A CONVERSATION WITH STEVE KIMOCK (continued)
SK: Yeah. It certainly would. I mean, it's one part of the puzzle. You have to figure out a way to distribute it. And you've got to promote it, and you've got to have the band go out and tour behind it. And you need to get all the media stuff working for you, and everything like that. So if it were just a question of getting into the studio to make it happen...
PM: Or just making a record.
SK: Just making a record, I think that's probably the easy part.
PM: It is the easy part.
SK: Yeah, the easy part of making a record is making a record. The hard part is getting a lot of people to buy it. But in the current music business, the state that it's in, I don't know that you can sell an awful lot of records of the kind of record that I would most likely make. I think it would just be too specific, you know, for...that's not the right word. Not specific enough, in a marketing sense, is probably the problem. I mean, as you said when we started, my stuff has sort of gotten lumped into this jamband thing.
PM: Right.
SK: Something tells me that there's a lot of people that are into that jamband scene that might not go, "Oh, that's it." I get the impression that people don't think you've got a legitimate jamband unless the guys are all, you know, twenty-something, and living in a station wagon. You know what I mean?
PM: Yeah.
SK: Like, "Oh, that's not a jamband. Look, they've got actual players." [laughs] And stuff like that. Is that weird?
PM: Well, it's no weirder than the situation that really exists. But I think, on the other hand, a lot of the jamband audience, what they're really looking for is, "Hey, is somebody going to improvise, and like really blow my mind?" It's like that's what jam means in its highest sense, is like, "Wow, somebody's like going to play something like really free, and just get out there and, you know, blow it out their ass? Wow! I want to see that go down!" And you know, there aren't that many in the jamband crowd, whoever that is, that are going to do that. But SKB is certainly going to do that. They'll present a tune, you know, it'll have a head, and then it's completely up for grabs at that point. It's just like, "Well, okay, you're up. What do you got?"
SK: Off to the races.
PM: The upside of the jamband label is, if it brings new ears to what you're doing, then so be it. Otherwise, how do the young hipsters looking for cool new music find new bands? There's not really names for what a lot of them do, you know, for what Galactic does or Steve Kimock does, or...
SK: Okay. Now, that's a simple question. You know, how you find new bands that you like is you support live music.
PM: Yeah.
SK: You take your twenty bucks, and you get your ass out of the house, and you go down to the club, and you plunk your money down, and you check it out. And that's how you do it. There really isn't another way to know what you're going to like. Because, ultimately, good music is the feeling that you get when you're experiencing good music, which is going to be different things for you at different times in your life. It's going to be different things for different people. I mean, that's the experience that I want to have. That's the experience that I'm trying to sell, if I'm trying to sell them anything, is that if you resonate with this, if this makes you feel like good music makes you feel, then, there you go.
If not, don't stop looking [laughs], please. You know, take your twenty bucks somewhere else, and go and have that experience of good music, because it's happening out there, lots more. It seems like there's more people playing now, playing more what they want to play, than any other time. I don't think that the scene, the musicians that are playing out on the road today, or the people that are going to support them, and the top level of the music industry could be any further apart.
PM: Right.
SK: So you're probably not going to get that authentic experience of really having some good music without going independent; you know, browsing through the new releases at Wherehouse, or something.
PM: Yeah. As narrow as the charts have become, the off-the-chart offerings have become a lot wider. I agree, yeah, there's a large number of great acts on the road.
SK: I mean, for crying out loud, if you just like hearing some good music and seeing somebody play really well, you know, go see Mr. Dave. Go see Dave Lindley. [laughs] If you want to hear some good guitar playing, you know? Hopefully, he's doing well.
PM: Do you listen to any ethnic or world music these days?
SK: Well, I still listen to a lot of Indian music, North and South, some classical, and some of the more popular stuff. There's some European/African popular music that happens in Europe that I think is really good. And I've always been a big fan of the High Life stuff, the African stuff, especially the funky stuff from the sixties. I love the guitars. I love that old guitar sound they had. And other styles, like Brazilian music.
PM: Yeah.
SK: There's Cuban music. There's all these styles that get represented in American music somehow. It seems like there's great music on every continent, and on every island, and we get a little bit of it. There's a great Hawaiian tradition, certainly. Its influence is right here with my ukulele and my steel guitar and stuff like that. That figures into it.
PM: You seem to have hit a new level of...let's call it nomadic stability, since you got married to Jennifer. Do you agree?
SK: That's a nice way to put it. We travel a lot. And it's not something that I used to do a lot. So it's really, really fun for me. She grew up traveling, having family in the States and family in Europe. And so she doesn't think anything of just hopping up at the drop of the hat and zipping off somewhere, you know. And so it's fun. We travel so much now with the band that I think that's good for me. Because I was living...you know how I dealt with my stuff for years, I sort of locked myself in a room. So I was locked in a room for forty years. Now I travel [laughs], thank God.
PM: We've talked about ways that the next album might get cut, and there are two SKB live records out now. I don't think we covered exactly the kind of record that if you had your druthers, you'd like to make.
SK: Oh, gee, another giant question. Because it's...I don't want to make one record. I'd like to make a record without playing guitar [laughs], you know?
PM: Really?
SK: Sure. I'd like to make a record just playing steel and ukelele and autoharp or something, and making some sounds and doing some stuff. And I'd like to do a record just... Okay, one of my favorite records of all time was that Crosby, Stills & Nash Deja Vu thing, you know, great songs, great songwriting, great guitar sounds. There's good guitar on that record. I'd like to make a record like that, kind of like the folk, folk rock, kind of song.
I'd also like to do more records of just improvisational kind of forms. There's a basic shape to improvised music, where there's this little gathering of energy, and it sort of ramps up to some sort of climax, and it ramps down quite a bit more quickly. But there's a general shape to it, you know.
PM: Sure.
SK: And part of my continued push in the small band improvisation thing was to create different forms for improvisation than just that same sort of organic ramp up, climax, falling off kind of shape, which seems to characterize most of it. I'd like to do a record that has some other kinds of improvisational forms. So there's a bunch of records that I'd like to make. There's not just one that, you know, would represent what I think I might be able to offer.
PM: I know you like to talk technically, and there's a lot of people that will look in on the interview that want to hear about the technical side of your gig. Why don't we talk a minute about your guitars de jour, and how you're setting them up. So let's get into what you're playing these days.
SK: Well, I still like playing lots of different guitars. I always wondered if I would get to a point where I just sort of liked one and stayed with it. And there are nights where I'll play a lot of the show on one guitar, but it's rare. I still like having some basic construction philosophy differences between the guitars.
I like to have a long scale guitar with heavy strings with weak pickups, right? So I own a white Stratocaster, so I've got a punchy, kind of clear sound. Set of .012's, little lipstick tube pickups stuck way down in the pick guard -- not a lot of output, but able to receive a lot of right-hand velocity. I can just whack away at it and it sounds cool.
But then one might need a long scale guitar with light strings and Humbuckers, so I have two Stratocasters. I have one with the old Fender Humbuckers on it, like these -- you know, the Thinline Tellies, right, with the maple neck, strung with .011's, so I can kind of push that around a little bit -- a totally different instrument. A totally different balance and resistances, totally different output, treats the amp differently. A totally different thing, but a Stratocaster, but not the regular Stratocaster pickups.
And then the same thing with the Gibson, with the shorter scale. I have a guitar with the weaker pickups with the flat wounds on it, and one with the Humbuckers and the light strings. So I just like having some kind of variety of guitars to play.
The Explorer that I used to play when we were playing together, I still have. I still play that all the time. I have two of them. I only bring one on the road. The last time I did a gig in town, I sat in with Bill Kreutzman's band and played the other Explorer, so that was fun.
PM: The other Explorer, what color is it? Is that also brown?
SK: It's also brown, yes. Mahogany.
PM: Is it also a Charles LoBue guitar?
SK: It's also a LoBue. Two of the four LoBues are in my possession.
PM: Wow!
SK: One of the other ones, some fan bought, and brought to a gig years ago. I think he bought it from Rick Derringer, the Corina one, the one that was on the cover of Guitar Player magazine. Number four, I've heard rumors that Gibson had it in Nashville.
PM: Oh, I could certainly look into that for you. I have friends who work there.
SK: Yeah, say, "You ever hear of that LoBue Explorer?" See if they know where it is. It's still, you know, just a charmed guitar, always has been. So, a couple of Stratocasters. I have two instruments, one that I bring on the road, and one that doesn't go on the road very much, made by my friend Tom Cerletti, who is an apprentice of Ribbecke, a great, great archtop builder. And he built me a beautiful archtop guitar, electric, and a beautiful solid body, one that has all the mother of pearl. The fingerboard is all pearl and abalone. It's beautiful.
PM: Where does Cerletti make his guitars?
SK: Healdsburg. [Northern CA] He's a local. And that guitar's got a lot of attitude. All these guitars that I kept have enough attitude that I have to go to them, because I'm not trying to get the guitar to work for me. I kind of go to it and ask, "What will you allow me?" [laughs] And then kind of go with that.
And I have that Cripes. He's the guy that was making guitars for Jerry Garcia towards the end of his career.
PM: And what's that like? What kind of guitar is that?
SK: That's totally different than the rest of them. It's a Stratocaster scale length. I've got three of those Harmonic Design Z-90s in it, great pickups. It's got a loop in it between the pickups and the output, so I can insert stuff between the pickups and the volume control, like a Mutron Octave Divider, stuff that likes to see a constant level. It just sees the pickup level, and then the guitar's volume becomes a post effect master, basically. But that's a neck-through guitar, birds-eye teak. It's fancy, kind of heavy, not my normal thing. My normal thing is not laminated. I like, oh, one nice big piece of ash, that's fine, one nice piece of mahogany, that's fine. But I've got lots of guitars. I play some bottleneck on the old Supro Ozark. I bring that to every gig. I've got a couple of Fender Stringmaster double-six steels, that I'll bring and play some steel on. I bring the Vega.
PM: Still playing the Vega?
SK: Pretty much everywhere I go, it's sitting right there.
PM: God, what a great old guitar that is.
SK: The Vega is kind of charmed. You have to play it really, really hard to get anything to come out, but then it just sounds so nice. The guitar for me is so personal, you know, it's hard to know much about the guitar or the player, other than that's a very personal choice that they like that instrument. You know, it doesn't really tell you a whole lot about the instrument or the guy. continue
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