some kind of sensible way. What passes for music these days–and the theory behind it — it’s the theory of the intonation system the music is imbedded in. When you try and learn music now what you’re learning about is the interval space that’s created in our 12-note system, you know, the 12 tones on the piano.
So by “intonation” you’re referring to the actual pitch of the notes that sound, and by “the twelve-tone system” you’re talking about how over the last few hundred years we in the Europe and North America [i.e., most classical music and jazz] have come to divide the notes into twelve equal spaces over an octave.
Right, so here’s a C chord, here’s a D chord, blah, blah, blah. But that’s about the system that the music is rendered in, it’s not about how it’s received, how it’s heard. We actually hear a little differently than that. If you take a tonic or a root note (a single tone), and this is debatable to some extent, there’s maybe really 31 pitches that you might need to really intone all the harmonies in tune, they way they occur in nature [following the physics of vibrations], to really tune all the modes to that root note. For reasons that we really can’t get into now–historical, mathematical, mechanical with all the instruments and the technology available to build them—I mean, it would be ridiculous for every keyboard instrument to have 31 notes for every tonic—so we wound up with a system where the 12 notes that we use in our music aren’t really the notes, they just stand for the notes, sort of like a shorthand. So the keys on the piano or the frets on a guitar actually stand for 3 or 4 other notes.
And our mental organization of these things is such that our brain recognizes the representation and sort of fills in the rest. Like, if I drew a little stick figure with chalk of a human female, it would be a totally different thing than having your old lady sit on your lap. The actual harmony, that’s the reality, that’s being with your gal. The pitches on the 12-tone keyboard are kind of like the stick figures. You, know you’d see a little chalk ‘W’ and you say, “that’s a bird.”
And the brain is really inferring the fuller form as best it can.
Yeah, the brain goes, “Bird,” but of course it’s just a little ‘W’ on the sidewalk drawn in chalk.
But the 12 tone system has advantages, right?
The 12 tone thing is cool because it allows this modulating chromaticism which gives us all the beautiful jazz harmony and modern classical music and there’s nothing wrong with that—it’s great. It’s just that there’s a lot of music that we resonate with that doesn’t really need the modulating flexibility of the 12-tone system and is better rendered closer to what’s called “just-intonation” [the notes sounding in accord with their natural physics rather than the 12-tone system] So to the extent that I try to stay aware of it, I try and push what I play in the direction of being more in tune with how we hear as human beings as opposed to just letting it sit in that 12 tone modulating chromaticism thing
How would all this translate in terms of your playing?
When you study where those harmonies really are, you realize there’s maybe some moves on the guitar, you know some guitaristic devices like slurring or bending, that might be taking you a little further away from the note you want, or maybe a little closer to the note you want and you start organizing your playing being aware that the fretted version—the stick figure version—is gonna be a little sharp, so you want to try to play that note a little flat. So you’re not gonna use a certain kind of vibrato to intone that note because it would be too big an interval to the root or maybe an other style of vibrato would bring it closer to the right note. And the closer you can get it to the actual harmony, the happier it sounds—it just sounds a little better, the further you get it from the stick figure thing.
Could the average person hear the difference in something you’d play with SKB?
When the harmony is properly rendered? The harmonies properly rendered make the melody a succession of feeling states rather than a succession of intervals. When you get the stuff in tune, you feel it, you really feel it! It’s that feeling of music and the feeling it brings is a little more truly rendered in that intonation.
So this is really what Mathieu is talking about in his book [Harmonic Experience]—that we’re sort of built to receive or feel certain tones and harmonies innately—that our bodies, our brains, our neurology, etc. are more in tune with this kind of intonation?
Yep. Exactly. If you go and look for some just-intonation music and you listen to some music that contains something other than just the 12-tone thing, you know, when you have a bunch of horns and piano and bass playing together you’re going to have something other than the 12-tone tempered tuning. You know what I listened to recently where the entire spectrum of intonation is just there intact in such a marvelously accessible way? Almost anything by the Band–the horn arrangements, the intonation of the horns is unbelievable, and with the keys and the vocals, now that is some really rich stuff. I swear people are gonna listen to that stuff a hundred years from now and say, “these guys were geniuses.” So check it out, it feels so good.
You’ve also mentioned in the past that blues players, especially the older steel slide guys, like Lightning Hopkins play much more closely to that natural rendered intonation. Do you think they were aware of it, or is it just what they heard?
It’s what they heard. It’s what people really hear. And when you have sensitive and gifted artists really hooked up to their thing–what they’re hooking up to is what they hear, more than the modulating chromaticism of the twelve tone thing.
And in terms of this whole idea of this natural rendering, we’re not just talking about changing the 12 tones we’re used to hearing in the West so that they’re closer to those natural tones. We’re also talking about the consequences for how harmonies and even melodies might go together differently under the natural system, right?
Yeah, but it’s a little deep to get into here, especially for people reading this who aren’t well-trained musicians. [Steve has drawn diagrams for me, which look kind of like a complex grid or matrix of triangles and rhombuses, which represent how the notes we know in the West relate to one another using this system.] And it’s a slap in the face for most trained musicians to realize all this—I know it was for me. But it’s perfectly natural for people listening to like one thing better than another thing and not know why. I think it’s partially because of this whole intonation thing. It goes a long way to explaining why people enjoy good singing, because good singing is often naturally in good tune in this really special way.
Well, I’m sure you need to get back to the album. Do you have any last thoughts before we go?
Just I’d just encourage people reading this, if they’re musicians, to do their best to look beyond some of the currently available stuff and try to learn some of the history of where our music comes from. Go back at least as far as Pythagoras, ‘cos that was a beautiful moment if ever there was one. And for the people that are listening, the whole experience of listening to music is so enriching, don’t be afraid to go out and look for new stuff, ‘cos there’s such great music out there all the time. And don’t lament the current output of crap like it’s representative of what music can really offer—don’t confuse the entertainment part with the real enjoyment.
The Steve Kimock Band will be touring throughout North America and Japan this summer. For further information on the band, including biographies, sound clips, and merchandise, please visit kimock.com.
Mike Babyak has been a student and collaborator with Steve Kimock since they were teenagers in Bethlehem, PA. He is a clinical psychologist on the faculty of Duke University Medical Center. He also performs with several of his own music projects, an acoustic duet called Howling Dog Theory, and an electric trio called Shape Shifters. You can reach him at triplefret@triplefret.com.
