The above video interview is also available on YouTube:
I’ve been wanting to go to Zebulon for a long time. This club in Los Angeles is known for booking adventurous music, and when Acid Mothers Temple announced their 2023 tour, the show at Zebulon was my only option in California to see them. It turns out this tour is mostly on the east coast. LA was simply a launch point. The next day they flew to Texas to continue their “35 shows in 35 days” tour. Grueling, you would think. But in our interview, Kawabata Makoto, the guitarist and founder of the band, told me he enjoys it. He has plenty of time to rest in between tours, and he’ll be back in the autumn to do it all again on the west coast.
Since they weren’t playing in my home area, I might finally have a good reason to make the long trip to Zebulon. The clincher would be that my good friend Ron Anderson has joined Acid Mothers Temple on bass guitar for this tour. Ron is from Brooklyn, but I met him in the early 1990’s when he was living in Oakland and performing with his band The Molecules. I loved his music and we’ve been close ever since. He moved back to Brooklyn so I don’t get to see him play live very often, and this was a very unique situation for him. I didn’t want to miss it.
Getting an interview with the band was by no means a foregone conclusion. They would be flying into Los Angeles from Japan, and Ron from Brooklyn. Their schedule was very tight. Makoto graciously kept me in the loop via email. At the club after their sound check seemed to be the best time to meet, but they were running late. Would there be enough time?
In addition to their own brand of improvisational, psychedelic-groove, or “trip” rock as Makoto prefers to call it, Acid Mothers Temple had a working relationship with Daevid Allen that started around 2002 and continued right up until Allen died in 2015.
Allen is famous for co-founding two pivotal bands in avant rock. The first is Soft Machine which he joined along with Robert Wyatt in the mid 1960’s. Wyatt spent his teen years with Allen who was an Australian tourist that took up residence as a boarder at Wyatt’s family home in England. In their early years Soft Machine caught the attention of Giorgio Gomelsky, who was wrapping up his time as manager of The Yardbirds. Gomelsky did some of the first demo recordings of Soft Machine that would eventually get released. These are among the few that you will find of Soft Machine with Daevid Allen in the band. Just as they started to see some success, Allen got stranded in France as they were returning to England from a tour. His visa problems would mean he would remain in France and form the band Gong.
Listening to the music that Gong and Soft Machine would release after this point makes me wonder how the two groups had anything to do with one another. As Allen’s Gong became more and more spacey and even humorous at times, Soft Machine developed into serious, technical jazz-rock pioneers. Both bands shared unusual songwriting structures, along with liberal use of improvisation. Once again it would be Gomelsky producing the early Allen LP’s for Gong.
Gong would have many personnel changes over the years, with Allen himself moving in and out of the band. By the turn of the millennium, Acid Mothers Temple had been around for about 5 years and caught the attention of Allen. Around 2002 Allen would meet the band and a working relationship was quickly formed. They released several albums together and performed many times as Acid Mothers Gong, including a show at the Royal Festival Hall in London in 2003.
In our interview, Makoto talks about what it was like for him to work with Daevid Allen and others from the Gong family. The set I was about to hear at Zebulon included a classic Gong piece called “Om Riff” from the early Flying Teapot album. You will probably hear it yourself if you go see them on this tour.
When I asked Makoto about how much improvisation I might hear in that night’s show, he turned the question back to me. “What does improvisation mean to you?” I love this question, and I blurted out a quick response in excited anticipation at what he was about to say.
Enjoy the interview, and don’t miss Acid Mothers Temple on tour in North America – east coast now, west coast in the autumn.
Above photos of Acid Mothers Temple live at Zebulon Los Angeles 26 April 2023 by Rick Rees.
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Acid Mothers Temple Interview at Zebulon