The deaths last year of Keith Emerson and Greg Lake, who were two thirds of the progressive rock power trio Emerson, Lake and Palmer, elicited a great deal of renewed attention in the mainstream media for their once extremely popular but frequently maligned synthesis of rock and classical music. ELP’s grandiose and virtuosic performances—as well as those of other popular “prog” outfits such as Pink Floyd, Genesis, and Yes—reflected the zeitgeist of the 1970s—a time when rock went from being the soundtrack of teenage rebellion to something far more ambitious and, to its detractors, unbearably self-indulgent. But while so-called progressive rock was an attempt to create a music that went far beyond the trappings of rock, there were other even more ambitious musicians working within the rubric of progressive rock that wanted to take that music even further—exploring not just the structures and harmonic language of classical music, but also the rhythmic complexity and tonal instability of contemporary and avant-garde composers. Among the most successful and long-standing of such groups is the Robert Fripp-fronted British band King Crimson (which has included in its various line-ups some musicians from the United States since its early 1980s incarnation). Even more experimental are the German band Can (which was formed by composition students of Karlheinz Stockhausen) and the short-lived Henry Cow (which was rumored to have been named after maverick American composer Henry Cowell, but actually wasn’t), whose personnel included English guitarist Fred Frith who is currently a professor of composition in the music department at Mills College.
Prog rock in its various guises (both mainstream and fringe) was predominantly a European phenomenon, although many of its innovations can actually be traced to Americans such as Brian Wilson (of the Beach Boys) and Frank Zappa. However, in 1978, as the heyday of punk led most music fans to dismiss prog as bloated and irrelevant, two guys in Denver, Colorado, came together to form a prog cover band inspired by an unlikely combination of Yes and Henry Cow. Those two guys were multi-instrumentalist/recording engineer Bob Drake and self-taught guitarist/composer Mike Johnson, whose heroes were not just Steve Howe (of Yes) and Jimi Hendrix but also Shostakovich and William Schuman.
“I heard Stockhausen just a few times,” Johnson recalled when he visited us at the New Music USA office in late January. “I remember I had a record of Xenakis, which was literally the sound of fire burning being filtered for two sides of an album. And I thought, ‘Hmm, I could do that.’ But I guess I’m old fashioned. I believe in my heart of hearts that you can make bigger emotional impacts on listeners if you plan it musically, as opposed to setting up events or preparing things and then letting them happen. … I’m looking for these dramatic kinds of builds and decrescendos, and things emptying out, things getting sort of nostalgic, things getting very intense—that’s Shostakovich, or my favorite, William Schuman, a good New Yorker. That’s extremely high art in my mind.”
Pretty soon after Drake and Johnson’s initial rehearsals, they stopped playing covers and by 1982 they had enlisted a classically trained vocalist and morphed into a vehicle for performing Johnson’s own complex compositions, scored for a rock band instrumentation, playing their first gigs in venues in and around Denver in 1983 under the name Thinking Plague.
“I don’t think we dealt in genre terms when Bob and I were doing this early on,” said Johnson. “Later, if people asked me, I’d say we were trying to combine 20th-century harmonic sensibilities with a rock band. I still don’t know what to call it, and I don’t much care.”
While not initially successful with local audiences, they labored on in the recording studio, self-releasing an eponymous debut EP in 1984 and pressing only 500 copies of it.
“We made this horrible, crappy, cheap pressing with a really nondescript industrial-looking label on it,” remembered Johnson. “We didn’t know anything about shopping it. We didn’t think that it was shoppable. … We didn’t think we could get on a label because we didn’t know what label we could possibly get on. We didn’t think that anybody would take it seriously.”
But some important folks did take it seriously, including the legendary New Music Distribution Service, which took 30 of those 500 copies, Henry Cow’s former drummer Chris Cutler whose own independent label/distribution service Recommended Records stunningly took 200 copies, and—perhaps most importantly—Wayside Music, the mail-order retailer that also runs Cuneiform, a label whose roster includes pioneering electronic/minimalist composer David Borden and the iconic free jazz innovator Wadada Leo Smith. Though the band has gone through tons of incarnations since then—Johnson is the only original member of Thinking Plague—Cuneiform has been the band’s label ever since.
Thinking Plague’s ninth album, Hope Against Hope, was just released on February 10, 2017, and it is every bit as uncompromising as its predecessors. To realize Johnson’s musical conceptions, the musicians in the band—like members of a contemporary classical music ensemble—read from fully notated scores. Because of its instrumentation and volume, it still sounds somewhat like rock but it is light years away from popular music.
“I don’t really understand the mainstream music industry,” Johnson opined. “I don’t quite know what they do and how they do it. I don’t even understand why anybody listens to that music. It’s like I’m a person from another planet, as far as I can tell, where all this is concerned. But when it comes to music that’s more serious, that’s got more depth to it, I don’t know how anybody manages to make a living. … I’ve never gotten a grant for this band. It does seem that there are not many grantors who have a word for what we do musically. Their tendency, because you’re going to hear electric guitars and drums, would be to call it rock music. … But as to how much money there is in any of it, nobody in Thinking Plague has ever made a living from the music. Nobody. Not me. Not anybody else. We’re a dot-org phenomenon. As a matter of fact, my Thinking Plague website is a dot-org website. There was no pretense that this was going to be commercial, so I figured better call it what it is. It’s not for profit.”
Mike Johnson in conversation with Frank J. Oteri at New Music USA
January 27, 2017—11:00 a.m.
Video presentations and photography by Molly Sheridan
Transcribed by Julia Lu
Frank J. Oteri: You’re pretty much self-taught as a composer and a guitarist, but you actually studied classical music as well as electronic music. I think these studies definitely wound up informing what you do, both as a composer and as a guitarist, so I’m interested in what you thought you were going to do back then, versus what you wound up doing.
Mike Johnson: Well, it really goes back even before that. When I was very little, my uncle gave a record to us—to my mom I guess, because my dad had no interest whatever in any kind of symphonic music but my grandfather on my mom’s side was an aficionado. So my uncle gave her an LP of Copland’s Billy the Kid with Appalachian Spring on the other side. I must have been three the first time I heard that—me and all my brothers got sucked in. This would have been the ‘50s when doo-wop music was on the radio. I didn’t listen to the radio; I was oblivious. But then I sort of discovered that my mother had some other classical records so I was listening to Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, and some Bach. There was even a Shostakovich piece in there mixed in on a compilation that I guess was on a 78. I didn’t know what it was, but I thought it was cool. I sort of forgot about all that later. I went to school and the English invasion took place. All of a sudden, everybody—even my brothers—were all agog and excited about the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. And that’s where I went. I got sucked into that after some resistance. Then my brother got a guitar, and they gave me a guitar for Christmas. He got an electric guitar that my cousin didn’t want, so they gave me a cheap acoustic guitar just to keep me quiet. There was this big trapezoidal box under the Christmas tree and I was like, “What in the world is that?” I was 11 years old. So when I opened it up I said, “What do you want me to do with this?” Because there were no music lessons in my family. My mother had had piano lessons as a kid and hated them, so she just decided her kids weren’t going to do that. More’s the pity is all I can say, again and again. But by the time I was 13, I taught myself to play guitar. My brother had sort of learned some, but I passed him right up. I was a lead guitar player in a rock and roll band with a bunch of guys that were 18 years old, because I was tall for my age. Then at some point my older brother went off to college. By that time we were living in Colorado. He came back for a break once with an armload of records. One of them was Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, one of them was Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and one of them was Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem. There was something by Prokofiev—I forget what—and maybe one or two others. And he just said, “These are great; you’ve got to listen to these.” And he left them with me. Anything my brother said, I did.
“I had this simultaneous epiphany with the very beginnings of progressive rock plus a reintroduction to 20th-century symphonic music.”
About the same time I started hanging out with these guys and we’d go down in this guy’s basement and play records. These guys turned me on to King Crimson. So I had this simultaneous epiphany with the very beginnings of progressive rock plus a reintroduction to 20th-century symphonic music. Those things worked into my psyche and I didn’t really know what the heck to do with it. I was trying to play rock and roll and be a high school student, and I managed to get through high school but I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wasn’t interested in studying. I didn’t read music. I’d never had any lessons. It had not been a supportive family situation where your mom is going, “Oh, you’re interested in that?” It wasn’t like that in those days. It was just a bunch of boys, and we lived in North Carolina and it was the ‘50s and early-‘60s. So it was all about “shut up, get out of the kitchen, go outside, play football, we’ll call you when the food’s ready.” Basically that was the parenting. I didn’t think of myself as a prospective music student. I’m completely self-taught. Everything was by ear. But I was very interested in this stuff that these masters were doing, and I couldn’t figure it out.
FJO: So what did your family wind up thinking when you actually became a musician?
MJ: My parents, as far as I can remember, never saw me perform anywhere. Not when I was in teenage bands, you know, playing like Beatles, Stones, and Kinks. Not later when I was playing whatever it was, like early-‘70s rock and roll music. They didn’t view being a musician as a meaningful, viable option, particularly being a rock and roll musician. It was just something that they didn’t believe was legitimate in any way, shape, or form, even though my dad loved Chet Atkins and certain kinds of popular music as well as lots of guitar-type music. But rock and roll wasn’t acceptable.
Both my older brothers went to college and became engineers. That was considered how you go. So I was like, what do I do? In the meanwhile I got a letter from Uncle Sam saying that the Marines needed a few good men. It was 1970 or ‘71 and the draft lottery was still going on. I knew that my number was up, because they picked a certain amount of birthday numbers every year and mine was pretty low on the list. So I knew that I was going. My older brother had already gone in because he lost his college deferment. I ended up spending four year in the U.S. Navy during which time I played guitar a lot. I actually honed my skills probably more than any other time, sitting around playing scales and copying my hero then, Steve Howe of Yes. I was trying to learn to play like that. Before that it had been three-finger blues licks and Jimi Hendrix was my God.
FJO: Were you ever in any of the Navy bands?
“I never did get any kind of credentials in music.”
MJ: No, because you had to be a good player to be in those. I couldn’t read a note of music. I was a Navy patrol plane radio operator chasing after submarines in the Cold War. I was a lonely, enlisted man, but I went all over the world. I was in Iran. All kinds of stuff. But I didn’t want to be there. I figured I’d get the GI Bill out of it at least. All my friends back from high school were doing things. It was a tortuous kind of experience for me, but I came out of the Navy with some equipment and a lot more chops. Then I moved back home. I became a music major at the local city college, but they only had classical guitar or all the usual classical stuff; I was an electric guitar player and I didn’t want to play classical guitar. So I took all the theory classes, the history classes, sight singing and reading, all the usual first two-year and some of the third-year music classes, and then some general classes. Then I just wandered away from school because I was playing in bands and I needed to do other stuff. At one point I was playing six nights a week in a really skanky lounge band, from 9 to 2 every night. I literally fell asleep at one point while playing some song. I found myself in the next song and didn’t remember how I got there. But it was paying the bills. I went back to school later, in the ‘80s. Thinking Plague was already a thing. I took a different major and finished a bachelor’s degree. Then I went back to school later after that. But I never did get any kind of credentials in music.
FJO: So, to go back to when you started playing in various bands—I imagine these were basically cover bands. You were not doing any of your own music.
MJ: Not at all. Not a bit.
FJO: So how did you make the transition to doing your own music?
MJ: Well, when I was getting turned on to all of this 20th-century symphonic stuff, I was in bands with these guys who were turning me on to King Crimson, ELP, Yes, Genesis, and a lot of other bands that were way more minor than that. So I was just all aflutter with all these possibilities, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I had another band with the same guys a little later and I started trying to write some tunes kind of in the flavor of what I thought was Yes, but I didn’t really have the chops at the time to do that sort of thing. Subsequently to that—I must have been 18 or 19 and working some kind of stupid job—some friends of mine started a band. They were doing covers of progressive rock tunes and, in some cases, they were arranging them a little bit. I hung out at a rehearsal and they were working on this one tune. They wanted a middle part and they didn’t know what it was. I just had this idea jump in my head, and I started saying, “Here, bass, you play this.” And then I heard this kind of thing. “Guitar player, you play this.” I built this part for them right out of my head, just talking to them; they started playing it and they used it. That was the first example of me actually writing something in the genre that worked. It was really angular and tritone-y.
But nothing came of that because that’s when I started getting letters from Uncle Sam. I was just messing around. I didn’t know what I was doing, but they thought it was pretty cool. The seed was there, but I had to learn to believe I could do it and had to find a path that I thought was legitimate. When I was in the Navy, I was living with a friend at one point and trying to write some stuff. A lot of stuff had a 12-string, and I was doing finger picking, so it sounded a little bit like Mahavishnu [Orchestra] and there was stuff that sounded a little bit like Genesis with maybe a little bit more science fiction-y sounding chords. A lot of this stuff is recorded, very low quality, but it exists.
Then I was in a music store in 1978 in Denver and saw a little note on a bulletin board: “Seeking musicians who are into Henry Cow and Yes.” So I called the number, and it turned out to be Bob Drake. We started a proggy cover band that never got out of the basement despite eight months of rehearsing, but he and I hooked up. After that we were hanging out and doing wacky stuff on cassette decks. It was about 1979 or ’80 and we were recording some stuff which I would call early proto [Thinking] Plague kinds of music. There was at least one tune that never had any words, but it had a part A and a part B and a noise section, and that exists too, if you twist my arm hard enough; it was called “Doppelganger.”
Then I remember sitting down at a little table in the little kitchen where I was living in 1980 and writing this tune “Warheads” which ended up on the second Thinking Plague record some years later. That was when I think of [Thinking Plague] as officially being born; me and Drake did a four-track reel-to-reel demo of it with us singing and no keyboards and all kinds of wacky noise going on. That exists, too, by the way. Then by about ’82, we put together a band of sorts to try to play some of these songs, and I was coming up with more stuff. Basically I had written the songs that I wrote for our first LP. Then Bob put together a couple of wacky things and our singer at the time put together a zany little tune, and we had enough [material] for a record. But we had no idea what to do. We sat for a year trying to figure it out. We didn’t know anything about shopping it. We didn’t think that it was shoppable to some record label, although we were getting Option and all these other magazines in the ‘80s that were printed on cheap newsprint and which were chock full of ads from record labels and distributors. DIY independent recording was huge. We didn’t think we could get on a label because we didn’t know what label we could possibly get on. We didn’t think that anybody would take it seriously. So I talked to my oldest brother, who was the most staid, settled, and established member of the family, and he ended up loaning me enough money to press 500 copies. We made this horrible, crappy, cheap pressing with a really nondescript industrial-looking label on it. And we hand spray painted the album covers and stuck a little insert in that we had printed. I think we shrink wrapped them, but maybe we just had plastic sleeves that we put them in. Then we managed to contact Wayside Music [a mail-order retailer that also runs Cuneiform]. They took some of them. And we contacted Recommended Records.
FJO: I know that Cuneiform reissued the first two Thinking Plague albums on a single CD many years later, but I didn’t realize that your relationship with them went all the way back to the beginning.
MJ: All the way back to 1984. We got on their maps, even though at the time I thought we’re just nobody, small fry. We also sent music to New Music Distribution Service, which was in New York. They were famous for not paying people, so we never saw anything from them, but they took 30 copies. Then Chris Cutler at Recommended took 200 copies and boom. That was the year we established contact with some important people in the future. And by that time, I was thinking to myself, “I am the writer in this band.” Drake was the producer-arranger aesthetic vision guy. But I was writing. I was putting together the notes and the chords and the rhythms. And the words, too.
The members of Thinking Plague in 1987. Back row (left to right): Bob Drake, Mike Johnson, Eric Moon (Jacobson), and Lawrence Haugseth; front: Susanne Lewis and Mark Fuller. (Photographer unknown, photo courtesy Mike Johnson.)
FJO: I definitely want to talk with you about words, but first I want to riff on something you just said vis-à-vis not knowing what to do with this stuff or who would take it, and you making a connection to Cuneiform and, for better or worse, to New Music Distribution Service. We talk all the time these days about being in a post-genre environment, but during that period, roughly from the late-’70s to the early-’80s, labels formed like Cuneiform which released rock that was on the fringe as well as contemporary classical stuff and experimental jazz. And New Music Distribution Service distributed all this music without making distinctions between all of these things. These folks loved all of this stuff. It was all part of this larger umbrella of new music. In terms of what you were doing, you refer to it as rock and coming out of performing in a rock band, but you were listening to all these other kinds of music. So you were poised to enter this proto-post-genre environment.
“I knew that what I was doing was informed by the 20th-century symphonic music, but I was never into the avant-garde.”
MJ: From way back when I was a teenager, I had this idea because I was listening to the ‘70s prog stuff, but for the most part they didn’t sound like 20th-century music. They sounded like 19th- or even 18th-century music combined with rock instruments. I had this idea of using a rock band to somehow communicate content or the essence of what these symphonic 20th-century guys were doing. I was interested in those kinds of polytonal or atonal harmonies and some of those odd rhythms, not just getting in 7/8 and staying there, but using changing meters as part of what you actually compose with as opposed to just laying down a framework that you now have to work on. The real composers use time and pitch as variables in expressing what they’re trying to express. This was all very germinal for me at the time, but it was in the back of my mind that this is what I wanted to do and did ten years later. So I was 27, 28 years old when I started moving in that direction and figuring out how to do it. I had to get the proggy stuff out of my system; I had to stop wanting to emulate the prog bands of the ‘70s. Henry Cow and the Art Bears helped me to do that—Art Bears in particular, and the last Henry Cow album, Western Culture. I was agog at it and it was inspirational for me. It showed me so many possibilities. So I wanted to do something more like that. That’s when the roots of Thinking Plague really took hold. So I knew that what I was doing was informed by the 20th-century symphonic music, but I was never into the avant-garde, like Stockhausen, and later on I was never into minimalism and the pure aleatoric music of John Cage. I was into the dramatic, heavy stuff that those composers from the first half of the 20th century were doing, because I was so moved by it.
FJO: That’s funny because I hear elements of Stockhausen and even Philip Glass from time to time on Thinking Plague records.
MJ: Well, I have a little section called the Philip Glass moment in one of my tunes, but it was definitely a “Philip Glass moment.”
FJO: It’s on one of the later albums so we’ll get to that in a bit, but even early on I hear musique concrète elements and I know that you had studied electronic music. But maybe that was not in your initial conception of the material and came more from Drake during post-production.
MJ: Drake never studied anything as far as I know, other than just what he listened to. When I was living in California, I had one electronic music class. It was taught by Alan Strange and it was definitely out there. It was a junior college class out in the Bay area, basically an appreciation class, but it opened my mind and made me very interested. So there was a piece of that. Early on I would try to write these scores, because when I went to school the first time, I learned how to notate. I never learned to read music well, but I learned how to read music on paper without having to perform. I learned how to write music. I would draw shapes and say, “This is going to be a synthesizer.” So I had these graphic things going on in the midst of my muddled notes. I was envisioning this kind of electronically enhanced rock music—this was before techno or any of that stuff came out. I was still sort of thinking ‘70s style. And then, as you say, Drake was just into sound and noise. He and I were both inspired by Fred Frith’s prepared guitar stuff, so we did hours and hours of tape loops of scratching and assaulting pickups with paper clips and files and stuff like that. And we had a band that got together and we would improvise for two or three hours doing all this stuff with tapes. We recorded a bunch of it and most of it we’d just throw it away. We would do it maybe as a transition or as something in the middle of a piece. We’re going to go into some noisy, weird place and then we’re going to emerge on the other side of it. But there was never any conscious thinking about the avant-gardists per se because we didn’t really listen to them. I heard Stockhausen just a few times. I remember I had a record of Xenakis, which was literally the sound of fire burning being filtered for two sides of an album. And I thought, “Hmm. I could do that.” But I guess I’m old fashioned. I believe in my heart of hearts that you can make bigger emotional impacts on listeners if you plan it musically, as opposed to setting up events or preparing things and then letting them happen. I also believe that human beings can listen to anything and if they listen to it enough times, they’ll begin to build the associations even if it’s the sound of dirt falling on totally random insects, whatever. If you listen to it enough times, you’ll begin to hear patterns and your brain will make associations that were never there. That’s what humans do. But my preference always is to hear it in my head and guide what’s going on. To plan. It’s more old fashioned in that I’m looking for these dramatic kinds of builds and decrescendos, and things emptying out, things getting sort of nostalgic, things getting very intense—that’s Shostakovich, or my favorite, William Schuman, a good New Yorker. That’s extremely high art in my mind.
FJO: But Shostakovich and William Schuman both conceptualized their music, then wrote it down mostly for other people to play, whereas in a band situation you have a group of people coming together and it’s way more collaborative. It might be your tune and your chords and your words, but then it’s Drake’s drumming or whichever singer you have at any given time, what she brings to it. It’s what the reed player brings to it and the post-production. It’s all these levels. So in rock or other music that is created in a group situation and that is crafted in a recording studio, the urtext usually winds up being the produced album. Of course this music is also performed live in concert, sometimes very much like the original recording but also sometimes very different from it. I know that you made a point in the press release for your latest album that even though many things on it are multi-tracked, everything could also be done live. So I wonder what the urtext is for you.
MJ: Obviously the score. But it wasn’t always like that—only since about 1990. Before that there were rough scores, sometimes just scribbles in a book that I took to a rehearsal where I said, “Listen to this. Here play this; try this. We could stick this with that and we’ve got a song.”
An excerpt from Mike Johnson’s musical score for “The Great Leap Backward” (which is featured on the new Thinking Plague CD, Hoping Against Hope)
© 2017 Malaise Music. Reprinted with permission of the composer.
(MJ:) The stuff from the ‘80s was written out, but it wasn’t necessarily finalized. I would generally write a primary bass part and I’d write the guitar parts and keyboard parts and I would sometimes write a vocal line, but there were never drum parts for it. For the first two records, I basically wrote the vocals lines and the words as I recall, except for one song by the lead singer on the first album, and then another song by the lead singer on the second album. For one of the songs on the first album, “How to Clean a Squid,” all the words are literally out of a cuisine magazine.
FJO: Yeah, that one is really bizarre; I love it.
MJ: It is bizarre. The drummer brought in that idea. He had this magazine and he gave it to the singer, and she went and figured out how to put it on top of the song we were working on.
FJO: I hope the recipe wasn’t under copyright.
MJ: Well, it was changed sufficiently enough. I like the part: “Turn body sac inside out. Turn body sac inside out.” We repeated it several times. “And clear away any grit or tissue. And clear away any grit or tissue.” That was just a Dadaist kind of thing, an Absurdist kind of a thing. We were into that. But over time, my tendency to want to compose started taking up more of the air in the band. By the time we did our third album, In This Life, I had pretty much written all the music, but I didn’t have finished vocal parts and I didn’t have words. I collaborated with our singer at the time, Susanne Lewis, to do that. For me, it was always a burden. I would write the music and I didn’t have the words yet. Sometimes I didn’t have the vocal lines. Or I did have vocal lines, but no words. That’s a real problem. You’re taking this structure and you sing, we need to put some syllables onto this that work. I had it sort of partly structured. I had motifs. I had names of songs that I wanted to use. But I didn’t have any words for them. So I presented all this to her and let her go. And that album is the result.
FJO: One of the songs on that album is completely by her, both words and music.
MJ: She contributed a song. And then she made decisions like what the vocal line would be in the song “Love,” because I didn’t have a vocal line for that song. So she just took the top note of the little chords that were going on and made a little melody out of it, which made perfect sense. And I said to myself, “Why didn’t I think of that?” It all worked out pretty well. Her particular musical personality and style, and her whole underground ‘80s background—that Lydia Lunch/Nick Cave flavor—definitely comes across, but it becomes a new thing in that context. She does a lot of indefinite wandering pitch things. Sometimes it sounds like: can’t she sing the notes? But she definitely is doing everything on purpose. That woman could nail notes. Wonderful ear. It took some getting used to, but then it became like, “Wow, I love what she does.” Some of our fans either love her or can’t listen to it, but she found something. We got lucky on that album in terms of collaboration.
But then the band flew to pieces basically after we put that out. The key players moved, even though we just got onto Recommended Records and we had our first CD. It was the first RēR CD that was manufactured in the States. And it was one of the first that was CD-only, because in those days people would make an LP and they would make a CD. Anyway, I thought, “Wow, we could do something with this.” We were all working stiffs. Bob Drake was working for a guy who had a mobile car wash, a truck with a big tank on the back, and they’d go around and they’d wash people’s cars in parking lots in the middle of winter. Drake was in blue jeans full of holes and crummy sneakers that were full of holes and wet. It was 20 degrees and he got peanuts. He would go home and he would have generic spaghetti with tomato paste for his supper. That’s part of the reason he went to L.A. because he was tired of starving to death. He thought he could parlay his engineering skills into an actual engineering job, which he did. Susanne wanted to go off to New York because I think she thought New York was the place where her artistic tendencies and vision could be fulfilled. But I just stayed there. Anyway, we ended up putting together a few shows with some airlines involved, some long distance rehearsing with Dave Kerman and Bob Drake coming from L.A., driving in and then driving back after spending a week in a basement rehearsing. We were developing and practicing stuff, but then it really fell apart.
FJO: There’s something I don’t want to lose in your referencing of Lydia Lunch—which is something I definitely hear in her vocals, too, so I’m glad that you confirmed that. Lydia is definitely on the punk end of the musical spectrum. We talked about the divides between rock and classical music, but at that time—from the late ‘70s through the early to mid ’80s—there was also a real schism between the people who were into more proggy things and people who were into more punky kinds of things.
“The proggers were called dinosaurs.”
MJ: Absolutely. The proggers were called dinosaurs.
FJO: But now if you listen back there are lots of musical connections between the two. It’s sort of like that famous Stephen Sondheim comment when he was asked what the difference between opera and musical theater is, and he said it’s the venues that they’re performed in. The biggest difference between prog and punk might have been that they had very different audiences. If you listen to a Public Image Ltd record, it sounds very prog.
MJ: But it’s very different from the Sex Pistols.
FJO: That’s true. But Gang of Four was also very proggy and, only a few years later, so was Sonic Youth.
MJ: I actually played with those guys a couple of times. We opened for them in Denver in ’87 in some big old, noisy, echo-y theater and then I had another little band that opened for them in Denver in ’86 or something like that. I had no trouble communicating with them. They were cool guys. But they were as loud as loud can be. The best way to listen to them was outside the building through a wall. That’s what I got to do once—behind the stage, through a wall. You could hear everything. You could hear all the weird frequency bending and shifting. But back to your point, I think that in the ‘70s, one of the things about the progressive rock bands was that they allegedly had a level of virtuosity playing their instruments and a lot of the music was about showing off that virtuosity and making big, long songs that were involved and had lots of parts and would get quiet and get loud and blah, blah, blah, stuff like Genesis’s “Supper’s Ready.” Then the punks came along and it was all like: No. Two-minute songs. Three chords. Everything’s loud, and we’re yelling. And they were bitching with us because they thought we were pompous. I was calling myself we because I was into the prog thing, even though I wasn’t one of those people officially. It felt like it was a countercultural revolution. We were throwing out things we learned and going back to the beginning. We were actually going back to the ‘60s, just crude rock and roll, except we were trying to be a little bit more crude and the players were even worse. That’s how I felt, but it quickly changed. It quickly looked to me like this ethic of rebellion and destruction was literally a wave that passed through and, in its wake, it left the new wave as opposed to punk. And new wave immediately started getting more technical and strict. Then a lot of people, like Peter Gabriel, made this transition. Then The Police came along, and the musicianship levels started recovering quickly.
FJO: But by the time Thinking Plague officially became a band and started releasing recordings, prog was a dirty word.
MJ: Yes. Absolutely.
FJO: I remember living through that. The rock critics turned prog into a dirty word, even though you could clearly hear prog elements in some of the punk stuff.
MJ: But you couldn’t call it that.
FJO: Right, but you did. Or did you?
“I read something that said, ‘Thinking Plague RIO,’ and I said, ‘What the hell’s that, a town in Brazil, right? Uh, whatever.'”
MJ: I don’t think so. I don’t even remember what we called ourselves. I don’t think we dealt in genre terms when Bob and I were doing this early on. I just knew that my influences were everything from Henry Cow and the Art Bears to Genesis and Mahavishnu, to Shostakovich and so on. I just knew that was what I was interested in. And Bob was kind of this enthusiastic “yeah, let’s do it” guy who would do anything but who had a Rickenbacker bass—still does—and he was a Chris Squire devotee. He liked lots of other stuff, too. He was a huge Henry Cow fan, so that threw him very left of the normal field of what most people listen to. So we stopped thinking about genres. I was always saying, “Well, this song is kind of like King Crimson” but he didn’t know about it. He didn’t listen to King Crimson and didn’t care. So we just didn’t deal in that. We let other people label us. The first time I ever heard this term RIO was in the ‘90s. I read something that said, “Thinking Plague RIO,” and I said, “What the hell’s that, a town in Brazil, right? Uh, whatever.” Then I read more and I tried to figure out what they were talking about, Rock In Opposition, but there were no musical descriptors in it, so I thought, “How come they’re grouping us with everything from Samla to Stormy Six plus Henry Cow? We don’t really sound like any of that stuff.” If you don’t like Henry Cow, that doesn’t mean you won’t like us. It’s what I always dislike about categorization: taking a bunch of things that are different but are similar enough to put into this box so that all the people that don’t like one of those things in that box automatically don’t like any of the things in the box. That’s why I objected to it. Later, if people asked me, I’d say we were trying to combine 20th-century harmonic sensibilities with a rock band. Sometimes I would use the term progressive rock, but that’s not really how I’d looked at it although I was informed by that. Frankly, I admired a lot of the musicianship of that. When I heard the term avant-progressive, I said, “Yeah, that’s probably the most accurate I’ve heard.” Whatever. I still don’t know what to call it, and I don’t much care.
FJO: But by the ‘90s the word progressive had been rehabilitated.
MJ: Right. The so-called resurgence.
FJO: Although after the band fell apart there was this long hiatus in the ’90s. There was almost a decade where Thinking Plague didn’t really function.
MJ: Except for what I was doing.
FJO: I’d like to know more about that. I know that you were involved with other groups. I know that you played with Dave Kerman’s 5uu’s.
MJ: I toured Europe for 2 months with them in 1995.
Mike Johnson (left) as a sideman for 5UU’s performing with Dave Kerman (drums) and Bob Drake (bass) in Grenoble, France, 1995. (Photo by Laurent Angeron, courtesy Mike Johnson/.)
FJO: But you never recorded with them. You were also part of this other group, Hamster Theatre, and you actually made several albums with them as a side man while your own projects were kind of on the back burner.
MJ: I never stopped working on it, or thinking about it. People moved away in ’89-’90, but we did a few more gigs in ’90 and we had plans. We had songs in the works. I would send recordings to Bob or we would get together. At one point, I went out and spent a week with Dave Kerman and Sanjay Kumar, who was the 5uu’s keyboardist, and Bob, in Bob’s little Burbank house behind the house, a little backyard house. Dave put blankets over his drums, because we couldn’t make too much noise. And we spent the week working up one of these tunes that I had sketched out in a book. But I came to find out later somehow that we weren’t all on the same page about what this project was about. I thought we were working on a song and it’s probably going to end up on a Thinking Plague record. I didn’t know, but I thought so. But I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, if there was going to be another Thinking Plague record. It turns out that at least Kerman, and maybe Drake, were thinking this is a new project. It was a song called “This Weird Wind” and it’s on the In Extremis record. It sounds like if Yes tried to keep going in the direction they were going in when they did Relayer.
FJO: When I listened to it again recently, I made a note to myself that it sounded to me like a bizarre amalgam of Yes and the more experimental moments of The Beach Boys.
MJ: I never thought of that. Okay. But anyway, there was another song, “Kingdom Come,” which was something that I had written in the later part of the ‘80s. It was sitting on paper. I made a really awful sounding sequence of it on a synthesizer that I had that you had to step program everything in really tediously. It sounded horrible. I played it for Bob and he hated the way it sounded. He couldn’t get excited about the song, so for the longest time it just languished. But I was going to get this song done. So I sent Kerman a chart and I sent him that tape, I guess. He learned the drum parts. Then we flew him back to Denver, went into a studio, and recorded the drum tracks. I got another bass player who reads to come in and just play direct-in bass, really clean tones. Then I just built the tracks. Bob was never on it because he never showed any interest in it. He was in L.A. doing all this other stuff, but that song got assembled despite that. Then we had this song which we ended up calling “Les Etudes d’Organism” which was based on an earlier thing.
FJO: It sounds like an expansion of the track “Organism” from In This Life that Fred Frith appears on.
MJ: And there was one before that called “Etude for Combo” on the second album. We took themes from that and then themes from “Organism” and put them together. We were trying to figure out a way to make a live performance piece that incorporated this stuff. We called it “Etude for Organism” and we worked that up in the basement at another place in 1990. Then we performed it in Boulder and we played it in L.A. once. It was a little bit rougher, but the parts were sort of all there—this whole big wacky thing with all these silly tunes and big, huge sections. Bob was determined to finish that. And we recorded some of it. He recorded drums, bass, and a lot of other stuff in a big studio he was working out of there in the middle of the night. I recorded stuff in Denver and I took the sax player into a nice studio to record. Then we put the tracks together. It wasn’t finished until ’94 in terms of mixing. Shortly thereafter, both Kerman and Drake were in France. I was still thinking maybe there’s another chance for this thing, but now that they were in France it got a lot harder. The internet was not really a thing at the time. So I went and I spent a lot of time there, but by the end of that I knew this thing was dead. There’s no practical way with them on the other side of the ocean and there was not enough momentum or interest on their part. So I came back home and thought about it for a while and finally thought, “I’m going to reform this.” I had four other tunes sitting that I had worked up on Finale that I wanted to record, plus there was “Les Etudes” and “This Weird Wind” sitting in the can—I couldn’t stand over 20 minutes’ worth of music sitting in a can. This had to get out somehow.
FJO: As long as we’re talking about the material that eventually surfaced on the In Extremis album, is “Behold the Man” the track that has what you described as the Philip Glass part?
MJ: Exactly. We called it the Philip Glass part. That was a joke.
FJO: Before we leave this moment when you were finding a way to reform Thinking Plague, I think there’s an interesting distinction between the earlier and reformed groups. While it’s true that in the original line-up it was primarily your material compositionally, the end product was the result of a real collaboration involving several people. But with the re-formed Thinking Plague and everything that’s been happening since, it’s really been your band.
The members of Thinking Plague in 1990 (clockwise from lower left): Mike Johnson, Shane Hotle, Susanne Lewis, Mark Harris, Dave Kerman, and Bob Drake. (Photo by Andy Watson, courtesy Mike Johnson.)
MJ: That’s really true, and the musicians would tell you that. I became the overseer. The only way to get the music done was to just do it. More and more, the only way to get what I wanted was to do it myself. I was getting more invested in each piece, and I wanted to make sure that it fulfilled what I wanted to get from it. My experience with other people had always been that it’s a compromise and that things get watered down, so it misses the mark a little bit. Sometimes, certainly, there’s synergy, and sometimes it’s so much fun, but for the serious stuff when I wanted to really mine a vein, I found that I needed to do it alone.
FJO: Well I’m going to make a conjecture, and I could be totally wrong about this. We don’t really know each other and I’m reading into your life story. But it seems like it’s a reaction to that almost decade-long period, where the band was in hiatus and you were essentially a side man in 5uu’s—
MJ: —Just briefly—
FJO: —and Hamster Theatre—
MJ: That was about the same time that the new Plague was formed.
FJO: Yes, but I wonder if going from being a de facto co-leader of a group to spending your time being a side man in other people’s bands made you think that you really needed to grab the helm and be the leader of your own thing once and for all.
MJ: I would say it was more the departure of Drake in particular, but also Kerman. Kerman was a strong personality. You care about what he thinks; he’s got incredible ideas and he was enthusiastic. But he was gone, too. They were just gone—physically and mentally. But I was still invested in this thing. I felt it hadn’t fulfilled what it was trying to do. It hadn’t reached what I thought it could reach. I had no idea what it was gonna do, but I had to keep trying.
In terms of being a side man, I didn’t do that so much. I decided I needed to get out a little bit. Dave Willey contacted me and asked if I would be willing to play guitar with this project of his. So I said, “Sure, I’ll give it a shot.” I showed up and it was pretty weird; it took a few rehearsals to feel comfortable. There was some quick personnel shuffling and then it settled into a thing and it started to work. Then it got better and better and pretty soon, by ’97, ’98, I was pretty invested, but it was definitely not what I would normally do. It was much more charming and humorous or sweet sometimes, and a little weird, a little out there. Sometimes it got really out there because Dave’s got this streak of “RIO” and it’s pretty big. But that wasn’t really it. It was just the desire that had already been there to fulfill this thing so if nobody else was going to help me do it, then I was going to do it.
The members of Thinking Plague in 2003, left to right: David Shamrock (ex-Sleepytime Gorilla drummer/composer), Matt Mitchell, Dave Willey, Deborah Perry, Mark Harris, and Mike Johnson. (Photo by Rick Cummings, courtesy Mike Johnson.)
FJO: And curiously, you not only played in Dave Willey’s band Hamster Theatre, he wound up playing in Thinking Plague as well.
MJ: Well, that was a case of needing a bass player. I knew Dave Willey from ten years before, about ’88 probably. As a matter of fact, he was good friends with Deborah Perry, and when Susanne Lewis took off to New York, Deborah Perry came down with Dave. Dave brought her down to our little rehearsal basement, and she tried out with Thinking Plague in ’89. After we did In This Life and Susanne was gone, I was very interested but Bob Drake didn’t like her voice. He still doesn’t like her voice. So that didn’t happen. But I knew Dave was a guitar player. I didn’t know he was a bass player. When I got in his band, he was playing guitar, accordion, keyboards, and everything else. Then I got a taste of what he could do on bass, and I was like “Jesus!” I also realized from playing his music that I didn’t understand how musically deep and capable he was. So I asked him and he said, “Sure, I’ll try it.” Then it wasn’t too big of a leap to say to myself, “Well, I need a singer, what about his friend Deborah?” And she was willing to try it as well. The first song we did was “The Aesthete.” She had a cold and we did it anyway; I think it came out pretty well. This was after me trying to work with Janet Feder. She’s a prepared classical guitarist from Denver. She was recording on RēR for a little while. She does neat stuff and she’s done some stuff with Fred Frith. She sings a bit, so I tried to get her to sing. It was the song “Maelstrom.” She actually recorded the opening vocal tracks. I decided, “Nah,” but she made an effort. She did alright, but I didn’t think it was going to work. Then Deborah came along and she had a real ability to nail pitches and to find the notes. And she did homework. She studied her parts.
FJO: Since we’re talking about singers, you’ve been referring to all the Thinking Plague music as songs. One of my pet peeves is that we’ve reached a point in our history where we call every kind of piece of music a song so it has rendered the word meaningless. A lot of the things on the Thinking Plague albums I don’t think of as songs. For starters, many things are much longer.
An excerpt from Mike Johnson’s musical score for the instrumental composition “Gúdamy Le Máyagot” (which is featured on the Thinking Plague CD, A History of Madness)
© 2003 Mike Johnson. Reprinted with permission of the composer.
MJ: I call them art songs.
FJO: Okay, but you also said that a lot of time the vocal lines and the words will come much later than your original conception. They start as instrumentals. And yet in every incarnation of Thinking Plague you’ve always included a singer, though there are instrumental tracks on many of the albums. Even though you’ve always been the leader of the group, whether de facto or total, you’ve never sung. In fact, with one exception where you featured a male singer, it’s always a female singer.
“I’m always writing guitar parts that are at the very limit, much of the time, of what I can play.”
MJ: Well, I never thought of myself as a strong singer. I still don’t, although I can sing. I do sing in other things sometimes. When I was young, I was a backup singer in rock and roll bands. But I was never strong; I have a soft voice and I have a fairly limited range, although I can do falsetto. I’m in a Beatles band right now, just for money. It’s money and kind of fun. We do realistic versions of Beatles recordings, and I have to sing so I do it. But, for Thinking Plague, my hands were full. I’m always writing guitar parts that are at the very limit, much of the time, of what I can play, so the vocalist is a full-time job on its own for the most part. The thing about having a woman developed over time. I began to feel that since the music was oftentimes so male, so angular, so mathematical sometimes, and so challenging and difficult, even off-putting, that if you placed a woman’s voice—and not some kind of growling or in-your-face blues or disco singer—but the idea was to have this little human heart that you could latch onto in the middle of this maelstrom of music that’s going on. And I think it works. It gives something for more normal listeners to latch onto. The human thread that goes through this music, which for a lot of people would not be a nice place to be traveling.
FJO: But it seems to me that there’s something else going on with having a singer who is singing lyrics. From the very beginning there were lyrics that were clearly political, such as “Warheads.” And almost everything on the last three albums has a political bent.
MJ: Definitely. Absolutely.
FJO: So, if vocal lines and lyrics are often an afterthought, I’m wondering where these things came from. Obviously, this band was originally formed in the early ’80s during the first term of Ronald Reagan. That has been called a great era for punk, which is essentially protest music. Some people have suggested that there could be a real re-flowering of punk now given the current political climate. Even the title of your new album, Hoping Against Hope, feels particularly timely though I know that you had already finished the album and had given it that title before the election.
“It is important for my artistic activity to make some commentary about what’s going on in the world.”
MJ: Yeah, I know. It was named well before, even before the campaign. And it was floating around as a possible name quite a long time before that, because the times just felt like that to me. Part of it was, after the last album, Elaine and I were talking and she said, “Can we do something that’s maybe a little bit more hopeful? Can we do something that offers some solutions or hope?” And I said, “Sure, if we can figure out how to do that.” Well, we didn’t really do that very well, but it made me think about trying to do that a little. I’ve never been able to go with a direction that’s just celebrating or joy and I have felt for a long time that it is important for my artistic activity to make some commentary about what’s going on in the world. Part of that is my work background. Since the ‘80s, I have been working in human services programs, like working with the homeless, helping people to get shelter, helping people to get jobs. Then I worked with poor students to help them deal with all the issues that were keeping them from being able to be successful. I had a day career out of this, and I was good at it. That informed my music, because when I went back to college after the music stuff, I took a lot of social science classes—politics and sociology and all this kind of stuff. My perspective definitely moved left, and I’ve been there ever since. The cliché is that as men get older, they get more conservative. Me, I’m moving left. I’m left of left now. I don’t even know where I am.
“Warheads” was in response to the Iran hostage crisis. There was a wave of Islamophobia that came to the country then, like ’79 and ’80, and I was appalled by it. So I made a comment about that, and I got my younger brother, who fancies himself a poet, to write some lyrics with me and so the lyrics are pretty abstruse. But there’s this one part that deals with warheads and the board of trustees are counting up their funds, warheads are counting their guns. This all struck me at a time when our society seemed a lot more peaceful: there wasn’t gun violence all the time; we were not at war. But it struck me as ugly and that something needed to be said. I didn’t really try to make much in the way of political statements. The song “Moonsongs” has a kind of environmental pagan slant, using pagan things as kind of an angle for the earth, not that I was on a pagan kick.
Then, with In This Life, Susanne was in charge of the words basically. “Run Amok” is about when you have too many rats in a cage and their behavior starts to alter and they try to eat each other and kill each other. That’s what I felt was starting to happen on the planet. Every now and then, somebody goes nuts and kills a bunch of people. It was rare in those days; now it seems to be every other day on the news. I really think that parts of this society are now running amok. All I did was give Susanne this title and tell her what I was thinking. She took it and did her thing with it.
Then when it got to the phase where I was fully taking the reins, “Kingdom Come” had a definite angle that way. “Dead Silence” also has an environmental angle. And A History of Madness had its own themes, but they’re not unrelated.
FJO: “Blown Apart” definitely has a political agenda.
MJ: “Blown Apart” is a good example.
FJO: And on Decline and Fall, there’s “Sleeper Cell Anthem,” which is intensely frightening.
MJ: It was supposed to be. The message was about who are really the terrorists here. “We are your daughters, sisters, and wives.” We’re the terrorists. We’re creating the terrorists. We’re creating the terror that’s creating the terrorists. Then on the new album, there’s a song about drones and execution from the skies called “Commuting to Murder.” I didn’t realize how timely that was. I wasn’t watching it at the time. People are seemingly being arbitrarily eliminated from on high without due process and without concern for collateral damage because it’s so important to us that we eliminate this Abu blah-blah-blah guy here. That was the one thing that I most objected to about Obama’s administration, the reliance on that. In general, I’m not disinterested in abstract poetic expressions that come from deep in the soul. But, in the absence of anything that’s hit me in the face, I had a certain level of anger and disappointment that I wanted to be expressed through the music.
Thinking Plague in 2011 (left to right): Robin Chestnut, Dave Willey, Mark Harris, Elaine, Mike Johnson, and Kimara Sajn. (Photo by Rick Cummings, courtesy Mike Johnson.)
FJO: So, to attempt to tie this all together. You create very sophisticated music, but you perform it with a rock band, which is a medium that’s been very central to our popular culture for more than half a century at this point. In addition to the very sophisticated music, your songs frequently have super charged political lyrics. By getting these messages out, through what is essentially a popular medium even though the kinds of things you’re doing go against the spirit of most of what is popular, are you hoping this music is going to change people’s minds? What’s the goal in terms of changing the listener? Can the listener be changed? What’s the purpose of making art that has this charged message?
“I had a certain level of anger and disappointment that I wanted to be expressed through the music.”
MJ: I honestly don’t know. After this last election, I’m not sure I know anything. You have to consider who listens to this music. They are all over the map politically, but they tend to be educated so the differences are not usually cultural at a level that’s just hopeless. So I always think maybe somebody will be—as opposed to converted—awakened about something, because a lot of guys that are into progressive music are sort of apolitical. They don’t like to deal with it. They want to deal with fairies and dragons, or with magic, strange mysterious glories. I’m trying to hit them with some gritty realities, but not in an overly literal, strident way. It’s a little bit subtle, I’d like to think, a little bit indirect. You have to read it and think about it. You have to actually pay attention, notice what the themes or the words are. But I keep thinking that somebody will be like, “Oh, that’s interesting. They’re talking about drones. I better think about that. I’d better look and see if I can find out what they mean.” So it’s kind of like saying, “If you’re listening to us, if you’re following us, if you like what we do, here’s something that we think you ought to think about if you listen hard enough and you care enough.”
But I don’t really have any expectations that it’s going to have any impact. You know, I wish. First of all, we don’t reach enough people, not as many as we could, and they are all over the world. There’s never that many on the ground in any one place. But if you influence somebody, they talk to somebody else and turn them on to something. If it influences their thinking about social or political issues, great. I don’t know what else to write about really. I wrote a song on A History of Madness, which was a love song of sorts. But there were some other songs on there that had a humanity theme. So it’s always something about man’s inhumanity to man, the stupidity, the selfishness. Right now the list is so long of adjectives that you can talk about with things that should be addressed. It does seem like a lot of people are addressing them. So, in a way, it’s a hopeful thing. I like to say it can only get better, but I’m afraid that may not be true. There’s a lot to write about right now. I’m not a political activist who’s going to spend a lot of time working on issues in that way. My mission in life is to do music, so I feel like I’m obliged to have these kind of messages in the music, but not like strident marching songs.
FJO: It’s interesting to me that from the beginning up to this day, in the year 2017, Thinking Plague has always been about making albums that are these larger statements. There are pundits who claim that a lot of people don’t listen to albums anymore. They listen to individual tracks and everything gets mashed up.
“If you influence somebody, they talk to somebody else and turn them on to something.”
MJ: Right. They don’t download whole albums. They download single tracks.
FJO: It’s great that you have a label that’s so invested in you. I didn’t realize it went all the way back to the ‘80s, but I know they’ve reissued your whole catalog. To have your whole catalog in one place is tremendous—to have that support, and for albums to be carefully recorded, produced, designed, and released. But it’s sort of weird, because the economics of all of this is shifting. How do you survive in this environment if what you want to do is make records?
MJ: Well, like I said, I had a day career. And, in as much as I am rather moved on in years now, I managed to retire from that. I was working for a state community college system, so I have a state pension, one of those things that our current president would probably just as soon eliminate. But it’s based on investments, my whole existence is tangled up in the dirty money that I sometimes write about or I’m going to write about. And I figure that’s okay; we should extract whatever we can from them. I had to spend many years earning that.
I hear all the time from our label that they are struggling. They have made all of our records available on Bandcamp. You can go and you can listen to everything. Most of the older ones have now finally gone out of print because it is not cost effective to press them and sell them anymore, because they don’t sell enough and you have to be able to manufacture so many in order to have economies of scale. So it became impractical for them to do that.
“I don’t really understand the mainstream music industry.”
I don’t really understand the mainstream music industry. I don’t quite know what they do and how they do it. I don’t even understand why anybody listens to that music. When it comes to music that’s more serious, that’s got more depth to it, I don’t know how anybody manages to make a living from recorded music. They say, “Oh, you’ve got to go out and play.” Yeah, if you’ve got a wide enough appeal, I guess. And if enough people have heard you. I don’t think going out and playing will make you very much money if they haven’t heard recordings of you first. So we’re at a kind of weird impasse. The ready availability of music in electronic form has made it basically too easy to get, and now it’s not worth much. People have gotten used to the idea of not paying much for it. I remember counting my pennies together until I had a couple of bucks and could go by a Beatles LP. I would listen to it until there was no vinyl left on it. You have to wonder if there is something about people’s psychology: if they pay something for it, do they value it more? Because they don’t seem to value it much now, except for those few people who actually care about the sounds coming into their ears and what it does to them, emotionally and otherwise.
Of course, there are so many people that love music, but they love it in different ways at different levels. It seems that for so many people now, music is just a background thing. It needs to keep a certain part of their brain busy, so they have it going in their ear buds as background all the time and it’s on shuffle, and they don’t really care what it is. And they listen to MP3s; they don’t care about high fidelity. They don’t care about really in-depth audio detail. It’s much less about what’s going on with the notes. It’s just a little hook melody and this over-processed drum groove and some pitch-corrected vocal parts. I don’t know what to think about all of that. I don’t know where it’s headed. But I do think that in its current model, it is unsustainable. I don’t know if I’ll be able to continue making records. I’ll have to make them myself or they’ll become electronic downloads only. I’ve had some guys say, “You should go hi-res.” But sooner or later, somebody will figure out a way to pirate that as well. But that’d be great. Let’s make the audio product something that’s really worth something—you really need to pore over it and listen to it. Everything that we do in the recording industry is reduced to 16 bits, no matter how it was produced before that. If it wasn’t, then the files would be too gigantic for most people. There are a certain number of techie guys that would download it all night onto their computer and love it that way. But most people want to put it on a player on their phones.
FJO: But there is a different economy that operates for a lot of the other music we’ve talked about— avant-garde music and even the music of people like William Schuman. All of that stuff doesn’t exist in the marketplace.
MJ: Of course.
FJO: And it never has. It exists either as the result of private funding or through grants from foundations or governments. Shostakovich, for better or worse—definitely worse under Stalin—was a state-sponsored composer. Over the past half century, jazz has also been embraced by the funding community and that has allowed it to continue to thrive now that it is often no longer remunerative in the marketplace. But that hasn’t happened with rock. We talked earlier about that moment in the late 1970s and early ‘80s when labels like Cuneiform and networks like New Music Distribution Service equally embraced avant-garde music that stemmed from classical music, free jazz, and fringe rock. There was no internet back then, but all of it is what we’d call dot-org music. Certainly what Thinking Plague does is dot-org music in the same way as the music of, say, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Ornette Coleman, Wadada Leo Smith, etc.
MJ: I totally get that.
FJO: So might this music continue to exist if it’s somehow subsidized? Could that be the way to make it keep going?
“Nobody in Thinking Plague has ever made a living from the music.”
MJ: Well, it’s interesting that you bring that up. I’ve never gotten a grant for this band. The closest I can say I’ve come is a Kickstarter campaign that succeeded—not on a gigantic scale, but enough to make it work. I’m looking at some grants that would help us to be able to travel. There’s a RIO festival in Japan that has some money issues, but if I can get a grant they’ll bring it back to life, just for us to go play at it. So right now I’m trying to figure out where the band is going to be, in what condition. Our singer is completing her master’s degree in music. She’s still trying to figure out what she wants to do when she grows up and she’s 46. God bless her. I can relate. It does seem that there are not many grantors who have a word for what we do musically. Their tendency, because you’re going to hear electric guitars and drums, would be to call it rock music. So then we’re not eligible for these jazz things. I’m not sure how many, but there may be cracks that we could squeeze into. We’ve got a horn player, so does that make us jazz? I almost got us invited to the Vancouver Jazz Festival. Almost. So this is something I need to look into. But as to how much money there is in any of it, again, nobody in Thinking Plague has ever made a living from the music. Nobody. Not me. Not anybody else. There’s never been that kind of income from the music—not even in 1985. Certainly not from In this Life or In Extremis, which was probably our best received record and the biggest explosion for us. It didn’t change our situation at all. We’re a dot-org phenomenon. As a matter of fact, my Thinking Plague website is a dot-org website. There was no pretense that this was going to be commercial, so I figured better call it what it is. It’s not for profit.
The members of Thinking Plague in 2009, front (L-R): Mark Harris and Mike Johnson; back: Dave Kerman, Kimara Sajn, Elaine di Falco, and Dave Willey. (Photo by S. Navarre, courtesy Mike Johnson.)
