Photo: Maryanne Bilham

Interview

Santana, Isley Brothers Talk 'Power Of Peace' Album

A pair of music legends discuss why they united to create music designed to uplift people in these turbulent times

Recording Academy

Oct 12, 2017 - 1:28 pm

The pairing of Carlos Santana and the Isley Brothers is something the GRAMMY Awards could have totally dreamed up for a once in a lifetime performance. Both iconic acts, having come out of the Sixties, are true GRAMMY heavyweights with over a dozen awards between them, including Santana’s Album and Record Of The Year in 2000 and the Isley Brothers’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014.

But since the GRAMMYs didn’t get to it yet, Santana and Ronald and Ernie Isley decided to take matters into their own hands, teaming up for the new collaborative album, Power Of Peace. Featuring their takes on some of the most recognizable and important socially conscious songs of the rock era, songs from Stevie Wonder to Marvin Gaye, the album is a powerful statement to try and lift people up in 2017.

GRAMMY.com spoke by phone with Santana and Ronald Isley in separate interviews about the new album, their mutual respect and how Santana was sampling three decades before rap turned it into an art form.

How important was it, to you, to have music to uplift people in these crazy times?
Carlos Santana: To bring clarity, courage, certainty and a healing medicine to all of us, sound resident vibration, frequency of collected commonality, is a healing thing. John Lennon “Imagine,” the Beatles' “All You Need Is Love,” Marvin Gaye, “What’s Going On,” “A Love Supreme,” [John] Coltrane, “One Love,” Bob Marley, this is the same frequency as Power Of Peace with Ronnie Isley. When you hear “What The World Needs Now,” especially because we arranged it so has a sound like Mary Poppins. I said, “Let’s just spread it out in 4/4 instead of ¾.” Then we did “God Bless The Child,” “Mercy, Mercy,” “Higher Ground.” If they would play this music in shopping malls, parking lots, elevators, this music will help heal those people who are strapping themselves with bombs tonight to hurt other people. This music says to the listener, in any language that you can understand, “Divinity does not demand death in the name of whatever you believe in.”

Were there songs on this album you heard differently after recording them?
Santana: I heard my brother, Harry Belafonte, say at the NAACP event, there’s a river of blood flowing down the stream from blacks and browns. I tried to not only use that, so I put it in the song [“Mercy, Mercy Me”]. I also put “Ain’t no future without forgiveness,” which is something that Desmond Tutu said. So, at the very, very end I put a quilt, I create quilts from all these sayings and then puts it’s to rhythm, that’s what I do. From Abraxas to Supernatural that’s what I do. Some rappers sample, I sample too. But I’ve been sampling since the beginning. So in “Mercy, Mercy Me,” we put, “There’s a river of blood flowing down the streams from our sisters and brothers, mercy. Ain’t no future without forgiveness, mercy.” That comes from Desmond Tutu. So I’m able to create and I’m really grateful and honored that people trust me, like Ronny Isley, with my vision as an offering to him. This is a love offering to Ronny Isley and Ernie Isley because they’re family. I love them. There were the Isley Brothers before the Beatles because they’re the ones that started with “Twist And Shout” before the Beatles came to Ed Sullivan. So Ronnie Isley was the first Michael Jackson, he was just a child when he was singing those songs.

Were there things that surprised you about the Isleys once you got in the studio with them?
Santana: All of a sudden things take over beyond my imagination or beyond my expectations. Being in the studio with them it was such an inspiring thing. We did 16 songs in four days and I’m very grateful and honored that they trusted me. We were doing sometimes five, six songs a day, but they trusted me. I was waking up every night like 2:30, 3 in the morning and jumping into the pool while my wife was asleep and I could hear and see everything. And then I’d get of the pool, get a towel and write down what we were gonna do the next day as soon as we’d get to the studio. I would hear the arrangement and hear how everything was gonna go.

Was there one song in particular that came to you that surprised you?
Santana: It was “Gypsy Woman,” I said, “I want to try to do ‘Gypsy Woman,’ a Curtis Mayfield song, and I want to try a little bit of Sketches Of Spain with Bob Marley.” That’s what we did.

How gratifying has it been to bring in a new flavor, Caliente BBQ, as your brother calls it?
Ronald Isley: It’s been really gratifying. This is something we always wanted to do. We’ve talked about doing it for so many years and finally the last three years it came about where we could do it.

You can be best friends with somebody but it does not mean you have chemistry. When did you realize you had that chemistry to play together?
Isley: We were talking about the songs, he knew the songs that we did and so he could hear my voice on certain things. So I could hear his music on certain things. We did the song “Gypsy Woman,” my brothers and I have a thing for guitar players, ever since Jimi Hendrix sat in with us. I understood what Carlos knows about music is good. And he knows the same things about music that we have studied for years and years. When I start to set up a song a certain type of way he knows where I’m going with it. When I did the Burt Bacharach song, “What The World Needs Now,” he was one of the people who got married to the songs I did with Burt Bacharach, “The Look Of Love.” He knows where I want to go with a song and I know what he feels and that’s what we want to show other people. Like on the song “Gypsy Woman,” we see how it starts off, then we want to do the song. We have the same feelings for the same songs that we did. The song we did that Billie Holiday did, “God Bless The Child,” he had that song set up for how the ending would go and how it should begin.

Were there any songs that changed for you as you began singing them?
Isley: Yes, “Let The Rain Fall On Me,” and especially the song “Body Talk,” I never heard it before. That was the song Eddie Kendricks did with the Temptations. Carlos heard the song and said, “Hey, man, you gotta sing the song. I can hear you doing this song.” I know all the Temptations’ music, but that was a song I hadn’t heard. I think Eddie did that when he started his own career. And anyway that was a song I had a lot of fun with even though I didn’t know too much about it. But it turned out really great.

What songs worked best for you guys to do together?
Isley: The Stevie Wonder tune [“Higher Ground”], I love doing that with him. That was the song I could picture us doing with him when we first started the album, that was the song I wanted to do with Ernie and him and myself. That was one of the first or second songs that we did. Carlos’ catalog is just as big as mine. He knows about everything from Jimmy Reed, B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf and Miles Davis, so he brought songs to the table and I said, “Wow.” I had to learn, myself, I heard them before, but I had to learn the way I would do it, what kind of style I would bring to the song. I wanted to do “Mercy, Mercy Me,” by Marvin Gaye, and I wanted to do that song “God Bless The Child,” I wanted to do it somewhat like Ray Charles would do it. But I didn’t want it to sound too much like I was imitating him.

Watch: Santana Wins Album Of The Year

News

A Letter To Our Recording Academy Members And To Our Colleagues In The Music Industry

Read a letter from the Academy's Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees

Tim McPhate

Recording Academy

Feb 15, 2018 - 12:16 pm

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

The Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees is attuned to the calls to action that have resonated ever since the 60th GRAMMY Awards. We recognize the impact of the unfortunate choice of words from our President/CEO, Neil Portnow, in a post-GRAMMY interview. In the many letters and statements that we and our Board have received from some of our most respected artists, as well as prominent female and male music business executives, the message is clear: Our Academy and our industry must do a better job honoring and demonstrating our commitment to cultural, gender and genre diversity, in all aspects of our work.

The Recording Academy is a membership organization, first and foremost. Like all Academy members, our Trustees live and breathe music, and are embedded in the fabric of our industry. Our Board members - many of whom are women - include independent artists, songwriters, touring musicians, producers and engineers, visual and audio entrepreneurs, A&R executives, and music publishers. Our Vice Chair and former Chair/Chair Emeritus are women, and our National Awards and Nominations, Membership, Advocacy, and Producers & Engineers Wing Steering committees are all chaired or co-chaired by women. We honor the Academy, and we expect nothing less in return than strict adherence to musical excellence, an inclusive and diverse philosophy, meaningful outreach and communication, a purity of purpose, and an eagerness to embrace change as our musical culture and society evolve

The Academy’s commitment to our community resonates far beyond the nominations, winners and performers on the GRAMMY Awards. MusiCares, the GRAMMY Museum Foundation, and our Advocacy presence in Washington, D.C., speak to how much we care about all the people in our music family, whether they are Academy members or not. Our 12 Chapters nurture new generations of professionals in recording and business, and mentor Governors on our local boards to ally themselves with the issues they are most passionate about. At the heart of what we do, there is mutual respect and the belief that each of us has something unique and valuable to offer. The more diverse we are as an Academy, the better equipped we are to champion our members and our community.

The GRAMMY Awards have always been a positive and negative flashpoint and will likely continue to be because of the ever-changing nature of our world. We are constantly striving to reflect genre, gender, and ethnic diversity in our categories and fields. We welcome proposals from our members to make changes, and we debate all worthy ideas at an annual meeting dedicated solely to this purpose. Likewise, we have worked hard to ensure that our eligibility requirements reflect changing distribution methods. The advent of online voting and the ability to offer audio streams of nominated titles has been designed to make the voting experience convenient, while not compromising security.

The Academy is a thriving, fluid environment. It has a powerful agenda to do good work intended to improve the lives of those who create music, and to ensure that we respectfully participate in a culture where creativity can flourish. We look to our industry partners to provide opportunities for music creators to maintain their professional careers. We embrace the idea that with the help and support of dedicated artists and professionals, we will undertake a fresh, honest appraisal of the role of women in all aspects of our Academy and the industry at large, with the hope of inspiring positive change.

Our Board of Trustees is committed to creating a comprehensive task force that will take a deep look at these issues and make material recommendations on how we can all do better. We are pleased that our task force announcement has been well received, with many people offering to participate in work that will yield tangible results. As we continue to take the appropriate time needed to ensure that this action is well-conceived and properly developed, we ask you to remember what this is about: improving our community and creating opportunity for all. If we achieve this goal, we will all look back at this moment as one that has helped reshape the fabric of our industry.

Please be assured that the Executive Committee and our Board of Trustees holds all the Academy’s leadership to the highest standards. We respect and deeply appreciate the opinions of the artists and industry leaders who have spoken up since the GRAMMY Awards. We cherish the trust that you have in the Recording Academy, and pledge to honor this transformational moment of gender equality as we continue to recognize musical excellence, advocate for the well-being of music makers, and ensure that music remains an indelible part of our culture.

Respectfully,

The Executive Committee on behalf of the Board of Trustees
The Recording Academy

Alice Cooper

Interview

Alice Cooper Talks 'Paranormal,' Working With Larry Mullen & Bob Ezrin

Legendary shock rocker also discusses how Mick Jagger influenced his showmanship and how he doesn't let stress bother him

Nicole Pajer

Recording Academy

Oct 12, 2017 - 6:00 pm

Twenty-seven studio albums into his career and Alice Cooper is a songwriting pro. In fact, the famed shock rocker jokes that at this point in his life, you could challenge him to write about practically anything -- and he’d definitely take you up on that. “I can pretty much write what you want me to write. I try to find the punch line first and write backwards from there,” he tells GRAMMY.com.

For Cooper, the process behind every album is different and largely reflective of the chemistry between himself and his co-collaborators and during the studio sessions behind his latest endeavor, Paranormal, the creativity flowed seamlessly. In addition to bringing in a wildcard drummer, aka U2’s Larry Mullen, Cooper also reunited his original Alice Cooper Band for several of the tracks. The outcome is what he calls “an accidental concept album” and “very Alice Cooperish.”

Cooper chatted with GRAMMY.com about the evolution of his live show, his secret to being able to get away with so much on stage without overly offending the masses, and why he’s concerned that the era of rock stars may officially be over.

Walk us through the creation process of Paranormal. I’ve heard that you’ve been calling it “an accidental concept album.”
Well it really kind of was. In fact, we went out of our way not to do a concept. Bob [Ezrin] and I are sort of famous for doing concept albums from Welcome To My Nightmare on and we decided this time to just do a great rock and roll album. Of course, after we got done writing the whole thing, I listened back and realized that every single character has some abnormality that was kind of striking and the only word that I could come up with was “paranormal.” The word paranormal actually means “next to normal,” not being normal, and my whole career has been that. So the paranormal thing just really stuck. It just felt really good. It just seems very Alice Cooperish.

You had some great people contribute to this album – Larry Mullen, Roger Glover, Billy Gibbons. How did those collaborations come about?
Most of the time, when you do a song, then you kind of say, “Boy you know who would be great on this song…” and that’s kind of what happened. “Fallen in Love” was so Billy Gibbons that it was impossible to not make it with Billy. We called him up and he nailed it in two takes. Roger Glover is on the only song on the album that has any prog sort of feel to it, which is “Paranormal.” The Larry Mullen thing was totally different. Bob said, “Let’s do something that is revolutionary for us. Let’s go with a whole different kind of drummer, a drummer that wouldn’t normally play with Alice Cooper” and Larry Mullen was the perfect guy. I’ve never had a drummer who ever came to me and said, “Let me see the lyrics” because drummers usually care about what the bass player is playing. So the idea that he listened to the lyrics and he interpreted the lyrics was really kind of unique to me. I really liked what he ended up playing on every single song. The guy really changed the sound of the whole album.

You’ve put out 27 studio albums. Do you have a standard process of how you tackle writing and being in the studio or has that evolved over time?
When you’re working with different people - I’ve worked with everybody from Henry Mancini to Carole Bayer Sager to Jon Bon Jovi. I’ve written songs with everybody. It’s always one of those things when you write something and you look at each other and you go “Oh yeah.” In other word, that lyric is married to those chords and they really work together. And then there are also times when you look at each other and you go “This doesn’t work does it? OK let’s go onto something else.” You can always feel when there is something wrong but equally, you can feel when something is really right on the money and it just fits perfectly. This album seemed to really write itself. It was very simple to write. I was in the room with four writers who were all experienced writers so we knew when we were up against a wall and we knew when everything was just flowing.

You had the original Alice Cooper band perform on several of the tracks. How did that come about? And was it instant chemistry again when you guys got together?
The great thing about the original band is that when we did break up, we didn’t break up with any bad blood. There were no lawsuits, nobody was angry, nobody was mad at each other. It was more of a separation instead of a divorce so we stayed in touch with each other and that was very important. Neal Smith called me up and said, “Hey Mike Bruce is in town.” And I said, “Well I’m writing for the new album, why don’t you guys come over and we’ll write something?” So, they came over for a week to my house in Phoenix and we wrote about six or seven songs but two of the songs really stuck out as being real potential Alice Cooper songs. It was the first time that I was able to get Neal, Dennis, and Mike all in the studio together in Nashville and then me on the mic. I said, “Listen. Let’s record this live. Let’s not layer it. Let’s do this live.” It just sounded exactly like what Alice Cooper sounded like in 1974. The guys haven’t changed the way that they play. I haven’t really changed the way I sing and then all of a sudden, there it was, it really did work.

Is it harder or easier for you to write songs at this stage of you career?
Well, I’ve written so many songs at this point -- because I do write the lyrics and a lot of the melodies for most of my albums -- that if you came to me and said, “I’m writing a play about an elephant and a giraffe on top of The Empire State Building. Can you write a song about it? I would says, “Well do you want it to be a love song? Do you want it to be funny? Do you want it to be scary?” I can pretty much write what you want me to write. I kind of know how to do it now. I try to find the punch line first and write backwards from there.

You have such a great live band and seeing you with them really gives a new edge to some of your more classic material. Tell us about teaming up with players like Nita Strauss.
Nita is great, I was looking for a shredder, I was looking for a girl that could really shred on guitar. I wasn’t even looking for a girl; I was just looking for a guitar player who was a little more metal than the other two guys I have, because I already have two guitar players. I was looking for somebody who was really going to give me more of a modern sound and I heard her play and I said, “Whoever that is, I want that person.” She came on board and just nails it every night. She’s so good. Every once in a while, you just find the perfect fit and she just fit right into the band. The best thing about this live band is that everyone are best friends. You never hear any yelling or screaming or arguing backstage. It’s always just laughing. That makes a big difference when you’re touring. It just makes everything so easy and it’s like that every single night. If we do 100 shows, it will be like that every single night. A lot of guys when they’re in bands together, ego starts creeping in and soon you have a mess.

Can you talk a bit about the evolution of your live show? You seem to always incorporate the classics like the Guillotine and Frankenstein but then you’re always adding in new elements like the Trump and Hillary parodies for “Elected,” like you did last year. Is each tour different in terms of how you’re curating your set?
Yeah, well the one thing about it is that I know what songs I have to do. It’s not like I have a choice. I know I have to do “Poison,” “School’s Out,” “Eighteen,” “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” and “Under My Wheels.” Those are the songs that you have to do because the audience really demands it. I put in “Halo of Flies” because I want to show off the band a little bit where they have a long section where they just play and kind of show the audience that they’re amazing musicians. Then you’ve got the straight jacket and then you’ve got “Only Women Bleed” and “Cold Ethyl” and “Feed my Frankenstein.” All those things have to be in the show. The tradition is to always end up executing Alice somewhere in the show so you’ve got the guillotine song. At that point, you don’t have a lot of room to add new stuff so to me, I have to surgically implant one or two songs from the new album and to make sure that it flows with the rest of the stuff. The hardest thing is going through 27 albums and trying to please everybody. It’s just impossible. As soon as I get a show done, everybody loves it and then I get emails saying, “How come you didn’t play this? How come you didn’t play that?” And it’s a good problem to have except you have to just get to a point and say, “Look.” So what I did on this show is I started rotating songs in. We do this song and this song and then next week we take those two out and put these two in so you are always getting two or three fresh new songs in the show.

Are you ever amazed at what you are able to get away with on stage? You’ve always been the original shock rocker but we live in a day and age now where everybody has to be so politically correct. Everybody is so quick to jump on Twitter and criticize everything!
It’s so funny because I’m not politically correct; I’m politically incoherent. So I could care less. It’s a show and I keep telling them, “Look. It’s a show. It’s fantasy. It has nothing to do with reality.” So, if you see Alice Cooper beating up a doll, it’s a doll; it’s not a person and then when that doll comes to live and does a ballet and then Alice kills the ballerina, well then, the ballerina has every single right to kill Alice back. Most people come to my show understanding that I’m not trying to tell them anything. I’m not trying to be politically correct or incorrect. You’re there to see an Alice Cooper show, you’re there to have fun and I agree with you, I think we are so politically correct now that we are turning into a bunch of robots.

In the early days, there was nothing but complaints because that was back when I was upsetting everybody. I think now people look at what I do and they get the sense of humor behind it. At the same time, there are a lot of things in the show that are very pointed and kind of make a statement and make you go “What? I don’t know if you’re allowed to say that or you’re allowed to do that” and I can say, “Hey Alice is allowed to do anything that he wants to do.”

How important is it for a frontman to entertain a crowd like that? And does it bother you that so many of today’s artists seem to just stand on the stage and act like they are too cool to move around up there?
When I saw Mick Jagger, I understood what it was like to get on stage and strut. You have to have a lot of ego up there to be a rock star, you get up there and strut your stuff and be sexy and be funny and be cool and be rock. You have to be a bit of an outlaw, the whole idea of being a rock star was to be an outlaw. I think this last generation is just so afraid to stand out. Everybody wants to fit in, whereas I never wanted to fit in, I always wanted to be something different. So did Bowie and so did Jagger and Jim Morrison. We didn’t want to be like everybody else; we wanted to create a new character up there. It’s a little worrisome that there are so many teenagers that are afraid to be teenagers.

So what would your advice be to them in terms of how to captivate an audience?
I would say understand the fact that when you are on stage, you are bigger than life. I’m not trying to make everybody into some kind of theatrical character but when you’re on stage, you become something other than yourself. I am totally different than Alice Cooper, I couldn’t be more different than him. When I get on stage, I play this arrogant villain and if I was just up there going, “Hey everybody, Good to see you tonight. Let’s all have fun,” people would look at Alice and go “Oh that’s not cool.” Alice is supposed to be something other than human so I never talk to the audience. I sort of let what happens on stage talk to the audience.

Between your solo material and the Hollywood Vampires, you seem to be touring more than ever these days. What’s your secret to keeping up your energy and having your shows be as good as ever while so many of your colleagues seem to be slowing down?
I honestly think one of the great things is I’m not stressed about anything. Everything is in order in my life -- I’m happily married for 41 years, financially and spiritually in order and I really like what I’m doing. I can’t imagine being in a band where I just stand up there and sing the songs. That would just bore me to death but the fact that I’m doing exactly what I want to do is probably why I’m still doing it. I also never smoked cigarettes and I think not drinking and smoking has a lot to do with your longevity. I probably have the energy of a 30-year old, rather than a 69-year-old, whereas a lot of guys that are my age get done with a show and are exhausted. I actually feel great after a show!

Alice Cooper To Michael Jackson: Fashion At The GRAMMYs: 1980s

Grace Slick

Photo: WireImage.com

Interview

Grace Slick Talks Painting, Expression & Madonna

Music icon on why she prefers the sun to paint and which '80s star had the most unique stage show

Steve Baltin

Recording Academy

Oct 12, 2017 - 2:08 pm

A member of the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame and Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, multiple GRAMMY nominee Grace Slick is one of the most iconic voices in the annals of rock – the woman who led the Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship in such enduring hits as “Somebody To Love,” “White Rabbit,” “Miracles,” “Jane” and more.

Now primarily retired due to both health reasons and personal choices, Slick is adamant her retirement is permanent, as she feels rock is a “young person’s game.” So these days she lives in Malibu where she spends most of her time painting.

She may not be a rock star onstage anymore, but in every other sense she is a full-fledged rock star. Opinionated, outspoken, charismatic, hilarious and more rebellious than a thousand 20-year-olds put together, she is still the embodiment of what a rock star should be as evidenced by this fun and insightful conversation.

How is it in Malibu today?
It’s just gray and kind of fuzzy.

Does that inspire a different kind of painting for you?
No, I’m kind of contracted in the sense it goes on in my head, it can be raining or sunny or anything. I prefer it sunny because the colors are truer with sun. I can only work at night, unfortunately, if I already know what colors I’m going to use. But I wouldn’t choose them at night. Incandescent bulbs and LEDs and whatever else goes on are not good light. It depends on the light, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the weather really.

Do you paint every day now?
Oh yeah, up and down, up and down, I have the weirdest life. I sleep for an hour and a half, get up for two, sleep for one, get up for three, sleep, got up for half an hour. It’s up and down for 24 hours. I haven’t slept for even four hours straight in I don’t know how long. And it has to do partially with being an old person, I’m 77, and also I have three deadly diseases, so they may contribute to it too (laughs).

Are there songs you hear now in a totally new light?
When I listen to it, I go to where I was at the time. So I don’t change and a lot of your personality doesn’t change because you’re determined, in a great way, by genetics.

We also spoke with Judy Collins recently and she talked about how she has changed what she feeds herself so much as she has gotten older. Are you that regimented?
No, I’m terrible. I’ve never taken care of my health at all. I eat what I want to eat and I go where I want to go and why I’m alive is a question mark. I don’t exercise, I hate exercise. The only exercise I like is laying down and it’s with somebody else and we all know what that is. That’s good exercise. I had to take water polo, when I was 15, before I even started smoking cigarettes, it was first period in the morning, eight o’clock, water polo for an hour. I went to a private girls school, and the rest of the girls would get out of the pool and they would go, “Oh, that’s so refreshing.” I got out of the pool and I went, “I’m going to die. This is hideous.” So I’ve never been an athlete and don’t like it, it makes me feel awful. People say, “Oh, I get a buzz when I run five miles.” I wouldn’t run five miles if there was a tiger after me.

At least you are honest about it.
My daughter does all this stuff, she’s vegan and all this other kinds of stuff, and I’m just this mess (laughs). The only exercise I got was, like I said, lying down, or wandering around on a stage. I didn’t jump up and down, I just sort of wandered around for a couple of hours singing and that made it so my lungs apparently are really strong. I still smoke cigarettes, which is really stupid. A lot of the things I do are stupid though, that is just one of them.

Looking at the Forbes column you wrote about the Chick-Fil-A protest, is it exciting then for you to know there are other ways for you to make your voice heard in protest and encourage musically?
Mostly what I do now is paint and I will encourage people or not encourage people depending on who I am talking to. But also this is a period of time where I’m sitting back, which is fine. I don’t care, I can be in a room with 20 million people or nobody, doesn’t make any difference to me. It’s just two different ways of being. And when you are older, generally, you’re a bit quieter. It’s not a loud period of time. And I think, this is just my opinion, rock and roll is for young people. It’s a young expression. It’s strong, loud, ironic, a whole bunch of things young people are, same thing with sports. You don’t see anybody 77 doing anything except playing a bad game of golf. The guys in the band used to hang out with athletes, football players and basketball players cause we have the same kind of jobs, which means you’re really on for a couple of hours. Then you might not do anything for a couple of days, then you’re really on for another couple of hours.

There are artists though, like David Bowie, or Lou Reed who aged gracefully. So are there artists you admire the way they have grown?
I think my favorite musicians, they’re younger than I am but they’re older, are Peter Gabriel and Sting. And Peter Gabriel especially because he can go all the way out there. I love those guys. As far as just a good set of pipes obviously Barbara Streisand, Celine Dion, Lady Gaga has a pretty good voice. What they’re saying may or may not be relevant. But just the instrument itself, like an Amati, an Italian violin, is nothing unless somebody plays it. So Celine Dion has a beautiful instrument, her songs are kind of stupid, but her instrument is good. I’d love it if somebody would write her some good songs. Or she’ll sing “My Heart Will Go On” and she’ll pound with her fist on her heart and I’ll think, “Oh, don’t do that, you’re voice is good enough you don’t have to be corny.” Stand there and sing. Whitney Houston did that, we were rehearsing for some award show, this is about 25, 30 years ago, she came into the rehearsal and she stood in the middle of the stage and sang the song. She just sang the song and she has the voice to do that. She doesn’t need exploding chickens or midgets running around, she just sings. And if you don’t have a very good voice then get a lot of dancers like Britney Spears, have them march around. There are all kinds of ways of doing it and everybody belongs. Britney Spears is fine. But if you’ve got that voice box that’s just a knockout like Celine Dion and Barbra Streisand and those people you don’t need dancing girls. You can just stand there and sing and it’s mesmerizing.

Who have the most unique stage shows you’ve seen?
One I just saw on the tube, a hour and a half, I didn’t see it live, but it was really well done, was Madonna. I didn’t like her when she first came out and I saw this thing the other day and I thought, “Man, somebody knows how to do a production.” It was fantastic, dancing boys and explosions and shit going on, but it was all really well staged and well costumed. She was actually good. She’s not a great singer, but she’s a good performer. And she did a beautiful job on this thing. There are people who do well with exploding chickens (laughs).

What are you working on right now?
I’m working on an abstract. I don’t usually do abstract, but that’s one way of pushing yourself because with the abstract it’s all about how it’s placed on the page or canvas, as the case might be. I’m looking at this thing and there’s something wrong about it, there’s something wrong about the way it’s placed on the page and I don’t know what it is. And what I do is I put it in front of me, there’s a television behind it. So I’ll watch television and I’ll look at it some more and eventually I’ll figure out why I don’t like it (laughs). Then I’ll change it, but I don’t have a style. I have about 15 different styles and that drives the galleries crazy because you can’t go, “Oh yeah, that’s a Grace Slick.” You can usually tell Ronnie Wood’s stuff, you can usually tell Jerry Garcia, most people develop a style and I never have. I don’t want a style.

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Garbage

Photo: Joseph Cultis/BB Gun

Interview

Garbage: Shirley Manson, Butch Vig Talk New Book, Tour

Duo details 'This Is The Noise That Keeps Me Awake' coffee table book and upcoming Garbage tour

Steve Baltin

Recording Academy

Oct 12, 2017 - 1:15 pm

More than two decades into their career, seven-time GRAMMY nominees Garbage are as creatively invigorated and vibrant as ever. The Shirley Manson-fronted quartet just kicked off a new tour with rock icons Blondie, they have a new socially conscious single, “No Horses,” on the way, plans to head into the studio later this year and they just released a massive coffee table book, This Is The Noise That Keeps Me Awake, celebrating their 24 years of music.

As one might expect, the book and reflecting on nearly a quarter of century together prompted a lot of memories and stories from Manson and drummer Butch Vig. GRAMMY.com spoke with both members about the book, the tour and staying relevant after two decades together.

Was there one thing that surprised you in working on this book?
Shirley Manson: The weird thing about being with a band, you don’t really realize how much time passes and that time has passed through our communal hands. So much of our lives are interwoven together by default rather than by design. So that’s an extraordinary experience to live through and usually in our lives we have passages that we spend with certain friends and lovers and certain jobs, but in a band, if you’re lucky enough to have some success for so long, you spend the bulk of your life with the same people who have borne witness to absolutely every triumph and every horrendous failure that you’ve endured. So that’s very peculiar in life and very unusual. I think that was what struck me the most when we started putting together the book.

Was there one thing that you hoped to achieve with this book?
Butch Vig: We told Jason Cohen we want to make sure it gets into our individual personalities and that came out the longer we did the interviews cause he would start asking us a lot of sidebar information. That’s how the sidebars came to be, he was the one who said, “I think there should be a lot of sidebars in the book, it would be cool to have these little anecdotes.” And the more we did that it sort of felt like it was more intimate and personal and less like a corporate rock band. Even when it came time to choosing the photos,

How do you approach a tour like the one you are doing with Blondie?
Manson: Right now rehearsal is all about us until we can get to the point where we can play these songs and not feel intimidated Blondie are about to come on stage after us. We want to make sure we put ourselves in the best light and we know that we’re sharing a stage with real legends and greats. People talk about icons and legends a lot and they overuse these terms. The fact is Blondie is an archetype and truly iconic and true music legends, so we’re not taking this incredible opportunity we have been presented with lightly at all. We take it really seriously, that we want to make sure we present ourselves well and don’t embarrass ourselves (laughs). It’s exciting, it’s a real challenge, it’s not often that we are pushed that much cause we tend to play our own shows. So when you share a stage with legends you better have your s**t together (laughs).

I was talking about it once with Greg Dulli and he said one of the things that brought the Afghan Whigs back full time was playing to new young audiences who had never seen those songs before.
Vig: Yeah, if you can get that kind of connection with your core audience and then find a new audience that’s the best thing that can happen to you because it allows you keep playing your music and exist. If there’s no audience for an artist you’re really doing it for yourself and you’re gonna be in your basement or home studio, whatever it is, and just playing for an empty room. There are certainly a lot of people that happens to, so anybody who can retain their audience and find a new audience, that’s a blessing.

I love that, in the book, you describe Shirley’s writing as having a correlation to Raymond Carver. Is there one correlation you see between the two?
Vig: As our albums have progressed, Shirley’s lyrics have gotten more personal. And then Bleed Like Me was a very personal record. I would say Not Your Kind Of People into Strange Little Birds, Strange Little Birds is almost more sort of freeform expression, how she took her lyrics. She didn’t even second guess herself, it’s just what came out. But the Raymond Carver short story, her lyrics, that’s what fills Bleed Like Me, and that’s one of my favorite records too. One of my favorite Garbage songs, period, is the song “Bleed Like Me,” because I just love the arrangement we came up with, I really just love the way that sounds, the way we approached it. And Shirley wrote all those vignettes, each verse is about someone she knows. The first two records Shirley would write about something and starting with Beautiful Garbage and Bleed Like Me Shirley wrote much more personally and I think she just feels, as a writer, she has to express herself or talk about something she knows, just something that un-self-consciously comes out of her. That’s where she’s at with writing. I think that’s a good thing as an artist, to have no fear to do that.

What was the worst case of foodborne illness?
Vig: We played a show in Philly or Baltimore and the catering was Indian food. I think everybody except Shirley had the Dal, Steve’s wife and my wife were there cause we had the next day off in Washington, D.C. On the bus about two hours in, everybody was just like, “Whoa. I need to go number two really, really bad.” And there’s a rule, you don’t go number two on the bus. We were on the freeway and everybody’s going, “We need to use the bathroom.” We were like all frantically, “Please, put the pedal to the metal, get to the hotel.” And we all sprinted, I wouldn’t even say sprinted, you had to hold it in and run through the lobby to get to our hotel room. We all were sick as dogs that night except for Shirley. She didn’t eat the dal.

Looking back for this book what stands out to you at the beginning?
Vig: We got on this roll, and you get caught up in it, especially on our first two records we had these long recording sessions and then we would go on the tour for 18 or 20 months. And I think by the time we finished Bleed Like Me we were pretty worn down. That’s why that seven months turned into seven years. We needed that time off to look back and go, “Wow, we really do have something special here.”

Manson: I was so surprised by the kind of enthusiasm we were met with and the great reviews we enjoyed and that’s just not what I remembered at all (laughs). So that was a real peculiar realization of oh my god, when we released our first three records funny enough, even though the third record unfortunately ended up running into a bit of a brick wall it still enjoyed great reviews. So our first three records it was just a glorious ride and we never really had to stop for a second.

Were there things that were said that surprised you or that now looking back made you realize how much people did connect with what you were trying to say?
Manson: Yeah, I had never felt comfortable necessarily as an artist. I wouldn’t say even now I feel particularly comfortable as an artist. I’ve just come to the realization I am an artist, and, for me, that’s a big leap. But I wouldn’t say I’m comfortable in that role. But yeah, I think you’re right. Looking back over the course of our career and realizing we’re still in this incredible position where we get to make records, the sole reason we get to do that is because of the records and so, of course, we have been, in some ways, understood by whoever has been kind enough to buy our records, come and see us play. Those people have built us a career which we continue to fly on and that speaks of some kind of connection, whatever that connection is I’m not entirely sure. But it’s certainly a testament to a song or a melody or an idea that’s touched somebody in some kind of deep way.

Is there one thing that stands out most for you about Debbie Harry?
Manson: I’m so lucky that I picked amazing women when I was a kid and I don’t know how that happened. I really have a lot of love for Debbie, but true respect. I respect her because she is a woman who’s marched through her career with great integrity and she was born, arguably, the most beautiful woman in music, of all time, that’s open to argument of course. There are not many women who are as gifted physically as she was, and yet she hasn’t solely relied on her beauty and her sex appeal. She has managed to find another act for herself with her intelligence and her writing ability, with her voice and with her spirit. And that is what I admire most.

Coming on to the tour I know everyone will focus on Shirley and Debbie but it has to be a thrill for you as well to tour with someone like Chris Stein and the rest of Blondie, who are all such great musicians in their own right.
Vig: It’s really cool in some ways because Shirley has known Debbie for a long time and they’re kind of thick as thieves. Their career is ten years longer than ours and we’ve been around for 20 years. So to have two really strong iconic female-fronted performers going out with their bands, they have the original people, we’re still together in Garbage and a lot of Blondie is together. Chris was the musical leader of the band, but Clem Burke is one of my favorite rock drummers and he still has the same haircut after 30 years. He looks badass. You know how opinionated Shirley is on women’s rights and feminist rights and Debbie is the same, a different sort of viewpoint how she expresses it. But I think it’s great to have a lot of female power on stage in a form of rock. It’s gonna be cool.

One memory that stood out in the book was performing at MusiCares in 2003 for U2.
Vig: We got asked to do that and a lot of people had picked songs and “Pride (In The Name Of Love)” was still available. I said we should do that and Shirley said, “No, we can’t do that, it’s too iconic.” I said, “But every U2 song is iconic, or practically every U2 song. We just have to do our thing.”

You did an old interview where you said you were more aggressive when you were younger because you were afraid. Are you more confident after this experience of creating a book and sharing memories?
Manson: I do remember saying that. I think the realization I had while saving my rescue dog that we love and adore, and we had taken her to puppy classes and the dog trainer said, “There’s no such thing as an aggressive dog, only a scared dog.” My hair stood up on the back of my neck cause I thought, “Well, that’s me because I am incredibly aggressive and clearly I’ve felt I wanted to protect myself.” If you’re aggressive it keeps people at bay for the most part. And certainly over the years I have become less fearful in a lot of different ways and not just through my career, but in my personal life. I’m definitely less fearful, but I think the trick for me is I’ve actually learned to experience joy. I’ve released myself from any kind of expectations in terms of my career with the band and, as a result, I can just go into the studio and have fun and just be creative and not worry about whether or not it’s going to appeal to a record company or to an audience or the radio. I don’t have to worry about that anymore and that is really liberating.

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