on the evolution of Non-Writing
2022: the year of the interviews
Does the world really need another blog? That’s what I was thinking before I started The Non-Writer almost 2 years ago. My answer then was: probably not, but maybe I need it. Like a lot of things I’ve pursued in life, I didn’t have a grand plan or any precise calculation as to where this might go. It looked like fun. That was enough. I needed to do it.
The need, I told myself, was to help me write a book on Giorgio Gomelsky. I’d already been doing research for a couple of years. I’d made a stab at a draft. I soon got sucked back into the research. By the time I got back to looking at the draft, it was so stale I had to start over. And so it would go.
“Don't get carried away with the research.” I asked him for advice, and that’s what Simon Reynolds told me near the end of a lengthy email exchange earlier this year. Simon is the author of several books on rock history. The one you should read, if you haven’t already, is Rip It Up and Start Again, about the post-punk period that developed from ‘78- 84. You want the UK edition if you can find it. The USA version, which was published later, is much shorter because of cost concerns from the publisher.
Simon knows a thing or two about researching stories, which is why I had to laugh to myself when I read his advice. Sitting next to me were the 3 volumes of material he ended up publishing related to the Rip It Up stories. And that didn’t include the massive amount of additional online material he provided as The Footnotes. He did the research, and as he put it, “I hate waste.”
By the time I got this advice, I was well into the series of interviews I started publishing at the beginning of 2022. Once again, I didn’t think much about where this new endeavor might take me. I simply thought it would be nice to get some personal stories directly related to the history I was writing about. Bingo. Every interview pointed me to more leads and more stories. And each interview itself was a great story.
This was a whole new type of storytelling for me. I had a simple (and free) video editor on my computer, and at first I thought I’d just be chopping out the bad parts, which I did. But it wasn’t long before I wanted to add music and pictures to help tell the stories and give a little context. I had no idea where I was going with this, but I liked it, and I soon needed a better video editor.
Which, of course, led to needing a better computer.
These video interviews were beginning to look like mini-documentaries. Right now, I’m in the middle of my biggest video edit yet. I’ve got 6 hours of interviews and 6 separate video channels to work into a 90 minute or so story that you will find compelling.
The need to upgrade my tools is not a surprise. The need to upgrade my expectations on where the Non-Writer is taking me is another matter. A year ago I would never have thought that I’d be telling stories in video form. It’s fun and quite time consuming as you can imagine. It’s taken me away from the writing a bit too much. I need to find a better balance of where I put my time, but I’ve never been good at that balance thing. If I’m having fun I’m gonna do it.
And a fun year it was. Looking back now at all the interviews still blows me away. Here at year’s end, I’d like to share some thoughts with you on those interviews in the hope that you might have some free time during the remaining holidays to go back and check out a few that maybe you didn’t have time for before. If you have a friend that shares your interest in this stuff, please point them to one or two.
Here’s a look back at The Non-Writer interviews of 2022.
In the first interview, done in late 2021, I wanted to explore the event that launched my interest in Giorgio Gomelsky … his recording of the first Material songs. Up to that point, I’d only talked to one person who was at that session. I went back to him to see if he’d like to do a video interview. He did. Thank you Don Davis for launching this interview series and telling us what it was like to play sax on that session, as well as on the ill-fated North American tour of the Zu Band.
Also in late 2021 I would interview Martin Bisi who was a member of the Material and Zu Band production crew, and also participated in the massive 12+ hour Zu Manifestival along with the tour that happened soon after. I met Martin in person several months before this interview when I saw that he had a tour stop in San Francisco. In the short amount of time we spent together before he went on stage to perform, he whetted my appetite for more stories about his time with Gomelsky and Bill Laswell. We would explore those stories and more in this extremely fun interview, where my only regret was that we couldn’t share a beer over the video link.
Just days before the end of 2021 I would talk with Paul Sears who not only did live sound for the entire Zu Manifestival, he also met attendees Robert Fripp and Debby Harry before and at the fest. Oh, and in between all of that he played drums with his band The Muffins who received a rousing ovation from the fest fans. Paul and I would talk again in late 2022 about The Muffins new box set release Baker’s Dozen on Cuneiform Records (more on that soon).
As 2022 dawned, I set my sights on talking with other members that toured with Zu Band and Daevid Allen’s NY Gong after they played the Manifestival in NYC. I kept hearing about Elliott Levin from people on Facebook. Not only did I learn much from him about what the NYC avant-jazz scene was like in the late 1970’s, he opened my eyes to the magic of working with the titan of improv Cecil Taylor.
Next I got in touch with George Cartwright, best known as the founding member of the band Curlew. This band got its start when George was invited to do the European tour with Zu Band. George and Laswell would bond on this tour and Curlew would form soon after. Once again I learned much about the avant-jazz scene of the times, and this time my eyes were opened to the magic of working with Ornette Coleman.
I tried to contact the original members of the band Material that were part of that first recording session with producer Giorgio Gomelsky and recording engineer Eddy Offord. Over the decades since that recording, each member of the band had become successful in the music biz. If success is measured in hit records, then Michael Beinhorn had more than most. Here’s what I wrote about him for the intro to our interview: If you’re a fan of NY No Wave Downtown music circa 1980, you probably know that Michael Beinhorn was a member of the band Material. If you’re in the music biz, you probably know him as the multi-platinum music producer of hit records by Soundgarden, Marilyn Manson, Hole, Red Hot Chili Peppers, KoRn, Ozzy, with worldwide sales of more than 45 million albums, and a 1998 Grammy nomination for Producer of the Year. It was my pleasure to talk with Michael about how he got his start.
Some of the members of Material were difficult to find. One, I was not able to contact at all: the guitarist Cliff Cultreri. What I was able to find out clarified my lack of contact. He was going through some very serious health problems, and maybe still is. Another, drummer Fred Maher, had very little presence on the internet. The one social media link I was able to find looked like it might belong to him, but I wasn’t 100% sure. Casting my message in a bottle into that vast internet ocean, I awaited a response. It took awhile, but he did respond. He told me about his very young teenage days listening to prog and joining what would become Material at the tender age of about 15. Bill Laswell would have to convince his parents that they were serious musicians so they would let their young son hit the road with the band in a school bus.
The story of Material wouldn’t be complete without some words from founder Bill Laswell. I got more than a few words. He told the story of his move from Michigan to NYC, and how he would soon meet Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman. He also met Giorgio Gomelsky who would give him a place to crash and rehearse, and form Material. They worked together for almost 2 years, finally recording a 4 song EP that would be initially released on Gomelsky’s Zu Records label. From there Laswell would part company with Gomelsky. No hard feelings?
Francis Dumaurier is the person I would learn the most from about Giorgio Gomelsky, the man. He’s the only one that’s written a book about Giorgio, and I stumbled onto it early in my research. The problem was it was only available in French. I would eventually meet the ex-pat in his now decades long home town NYC. In our interview, we talked about that first meeting and how we resolved to find an English publisher for his book. Try as we might, it didn’t seem like it was going to happen. Then, shortly after I published our interview, I got a message from Francis that he’d been contacted by a publisher in England. I believe someone who subscribes to The Non-Writer put him in touch. Thank you. I was honored to be asked to write the Forward. Looks like it will be released sometime in mid 2023.
Not long after I published my next interview with Yardbird drummer Jim McCarty, I saw my nextdoor neighbor. He said he needed to talk to me. Now. I’ve had plenty of talks with him over the years and feel lucky to call him, and my other neighbors, friend as well as neighbor. He’s a little older than me and was living here near San Francisco in his youth. He saw plenty of rock shows in the 60’s at The Fillmore, The Avalon Ballroom and Winterland. He was even at the infamous Altamont concert. I love hearing his stories about these shows, but what could he want to talk about that seemed so urgent? He brought over some beer and we pulled up some deck chairs. He said, “Rick, that was the most fantastic friggin interview I just saw about the Yardbirds.” He spent the next 2 hours telling me what he liked and learned from the interview, and of course about seeing the Yardbirds in San Francisco. Jim McCarty was incredibly generous with his time with me. After two hours, we were only half way through what I wanted to talk about. He then said “You’re getting into some very important stuff now. Let’s continue this later when I’m more fresh.” We did, and you can hear it all.
All of my interviews have been great fun, and great history lessons. I always learn a lot. That’s kind of the point of doing them. With regard to the Gomelsky history that I’m writing about, my interview with legendary recording engineer and producer Eddy Offord is by far the most important. After all, they did that Material record together in 1979. But more than 10 years prior to that they were working together on some of the most important “first records” of several artists that would later become hugely famous, including John McLaughlin, Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger, Keith Tippett, just to name a few. I knew about all of this going into the interview, but I did not know that Eddy would credit Gomelsky with giving him his first start as a recording engineer.
Fred Frith is one of my favorite musicians, so when live shows started happening again in the summer of 2022 I jumped at the chance to see him play with the Fred Frith Trio. It was a conversion with Fred a few years ago that got me started on the path to writing about Gomelsky. We did this interview by email days before I would see him at the gig. And what a gig it was. I’d seen them play before, but this time they were using compositional elements in some of their pieces, not the start-to-finish improvisation that I had seen before. This gave the music a power I had not witnessed from this trio in the past. I was so excited after this gig that I arranged to do a video interview with trio members Jordan Glenn and Jason Hoopes the next morning.
There’s no doubt that for lovers of adventurous music, 1978 was an important year, especially in the USA, And maybe most especially in NYC. Punk had changed everything by then, and an as yet to be named movement of post-punk was cropping up in cities everywhere. Eno did his compilation album No New York, and those bands and their cohorts started calling their music No Wave. Near the end of the year, Gomelsky had been providing rehearsal and gig space for these non-musicians, along with progressive musicians and free-jazzers. All of these folks would collide at a massive day/night long event called the Zu Manifestival. I needed to talk to more of the participants.
By the time the No Wave scene unfolded in NYC, Rhys Chatham was already ensconced in the city's new music scene through his work at The Kitchen, which he was frequently booking. This new scene would entice him to morph his academic approach to composition into something that could rock. He would learn this by joining other peoples’ rock bands and soon found himself playing electric guitar at the Zu Manifestival in the band Arsenal. He would go on to pioneer the sound of very large electric guitar ensembles, along with Glenn Branca who was also playing the Zu Fest in the band Theoretical Girls (see the Wharton Tiers interview below). Hear Rhys talk about what it was like for him to learn how to rock.
The No Wave scene attracted artists from many disciplines. Howard Rodman was a writer of 4 failed novels before he decided to give playing electric guitar a go in the band Made In USA. He seemed to be in the right place at the right time. When he went to buy a guitar, they sold him Tom Verlaine’s guitar. When Gomelsky offered his band a gig in his loft space, Brian Eno showed up, and was promptly thrown out by Giorgio. They would later play the Zu Fest. Howard would eventually trade his guitar in for a pen and resume his writing career armed with new insights that No Wave had taught him. He eventually went to Hollywood and found success in films.
Fun City was a more than appropriate name for the music recording studio founded and run by Wharton Tiers. I never met Wharton before our interview, but he seemed to be having fun all the time. The smile never leaves his face. As I would soon find out, he knows what he likes and he knows how to pursue it. And he likes loud music. Very loud music. He would discover this playing drums in the No Wave band Theoretical Girls, which would also spring-board the career of Glenn Branca. Glenn would become famous for composing, recording, and performing music for large guitar ensembles, sometimes with more than 100 electric guitars. The person doing much of the difficult recording of this music was Wharton. It didn’t stop with Glenn. He also recorded many of Sonic Youth’s records, and made a gold record with Helmet, along with a very famous commercial with William Shatner.
That’s 2022. I make no promises for 2023, but here’s what I’m thinking. I want to do more interviews and publish them more frequently. To this end I will need to make the video edits simpler. I also want to continue the more complicated mini-documentary style edits for special stories. I’m in the middle of one now to celebrate the recent release of The Muffins box set Baker’s Dozen on Cuneiform Records. After that I want to start work on one for the Zu Manifestival. I also have some personal stories about my time in art and engineering that I want to tell you about.
Thanks to all you subscribers out there. Please share The Non-Writer with like minded friends. See you next year.
Rick Rees, The Non-Writer
So happy that I found your Substack. Gobbling up these posts this evening.
It’s funny, I thought the same thing when I started Polyester City earlier this year...does anyone need to see/listen to my art and music? I don’t know, but I couldn’t not do it I guess.
If you have a moment, please check my thing out, love to hear your opinion!