An "interview" with Franklin Bruno

PART I

How's stuff?

Can't complain. Well, I guess I can, but....I'm listening to a NPR special on the 25th anniversary of Watergate as I do this, so if I suddenly start referring to Deep Throat, that's why. Yesterday was Thanksgiving, which I spent with my mom's side of the huge extended family. I guess a second cousin once removed of mine just started a punk band, so we talked about Fugazi and such for a while. (He asked me if I had seen Minor Threat - I'm not that old.) I ate heartily, but not to the point of self-disgust, which is good. Actually, I've dropped about 15 pounds in the last 8 months. Slowly is the only way to do this and keep it off, I think. Otherwise, I'm not quite broke, my love life is a car wreck (well, ok, a deserted highway), indie-rock is dead, and I have 300 pages left in Infinite Jest.

Where did the name "Nothing Painted Blue" originate?

"Kitten With a Whip" (1963), Ann-Margaret and John Forsythe. I saw it in high school, but lost the tape in college. It has since showed up on Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

I won't go into more detail here, but if you ever see it, you'll hear the line.

What is the Inland Empire? (Any info you could cough up about bands and labels and such...just throw it down.)

The I.E. is the part of Southern California about 40 miles east of L.A. and just west of the high desert, extending from San Dimas to Riverside and Palm Springs or so. Like Orange County, the area is what urban theorists call an edge city - a suburb that's gotten large enough to become an semi-urban center in its own right. Actually, it's a little far from L.A. to really be a suburb, though more people probably commuted out there when the traffic was lighter. It includes the towns where I grew up (Upland) and went to college (Pomona College, at Claremont). The actual term "Inland Empire" is a fiction of chambers of commerce and such, which we started using semi-ironically to refer to our 'scene.' There's surely a history to be written of the music scene out here - Frank Zappa spent some time in Cucamonga (and Tom Waits claims to have been born in a cab there), Sammy Hagar and David Lowery (Cracker/Camper Van Beethoven) were from Riverside, and then there's the whole crop of bands I know - Refrigerator, Shoeface (defunct), WCKR SPGT, Diskothi-Q, The Mountain Goats, etc.

We all started doing stuff in '90 or so (though SPGT predates that, and Bob Durkee of Shoeface was in a well-remembered hardcore band in the 80's), and a lot of it was pulled together by the activities of Dennis Callaci with the Shrimper compilation tapes, and the fact that we had a low-key place to play where we could always get a show, a sandwich shop called Munchies'. Munchies' closed a few years ago, and several key folks moved away, so there's not so much a scene anymore as a Diaspora, but Shrimper still continues. Kyle Brodie (our drummer) and I had a label, Jupa, for a while, but we stopped after our 1st LP and 6 7"s (2 by us, 2 by SPGT, one each by 'Fridge and Giant Sand), all hotly sought-after collectors-items (not really). I should also mention KSPC, the Pomona College radio station, which plays, as a matter of policy, nothing on major labels (inc. major-owned indies like Matador and Sub-Pop) in its rock programming. It's given a ton of exposure to bands from our area. There's a lot more to say, but this answer is already way too long.

The best intro to the classic period of this scene is Abridged Perversion, a CD comp on Shrimper and Brinkman compiled from various cassette compilations.

What other recording projects have you been involved with? (I found a picture on the 'Net, circa 1992, of you - well, the back of you - playing with a band called Verga...?) And while I'm here - was Verga some sort of UFO conspiracist?

Verga? I have no idea. Some friends of mine lived in a house in Claremont called "The Meandering Verga" (that's what was scratched into a piece of concrete in the driveway). I think this may mean 'the wandering penis' in half-Portuguese or such. But it was never a band. What's the URL?

That would be - http://music.dartmouth.edu/~apel/html/verga.html. (Ed. Note - if you simply delete the ("html/verga.html") suffix, you'll get to the main page, if you're curious - a bunch of stuff pertaining to "sound sculptures" and such...)  (I don't think that link is working anymore, though.)

Yeah, I looked at the picture, that's my friend Ted's site (though I think he may have moved most of it to San Diego), and the picture is of us fooling around at his house around '92. He's a very intelligent electronic/experimental composer - knows a lot about (John) Cage, (Morton) Feldman and such. We might try to collaborate on something for my next solo record, because, y'know, I'm not quite pretentious enough yet.

Anyway, other than 0PB and solo stuff, I've recorded with WCKR SPGT off and on, appear on one or two Refrigerator tunes, and John Darnielle (Mountain Goats) and I had a duo called The Extra Glenns, who put out a 7" on Harriet in '92 or so. I might be helping out an L.A. band called Rock Band #47 in the studio soon--but I'm no producer/session man. Oh, there's also a bunch of demos for a musical Jenny Toomey and I did several years ago, but that project seems to have stalled--too bad, I liked the songs. Speaking of Jenny...

Considering the persona you assume in the majority of your songs (that of the unlucky lover), I was wondering about your thoughts on this quote from Jenny Toomey - 

"The very definition of 'romantic love' as represented in the great works - well, it contains the same obsessive characteristics that we now identify as stalking."

I'd have to know which 'great works' she meant, but I guess there's something of that sense of pursuit of the unattainable in the troubadour/love lyric tradition. I'd identify my songs slightly differently - I write about love triangles a lot (more than I've been in them, certainly), and one of my big themes seems to be the moment when romantic illusions get destroyed; when you find out that the person you've assigned these wonderful characteristics isn't what they appear, or when they find out the same about you. I think a lot of 'romance' consists of this - the projection of your own lacks and deficiencies on to some object of desire who one thinks can save you from yourself, or cure you of your sense of inadequacy. Obviously, in a healthy or mature relationship these aspects dwindle, but those things are a lot harder to write about.

A multi-part question -

- Listening to Emotional Discipline, it seems that the lyrics of the latter tracks (i.e. "After the Housewarming," "Going to Fontana") are more story-like than your earlier work. Have you noticed a similar change in your songwriting, or any other changes?

The chronology is deceptive - "Housewarming" was written in '91 or so and didn't get recorded for a long time, and "Fontana" was originally a pastiche of a series of Mountain Goats songs called "Going to [various places]." Lyrics usually occur to me in terms of metaphor and image, not narrative, which I think may be a weakness on my part. Each record has a couple of story-songs, and some of those are my favorites. The upcoming 0PB record has a song called "Explorer Scout" that I'm really happy with, but I'll let you wait.

Other changes - musically, I've streamlined a little - not every chord change has to be clever, and I've written a lot of solo songs lately that are very clearly in established forms (country song, 32-bar Tin Pan Alley standard). Lyrically, I'm too close to it to say, though one friend I respect thinks I'm writing better lately, which I hope is not just flattery.

- Do you consider yourself a songwriter or a musician?

The former. I like performing, but I don't think it's my great strength. My guitar and piano playing (and surely my singing) are basically tools for getting the songs across. I mean, I guess I play better than some people, but it's not my real focus.

- Have your songwriting goals changed (that is, are you now trying to accomplish different things with your work)?

That's a hard one. I suppose it feels different to know that a few hundred people are going to hear your songs than it did when I was just writing in my dorm room or something, but I doubt the basic impulse has changed. I'm trying to capture certain experiences, hone the formal aspects of the song, and try to be self-critical enough to know when I'm repeating received ideas and devices from the history of popular song (which I respect). The best songs are the ones that teach me something I didn't know when I started writing them.

Here's another quote, from a piece you wrote on Jeff Gomez's Our Noise - "Why bother with rock at all, much less 'indie rock'?" What do you see as the distinction between the two sects? And are the two worth bothering with?

Well, the context was, as you said, a review of this terribly-written novel which name-dropped bands and labels as a kind of frosting on a dull, not-very-authentic-seeming Gen X story. I guess I don't really believe in the existence of 'indie-rock' as a label or a movement; there were rock bands making good records outside of the attention of major labels for years before the post-Nirvana era, when such bands started getting a little better-known, and there will be rock bands doing the same for at least a couple of decades to come, after the attention has died down (which it's already doing, as electronica becomes the new hype). For my part, I listen to a lot of jazz, singer-songwriter and folkie types, totally 'out' improv, and Broadway cast albums, and all that stuff has as much or more to do with what I'm trying to achieve as, you know, Sebadoh, Pavement, Superchunk, etc.

Now, by totally 'out' improv, you mean musicians that simply play without any real idea on what they're doing - simply creating something on the spot?

Well, by 'totally,' I guess I just meant non-mainstream jazz or what some people call 'new music,' most of which, even when largely improvised, has some kind of compositional structure, though it's often based around something other than making up new melodies over established harmonic structures. The stuff that's allegedly completely without structure (i.e. AAM--or is it AMM) is often interesting, though I tend to think that the rhetoric of TOTAL freedom is dishonest. I like Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, George Lewis, Ornette (Coleman) - a lot of the guys who started doing this stuff in the 50s/60s, and some of the Dutch and UK improvisers - Derek Bailey, Han Bennink (esp. in Clusone 3), Evan Parker, Misha Mengelberg.

And, about Broadway cast albums - do you mean the "classics" (Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma, West Side Story) or the more recent stuff, such as Andrew Lloyd Weber's ouevre? (Not that I've noticed much of a distinction between the two, excepting Mr. Weber's use of rock pyrotechnics in Phantom of the Opera - the Three Penny Opera wasn't that bad, though...)

Well, here I'm usually listening for well-constructed (formally and dramatically) songwriting, as the singers (especially of recent stuff) often have 'theater-itis.' I hate Andrew Lloyd Weber, except maybe for Evita, which I saw as a kid and have a soft spot for. Just about anything that tries to combine rock and show music directly ends up being bad theater and worse rock- see Rent, which I really hoped wouldn't suck, but largely does. I love Rodgers & Hart (though not Hammerstein so much--too sappy), the Gershwins (Rhapsody in Blue, Porgy and Bess), Comden & Green (On The Town, "Singing in the Rain"), and later on, some Sondheim (A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum, Passion) and Kander & Ebb (Cabaret, Chicago--both very influenced by Brecht).

(Ed. Note - All examples of the composers' works, excepting Kander & Ebb, were provided by yours truly - that is, me.)

Is the Rodgers of "Rodgers and Hart" the same Rodgers that worked with Hammerstein? Or is that Rogers?

No, it's the same guy, and it's with a 'D.' The Rodgers & Hart stuff (most famous songs would include "My Funny Valentine," "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered," "The Lady Is A Tramp") is very witty and sophisticated, both musically and lyrically. Hart practically invented the intricately rhymed, colloquial/slangy style of the great Broadway lyricists, and he really has a dark view of love. Hammerstein was extremely skillful, but his work is more tied to the dramatic context of the show, and tends to be more sentimental. Rodgers' music for his lyrics is also plainer, less jazzy (e.g. "Oklahoma," anything from The Sound of Music.)

I've heard a lot about some infamous "smokebomb" show involving Tsunami a few years back - what happened, exactly? (And what exactly is a smokebomb - is it tear gas, or does it smell, or what?)

I won't go on and on about this, but we played a show w/ Tsunami and the Coctails a few years back at Chicago's Lounge Ax. Our roadie at the time decided that we should set off some smoke bombs we'd bought at a roadside fireworks stand during out final show of the tour. (They're not particularly stinky or tear-inducing, except to the extend that they're, well, SMOKY.) Basically, they just made a lot more smoke than we expected, driving Kyle out the back door, us off the stage (there's a tape of me coughing uncontrollably while trying to sing "Register"), and most of the crowd out of the club. We've made up with the Coctails and the Lounge Ax since, but they were pretty pissed at the time.

It's about the most confrontational we've every been on stage, and it was (kind of) inadvertent.