Mike Gordon - Deep Thoughts

Date: 14 Mar 2003 05:49:08 GMT
Newsgroups: rec.music.phish
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Below is a transcription of the interview/article
from Mike's Feb 2003 Bass Player cover story.
Mike Gordon - Deep Thoughts
February 1, 2003 - Bass Player
By Chris Jisi
Mike Gordon has long been a low-frequency philosopher, having kept journals on
his craft since Phish's early Vermont days. But never have his thoughts been as
loud and clear as they are at present, thanks to the fruition of three projects
he has juggled over the past two years. In 2001, while the hugely successful
jam band was on sabbatical, Gordon and 22 other top bassists joined Gov't
Mule's Warren Haynes and Matt Abts for The Deep End, Vol. 1 & 2, a
quasi-tribute to the late Mule bassman Allen Woody. (The CDs' titles were taken
from a lyric Gordon wrote on his track, "The Banks of the Deep End.") Mike
filmed the sessions, and his DVD/video Rising Low was released last fall. The
88-minute documentary probes Woody's life and the making of the CDs, presents
an inside peek at each participating bassist, and expounds on bass in general.
Gordon's celluloid journey has had an equally engaging effect on his own
playing. During his Phish-out-of-water period, Mike joined forces with acoustic
guitar legend Leo Kottke to write and record Clone. Kottke usually performs
solo, and teaming two such offbeat personalities in a duo setting was a
pleasant surprise. Over the disc's intimate 14 tracks and on a subsequent
six-week mini-tour, the pair exuded the warmth and sizzle of a fireplace.
Sparks also flew at a summer reunion for Gordon and his Phish-mates-guitarist
Trey Anastasio, drummer Jon "Fish" Fishman, and keyboardist Page McConnell.
While rolling tape in Anastasio's barn, the quartet ended up with 12 primal,
potent tracks that capture Phish's driving, exploratory style at its best; the
tunes became Phish's latest CD, Round Room. Shortly before the group's December
appearance on Saturday Night Live-followed by a New Year's Eve show at Madison
Square Garden and the start of a winter U.S. tour-we asked Mike about how all
three projects have shaped his bass perspective.
What did you learn from making Rising Low?
Much of it had to do with themes I'd been contemplating all along, but what
took me by surprise personally, while driving home a point I already knew, was
the restraint shown by all of the great players involved. There was no display
of egos or flashy, look-at-me overplaying. They all had the maturity and
refinement to serve the song; they had learned in their careers that just doing
what's necessary for the song results in a deeper experience. Being around
those players was a period of growth for me, but it was more subtle and
spiritual, as opposed to copping licks or techniques. I tried copping some
things, though; I transcribed Oteil Burbridge's incredible version of "Amazing
Grace," I wrote down the names of Larry Graham's vintage effects, and I was
mesmerized by John Entwistle's three-finger technique.
One of the film's themes was the essence of bass playing. What did you
discover?
I looked at what attracts people to bass, how it moves people-the effect of the
vibrations on the body, mind, and spirit. I wanted to figure out how the mind
and soul work while you're playing; can you make decisions for emotional and
intellectual reasons simultaneously? But I arrived at a broader question that
used bass playing as an example: As an artist, what does it take to achieve
greatness? I posed the question to all the bassists, and I developed a
three-level theory of the steps required. The first step is being inspired by
what's already out there in a wide variety of musical styles. The second step
is to transcend those influences, find your own voice, and express it through
your instrument and craft. The third step is to transcend your own voice and
tap into the moment-the sort of universal vibration-and let it flow through you
in a deeper, almost spiritual way. You become a conduit, as so many great
musicians speak about. I've since realized there are aspects of greatness I
didn't get to cover in Rising Low, including confidence, passion, luck, talent,
focus, timing, and attitude.
How did you play to the environment in the scene where you're standing with
your bass in Manhattan traffic?
I tried to get to that third level by opening myself up and just playing; a
little pattern came to me, and it felt right based on what I was tuned in to. I
was trying to show a two-sided concept: At first, I'm playing to the mood and
rhythm of what's going on around me, so the environment is playing me. Then the
traffic slows down at the red light and my bass line gets slower, and the scene
changes to a park. So the flipside is, I played something that caused the
surroundings to react and change. The point is once you learn to get in tune
with the environment you're in, the environment will react to you as well. An
example is when you're jamming and you play a note that introduces a new
tonality; suddenly everyone else shifts to a new space and color because of
that note. My theory is that if your playing conjures up a mood or place for
you, the best thing you can do for that bass line is to bask in it and think
only about that place-not the actual notes.
After you finished Rising Low you entered a fertile writing period.
I wanted to make music rather than talk about it, so I got a little office in
downtown Manhattan's Woolworth Building. I brought my Languedoc semi-acoustic
5-string, a chair, a hard-disk recorder with built-in drum pads, a microphone,
a pile of lyrics from my friend Joe Lintz, and some of my own ideas. My goal
was to go in each day for an hour or two and write. I came up with about 50
songs or song ideas that I developed for the upcoming soundtrack to my film
Outside Out, for the Phish album, and for the Leo Kottke album.
How did you get together with Leo?
I had been a fan since 1983, and I felt I could get along with him. In '99 I
bought one of his albums [1971's 6- and 12-String Guitar, Rhino], and for fun I
recorded a bass line-actually more of a duet part-to "The Driving of the Year
Nail," and I gave it to him. He called me and said he liked it, we made plans
to get together, and about a year later we went to Trey's barn to play. It took
us a while to click, but we finally hit on this one little polyrhythm that
became the intro riff on the track "June." From that point everything jelled.
We each got a half-dozen tunes together and worked them up, along with two
covers. We recorded Clone over three sessions in Burbank.
What basses did you use, and how did you record them?
I played my Modulus 5 with a pick, except on "Arko" and "With"; I used a custom
National Reso-Phonic 4-string acoustic bass guitar that was a gift from my
assistant, Jared Slomoff. I recorded both basses direct-the National has a
piezo pickup-through an Avalon U5 preamp/DI, and we also miked an Ampeg B-15 or
an old Fender amp the studio had. David Z, the mix engineer, favored the direct
sounds, and he added Aphex Big Bottom on every track. Leo and I recorded
together, and he cut his vocals while we were playing. I overdubbed my vocals,
some percussion, piano, and my guitar solo on "Fugitive."
What is it like playing in a duo with Leo?
Eye-opening. At first I found that if I played a standard-type bass line, it
could make what he was doing sound cliche because it defined it too much. Leo
comes up with his amazing parts on the spot, and he doesn't have the technical
training to tell you what he's playing, so it was even more challenging. I
found that acceptance and not thinking saved the day. As soon as I stopped
worrying about what I should be playing and accepted what I was playing, we'd
get into a flow of notes and scales. We developed a sort of counterpoint. Not
having drums and keyboards enabled me to let loose and fill more space, but at
the same time I'd take on the timekeeping duties when needed.
You can really hear the counterpoint on "Disco," "June," "The Collins Missile,"
and "Whip."
"Disco" was a solo piece Leo had; when we worked it out at his Minneapolis
apartment, I started getting into it and dancing up and down the neck. For
"June," which came out of a jam, the idea was to take turns stretching while
the other person held down a part. I wrote my "Missile" and "Whip" parts at the
Woolworth Building and then adapted them to what Leo came up with.
On tracks like "Car Carrier Blues," "Pizza Towers," "Fugitive," and "Te Veo"
you fill more of a traditional role.
Some songs needed to be pared down because that's what it took to make them
happen in the studio. But even on our mini-tour my parts ran the gamut from
minimal to wide open. Plus we worked up a lot of new covers as we went along.
What's the state of your technique these days?
I've been playing almost exclusively with a pick for a few years now, except
for a bit of slapping. When I took away the fingerstyle side I realized there
are certain kinds of grooves, ghost-notes, and string-crossing moves that I
could only approximate with a pick, but I'm always working on getting better at
it. I like the pick's sound and attack, and I wanted to focus on one tone so
our soundman can always dial me in. I also like that it's uncool to the jazz
and funk people-I always go against the grain, ever the outsider.
Who are your pick influences, and what's your approach?
I'm influenced by the great bluegrass-guitar flatpickers, like Tony Rice, Doc
Watson, and Clarence White, and I'm hip to the great pick bassists, like Paul
McCartney, Phil Lesh, Joe Osborn, Bobby Vega, Steve Swallow, and Anthony
Jackson. I use a heavy nylon pick and strike the strings in between my pickups
using up-and-down wrist strokes. I don't care for the glassy, grungy, top-end
sound some players get. I prefer a round, almost upright sound, so I do a lot
of muting with my right palm and left fingers. I've been a long-note guy in the
past, but my style is constantly morphing. Right now I'm into shorter notes.
Let's talk about the new Phish album. How many songs from your Woolworth
Building writing sessions ended up on Round Room?
I brought in about 21 songs, and we weeded them down to eight and learned them
all. Two of them, "Mock Song" and the title track, made it onto the album.
Was there a concept for the disc?
We didn't even really know we were making the disc. We spent nine days learning
22 songs and then four days recording demos with the idea of re-recording the
songs later. But we ended up liking the demo versions, so we did two more days
of overdubbing, and that was the album. The concept-and it almost sounds
cliche-was to learn how to play with live energy in the studio. We recorded at
Trey's barn with everyone in the same room with the API sound board, so it
sounds very raw. We realized there's nothing like the chemistry of 17 years of
playing together, and we were able to catch that jubilant, relaxed, easy
feeling right at the moment of conception. At one point Trey said it was some
of the greatest music we had ever made, and that it would be a good album if we
didn't ruin it by spending too much time on it. I think it captures the
psychedelic, free-ranging vibe of our early stuff, but with more personal,
heartfelt lyrics.
Did you do any overdubbing?
Very little. I fixed a few wrong notes and downbeats that flammed with the kick
drum, but I didn't change any bass lines. That's quite a contrast to early
Phish albums, where I would go in and replace most of the bass parts. We
overdubbed some of the vocals and added some acoustic guitar and percussion,
but sparingly-it's very much how it sounded in the barn.
What gear did you use?
I played my Modulus 5 with a pick all the way through. It was so casual that I
just plugged into whatever bass amp was set up for rehearsals. I believe it was
an old 18" cabinet I had built years ago, with an SWR 4x10 on top and an Ampeg
SVT-4PRO head. We miked both cabinets and I went direct, though I'm not sure
how. I just told the engineer I wanted some bite. I didn't really have time to
go back and work on my sound, and in keeping with the spirit of the album I
didn't want to impose, so I left it alone. It came out sounding real good.
"Pebbles and Marbles," "Walls of the Cave," and "Waves" are classic Phish
epics, with numerous sections and trippy jams.
The "Pebbles" jam section sounded un-grounded at times, so I was a little upset
with my groove. But Trey and Page overdubbed additional guitar and keyboard to
give it even more of a wash and turn it into an ambient, thick, flowing jam,
and in that context the bass sounds fine to me. "Walls" has a timelessness to
it; I like the minor tonality and the medium tempo. My heart sinks when I hear
it. The jam is in B and I tried to work in my open B string, although I didn't
end up using it as much as I intended. "Waves" is my favorite song on the
album. It's floaty, like the title, and Fish's ride cymbal is like a dream
riding on top of it all. The jam section is us at our best; I remember at one
point my only conscious thought was that it was like being on a wave.
By contrast, "Anything but Me," "Mexican Cousin," "All of These Dreams,"
"Friday," and "Thunderhead" are relatively simple.
Trey really wanted the album to be about the vocals; he wanted us to listen to
the singing and the lyrics and play in support of them. "Anything" is a
shuffle-in-three feel, which we're doing more of now-I think we avoided those
early on because they were associated with the Dead [laughs]. "Cousin" is a
silly song about tequila. "Dreams" has a gospel-bluegrass-country vibe, with
the bass serving the song. "Friday" is simple and melancholy. The verse vocals
have only bass behind them to further expose them. A similar thing happens in
the "Thunderhead" verses: I reached up high to play a sort of unison with the
vocals. You can hear me hunting for the notes the first time, and then I
embellish the melody the next two times.
How did you put together "Round Room"?
I wrote it in my Woolworth office. The bass line is in nine but the melody is
in four, so the vocals sort of wait for the bass line to catch up. The guys had
some trouble figuring out how to sing it at first. We also found there were too
many rhythms going and we needed an anchor to make it more danceable, so we
added a King Sunny Ade-like pounding kick drum beat to match the vocals in
four, while the percussion stays in nine. The whole piece is inspired by West
African music and musicians like Ade and [guitarist] Diblo Dibala and his band,
Loketo.
"Seven Below" showcases the new, improved groove aesthetic between you and
Fish.
That has some funkiness-a little Medeski Martin & Wood vibe. In addition to my
own current groove-awareness phase, Fish has come a long way, compared to the
non-traditional way we both approached our instruments 17 years ago. There was
the period when the band was playing so much odd-time stuff that we realized we
couldn't play a simple shuffle, so we spent all our soundchecks playing
straight blues. But really, the groove focus for Fish and I began six or seven
years ago. We had this video of James Brown performing on an old TV show, and
we would watch it every day on the bus. Gradually we got much better at locking
the bass and kick drum, and it's so much more powerful to have that aspect,
even if you don't always use it. Fish has big ears and he can tune into and
follow anyone, but now he has the firm grounding, too.
My ultimate goal as a bass player is to be both solid and melodic. The best
bassists do that, like Phil Lesh-he has this perfect synthesis of groove and
melody going at the same time.
During the closing jam section of "Seven Below" the key morphs from C, where it
had been all along, to F, and then you introduce D from out of nowhere.
[Laughs.] That's typical. Trey recently told me that while listening to old
tapes, he realized many of our unexpected peak moments could be traced to a
change in the bass line a few minutes before the peak happened. For me, a cool
thing about the band is our ability to not just improvise but to go places
together by coming up with chord progressions on the spot or changing the tonal
center. Even on the groove side, I like to know where the one is because it
gives me confidence-but it's also cool to be unsure and disoriented for a
moment, because it makes me feel like I'm on an adventure. I like anything that
can get me into that dream state of being untethered. It's amazing what there
is outside the box when you are willing to discover it.
What's the story behind "Mock Song"?
I got new studio gear in my apartment, and my assistant and I decided to write
and record a song to try it all out-so it's a "mock song," not a "real" song.
Jared played drums, I played the other instruments, and the band ended up
really liking it. When I was reading the lyrics to the second verse it was dark
in the studio and I didn't have my glasses, so I screwed up some of the words,
but everyone said, "Don't you dare change that!" Later, Trey sang this other
string of words he just made up on the spot-total gibberish. The bass line is
like a big, sparse sub-hook that I played in two different octaves.
"46 Days" casts you in a new bass light.
That's our rock song; I don't think we have anything quite like it on any
previous album. Everybody was taking a break or eating, and Fish sat down and
started whacking out this beat for one of Trey's tunes. I picked up my bass and
thought to myself, I'm going to lean back and play a deeper, grittier, looser
bass line than I normally would-I'm just going to be a different character for
a minute. Everyone dug what we were doing, and they came back to their
instruments and rolled tape. The track has a thrashing rawness to it. I had
Trey's demo bass part in mind, but you can definitely hear the Rising Low
influence. There's some John Entwistle and Allen Woody in there.
What can you say about your next CD, the soundtrack of your film Outside Out?
The disc is called Inside In, and it will be released in early spring. I play
all the basses and guitars, plus some keyboards; the basic band is [drummer]
Russ Lawton from Trey's solo band, James Harvey on piano, and Gordon Stone on
pedal steel. Buddy Cage plays pedal steel on a few tracks, and the other guests
are banjoist Bela Fleck, fiddler Vassar Clements, and Fish and Gabe
Jarrett-Keith Jarrett's son-on drums. We took the movie's music, which I
recorded in 1999-songs in some cases, score music including bass-and-drum jams
in others-and made them into songs with verses and choruses, as well as some
instrumentals. It has a sort of funky country vibe with pedal steel as the main
voice. Malcolm Burn mixed it. It's really listenable and one of my favorite
projects I've done.
How do you relate your filmmaking skills to bass playing?
For me it has always been about visualization. I think visually when I play;
I'm either imagining fretboard patterns or scenes that the music is conjuring
up. So capturing visions on film made perfect sense for me. When I'm shooting
or editing a film and working with visualizations, it's the same kind of
riffing that happens on bass, where I visualize sections of a song and edit my
part accordingly. The merging of the two is fascinating. In Outside Out I had
all these jammed cues that I'd try with a scene, and I found that if the music
was slower it made the scene seem to go slower, and vice versa. It's pretty
broadly accepted in the film world that sound, and music in particular, is 99
percent of a scene's emotion. What you see is more like the intellectual
information that the brain takes in, but the sound is the emotion. That's a
connection I want to continue to pursue in all mediums.
--
<phish archive note: There is also a section about Mike's bass gear, and a few
lessons. They are not included here, but are available on the website,
http://www.phisharchive.com/articles/2003/mikecover.shtml, along with
photographs from the magazine.
___
The Definitive Phishtorical Experience
www.phisharchive.com
"..I don't think that I was expecting a lie.." - Trey Anastasio