A Conversation with John Kruth (continued)

PM: So what about this album that you're working on now? What is that?

JK: In a way it's--well, Marylyn's family is Croatian, and we go to Croatia every summer. And her uncle is the zookeeper of Split.

PM: The zookeeper of what?

JK: Split, that's the name of the town that we go to.

PM: How do you spell that?

JK: Like split, daddy-o.

PM: [laughs]

JK: The new album is called Splitsville.

PM: [laughs]

JK: Split is this absolutely beautiful little city right on the Adriatic coast.

PM: Wow.

JK: And the Diocletian Palace is there. And Diocletian was a Roman emperor who was an exile in Croatia. And he built a palace there. In fact, the cover photograph of the album was taken in 1968--this might be too much information, I don't know--but the album cover photograph was taken in 1968. If you remember, there were riots busting out everywhere, in Newark--and it was the year that Martin Luther King was shot, there were riots all over America. The tanks were pulling into Prague. There were riots in France. And a guy named Pave Dulcic was a conceptual artist. He was like an avant-garde conceptual artist in Split at the time. And his response to everything was to go paint the Diocletian Palace Square red in the middle of the night.

PM: Wow.

JK: So he and a couple of friends, with a couple of bottles of wine and a couple of gallons of paint went and painted the Square red. And what happened, of course, is that this was Yugoslavia, under Tito, and so they came and they dragged him away, and they beat him with clubs, and they locked him up in jail, and by the time they released him he was never the same. And he died soon of that. And I wrote a very Billy Bragg electric proletariat rock song, "The Ballad of Pave Dulcic," and I recorded it there last summer, along with a handful of other songs. All of the songs are about Croatia, or inspired by Croatia on one level or another. And there are 15 songs, from very sweet, gentle, eastern European waltzes, to a very Tom Waits-ian kind of song about "I Got A Bottle Of Rakajia," and rakajia is like homemade moonshine. So there's all kinds of stuff on there. I'm just actually finishing it up now. Two members of Camper Van, my old pals, Victor Krummenacher and Jonathan Segel have done some overdubs on it, along with Matt Darriau from the Klezmatics playing clarinet and bagpipe.

PM: And will this come out also on the Crustacean label?

JK: Probably, most likely. I was just talking with them today, but it's going to come out in Croatia first this summer. We're just finishing it up, and I'm going to go over to Croatia. And boy, I don't even know how to spell Mestrovic's name for you. There was a famous sculptor there, his name was Mestrovic--I could ask Marylyn--I could send you the spelling. But I'm going to play a concert at Mestrovic's Villa, which is right on the Adriatic. It is so gorgeous. And Mestrovic is like the most famous sculptor of the--well, one of two or three of the most famous sculptors of the 20th century that came out of Yugoslavia. So there's this incredible villa right by the Adriatic. And I'm going to play a concert there, and we're going to have a CD release party. And Croatia Records is going to distribute it around Eastern Europe for me.

PM: Unbelievable.

JK: Yeah. And I've worked with some Bosnian gypsies over there. And the guitar player, I could send you his name. I can't remember it off the top of my head. He was in Metak, who were like the Led Zeppelin of Eastern Europe. This guy is like the Jimmy Page of Yugoslavia. He just came in tenth in a world competition for finger-style guitar. And he came down--the guy who produced the album, his name is simple, his name is Pipo. He is like the folk rock producer of Croatia. He produces a guy named Oliver. And Oliver is huge, enormous. Oliver is like Bob Dylan and what's his name, Neil Diamond, rolled into one.

And then there's another guy named Giobanni. Giobanni was the lead singer of Metak and guys from Sting's band play with him. He's kind of like somewhere between Robert Plant and Sting, or something, of Eastern Europe. So he's the guy that produced my session for me. And he brought in this guitar player. He said, "Don't worry, you don't have to pay him. He doesn't need any money. He just lives out on an island by himself, and he has money, and he'll only play on the album if he likes the music." And he came in and he kind of looked around with his face like "hmmm," like he wasn't too impressed with anything. Then he started to listen to the songs, and he told me that nobody wrote those kind of songs in Croatia. And he said, "I'll play on the record."

[laughter]

JK: So it was a really interesting experience, because I could hardly speak to these guys. They didn't know English very well at all. In fact, an engineer almost erased a great track because he couldn't understand what I was telling him.

PM: Wow.

JK: So it was really a wild way to work. And now I'm just going to finish up those tracks, and I'm pretty sure Crustacean is going to put out the Croatian album, which is called Splitsville. There's a song on there called "The Lone Croatian General." I met this one general that was the only general that was not called in by the Hague. And that's his story. I told his story on the album. And it was just with the banjo. And they had never seen a banjo before. They had maybe heard one once.

But it's really an odd mixture of Croatian imagery and poetry--all the lyrics are all like inspired by Croatia. And most of the music--the music is either American country Appalachian kind of style, like Appalachian kind of folk, very simple, on banjo and mandolin, because that's what I had with me, that's what I was traveling with. Or it's highly eastern European kind of Italian Greek, Jewish, Croatian, of that geographical spirit.

PM: Wow.

JK: So that's what's happening. [laughs]     continue

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