Natural Causes

Steve Tibbetts guitars, piano, kalimba, bouzouki; Marc Anderson percussion, steel drums, gongs

ECM 1951 CD

“I am partial to silence, breaks, decay, full stops in music. I could have delineated separate sections in some compositions at a break, but I like the idea of freezing silence or gaps into the fabric of the music. It was tempting to have the entire album appear as one track, one unbroken piece.”

- Steve Tibbetts

It has been eight years since Steve Tibbetts gave us the fiery electric guitar album “A Man About A Horse” (ECM 1814). Now he returns with a different kind of recording: an album of, primarily, acoustic sounds. The making of “Natural Causes” took place in a period when Tibbetts was reconsidering some fundamental aspects of his art and craft – in parallel with daily studies of Bach, Bartók, and music theory. Examining those giants up close made it doubly difficult to go about business-as-usual in his own work. “After some hours, my ears would be wide open…and disinclined to the prospect of blasting electric guitar. So I stuck with my dad’s Martin D-12-20 12-string. I wanted to keep things simple. I thought maybe I could find a voice in well-played single-string lines and say more with less – like Sultan Kahn perhaps. That was the intent, even though the music usually mutated into complex little cathedrals.”

The music of Sultan Kahn has been a reference for Tibbetts since the mid-90s and the experience of witnessing a revelatory concert that brought the Indian sarangi master to Minneapolis. “Since then I have taken the singing, voice-like quality of his sarangi as my example. Over months and years of playing the frets were ground down on my 12-string and it began to sound more and more like the sarangi. The frets are nearly flat now. The guitar is about 45 years old and has a mellow, aged sound to it. I set up that guitar so that the strings are in double courses. I set them in unisons. This makes it possible to find (for me) a more “singing” tonality in single string lines. “

Gongs are another primary instrument on “Natural Causes”: “Gong cycles are everywhere in this album. I lived around gong cycles when I worked for study-abroad programs in Indonesia. The students studied gamelan music as part of our programs. Music is everywhere in Indonesia: feasts, temple ceremonies, funerals, births, sacred calendar days. Gong cycles anchor the music. The gong cycles on songs like “Lakshmivana” are triggered from a 12-string I set up with a midi interface. A friend let me record in his gong shop in Peliatan (south of Ubud, Bali) for a few hours, sampling gongs and other metal-key instruments on a portable DAT recorder I brought to Asia. I sampled gongs, gamelans, jublangs, and other metallaphones. I mapped them to diatonic scales, not necessarily tracking the guitar pitches. In other words, a harmonic minor scale played on the guitar might trigger a melodic minor scale from the sampler a 5th higher. I would sometimes make four or five different scales like this, trigger all of them from the guitar, then craft tiny compositions or motifs.”

Marc Anderson has drummed on all of Tibbetts’s ECM albums, but the present disc is the first since 1981’s “Northern Song” to feature just the two of them. Tibbetts: “Working with Marc is like working with my hands. I don’t have to ask my hands to find the fretboard, they just do. Marc is the same way. We’ve worked together now for 32 years. I don’t have to ask him to do anything in particular, or analyze his approach. He just finds the right drum, we spend some time finding the voice in the instrument with the mics, and then go to work. There were a couple of tunes where I thought I really didn’t need percussion, where things seemed to be standing on their own. Simplicity and all that. Marc would say, ‘Let me try something.’ I’d listen to his playing afterwards and wonder how I could have considered not having him play on that particular song.”

For most of the last three decades Tibbetts has been his own recording producer: “It can be difficult to produce yourself…especially when both the producer and the artist are tired or out of ideas. In moments like that, I would try to record extremely concise bits of music; 5-10 seconds of guitar, bouzouki, or kalimba. Occasionally I’d haul out these miniature compositions and try to craft one into a rhythmic base, a frame, a beginning, or an ending. The second song, “Padre-yaga” is full of these little bits.”

An overall goal of “simplicity and austerity”, was not always evident in the work methods: “Sometimes I just can’t stop adding tracks. I wanted to see, just as a lark, what it would be like to overdub twenty or thirty 12-strings playing Michael’s song [“Gulezian”, a piece loosely based on fellow guitarist Michael Gulezian’s tune “Arcosanti”]. The sound was good. Goodbye austerity.”

A kind of selective randomness had its role to play, too: “I’d lay down a basic guitar line, something that hewed to my notion of clarity and articulation, then add something equally simple, like a bouzouki line. Then I’d listen to only the bouzouki line and add a kalimba. Then I’d listen to only the kalimba and add piano. This stepwise process would go on for days, weeks, years, out of control. No deadlines, right? Then I’d listen to everything, all at the same time. Sometimes, within that chaos, I’d find a 12 second section that sounded like four kalimbas mating fervently with three hybrid guitar-pianos. I’d snip that section out, set it aside, and develop it. That’s how the cuts ‘Sitavana’, ‘Ishvaravana’, and ‘Kuladzokpa’ came together.”

At one stage, Tibbetts included an acoustic version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Villanova Junction” in his track list, but ultimately felt it didn’t fit the album’s flow. The orphaned track has since been posted by Steve on YouTube, and can still be heard there.

The journey towards ‘a result’ on “Natural Causes” was, as Tibbetts freely admits, a halting one. The artist’s final assessment: “I have a real fondness for the whole thing, similar to a fondness you’d have for a three-legged cat you’d adopted. You don’t drive your kids to the pet store with the intention of buying a three legged cat, but if one hobbles up to your door and you feed it, you might eventually grow fonder of that cat than a regular four-legged one. It’s like that.”

Richard Ehrlich’s photography (Richard took the Sand House booklet photo)
Thomas Harrison’s band (Thomas took the Lycian Tomb booklet photo)

Sultan Khan, recorded by Marcus Wise

Sultan Khan

Anton, Tibbetts, Anderson, Wise

Pt. 1:  This Album     (Pt. 2:  Electric Guitar in Madison)

Wasps

Two years ago I was working with a couple of friends I had hired to fix up my house. I used my friend Paul’s enormous ladder to get up to the gutters to clean them out. My job was to use the dandelion removal tool to flip the decaying leaf-goo-matter out of the gutters. I was up on the ladder, very high. I was as high as Paul, who was on the other side screening in the gutters I had cleaned.

There was a complication in this simple task of mine because I had to clean the gutters up to about ten feet away from an enormous wasp’s nest. It was hanging 20 feet over the front door to our house. Paul’s advice was to blow up the wasps’ nest, but I, being a left-wing atheist-vegetarian militant-pacifist said no. It was a beautiful piece of work this nest, yes it was.

The nest was a bulbous, conical, gray swirl of grain. Bit by bit by bite these wasps had gone deep into the woods collecting bark and pulp, chewing all the way home, spitting it out in a pattern, just so. What a thing, a frozen tornado of potential pain. Immobilized wasp spit. Just waiting.

They were very quiet while I was up there, just a little business going on. I felt we had an understanding, an agreement, the wasps and I. (“Wasps, you hang your pulpy sculpture twenty feet over my front door, leave me alone way up here on this ladder, and I will protect you from Paul, who wants to blow you up.”) It was still menacing, in spite of our treaty. I was aware that there was stinging fury just one wrong move away. But I was ready for it, I was dressed up. I was up on the ladder, not intending to get any closer than ten feet from these creatures, and dressed for the part. I had wool pants, long underwear, a winter jacket, a balaclava over my head, goggles and gloves.

The fatal error was the gloves. It was a hot day. I chose my wife’s driving gloves out of the box of winter accessories. Very thin material. (How would the wasps know, anyway?) I’m up there, flipping the gelatinous goop out, and it was very hot with all that stuff on. It must have been 90 degrees out.

In looking back I can’t figure out what I could have done wrong. I was always ten or fifteen feet away from the little wasp apartment. But something I did made the wrathful wasp sentinels decide it was time to attack.

I looked over just in time to see the beginnings of the sortie–it was lovely, liquid, and slow-motion, just like a car crash. The nest stayed attached where it had been, but it appeared as though an invisible hand had tipped it so that the wasps could pour out like cereal out of a cereal box. They ladled themselves out, dropped down about half a foot, and then adjusted to curve up and head for me, the guy on the ladder. It was an unbroken line, out the spout, down, adjust, and beeline to Steve. Well, I was ready. I saw the attack formation. I was aware, cool, calm. I started to back down the ladder.

Some great power, God maybe, informed the wasps that the ladder guy was wearing very thin driving gloves, and it was possible to clump up on his hands and sting through them. Jesus or somebody had also informed wasp consciousness that it was possible to squeeze under the goggles and sting around the eyes.

At that point I lost it. I was only about five feet from the ground and safety, but I let go, pitched backwards, put my hand out and fell. I hit the ground, my right hand leading the way. Bang. I tore off my now-useless wasp outfit, ran inside, and put ice on my face and hand, not aware of my broken wrist bone. Unaware for a few months, actually.

Later that evening we played softball. Paul arrived early at the softball diamond ahead of me, told the story, and Julian called out as I walked up, “Maybe we’ll see a little sting in your bat tonight.” No such luck, in fact, I was told later by Mr. Bone Doctor that if the injury had been a simple hairline fracture at that point it was probably a complete split after a couple of fruitless swings of the bat. I was 0-for-3 that night. There was surely no sting in my bat.

Plan

A year passes by and it’s time to do something about the broken wrist bone. Bone-Doctor-man tells me that as surely as the sky is blue I will get wrist arthritis unless this bone is grafted, pinned and screwed back together. Having no medical insurance I have to wait until after a 40 city tour with Choying Drolma and a group of Tibetan nuns to afford this. Strangely, I felt a lot of flexibility and hand freedom in playing guitar on that road trip.

I made a plan. They are planning to slice my wrist open, pin the skin back like a frog in biology class, and drill, screw, and suture things together with bone shavings “harvested” (their word) from my hip.

I would be on ice (as far as guitar playing) for six to eight weeks. So I made a plan. First I would spend about a week laying down some blazing hot drum tracks. I would use the samples and patterns I had from my drum studies in Bali (in 1991). Then I would set up my Marshall guitar amp in the bathroom of my studio (because it’s so loud) and run lines to the Matchless and the Pod (guitar amps) and play berserk electric guitar for two nights. “Berserk” because you never know how these surgeries go. Two people died last year in Minnesota from routine knee surgery. I could wake up dead, or without on arm, or with a stump. (“Sorry Steve, complications”). That should inspire my playing a bit. Your last chance.

After surgery, I would go into retreat for a month at a place I know in southern Colorado and be very still for a month. I would not fall on my arm and re-break it like I did in 1974. I would be ready for the itchiness that comes from wearing a cast. I would bring a 12-inch screwdriver that I could work up and into the cast to scratch my arm. (Ahhh.) I would come back after four weeks and be miraculously healed, four weeks to a brand-new wrist instead of the projected six weeks.

So that’s what I did, except I only ended up with one evening for the berserk/inspired guitar tracks. But they were good, and I used them. There are lots of mistakes, pratfalls, and sloppiness. Much of the guitar on this album is from that night. It’s sliced, diced, turned inside-out and backwards, and often left as-is. As-was.

I had a complete recovery from the accident. My wrist and hand are fine now.

Imagery

Every piece in this new album is rich in color and landscape. There’s a plot, intention and meaning. Do I want anybody to know the specifics of plot, intention, and meaning? Definitely not. Why not?

I’ll tell you why not. In 1973 I took a very nice music appreciation class at college. Harry Hammer, our soon-to-be-deceased instructor led us through his favorite classical music. It was very pleasant, especially at 9 in the morning. Our assignment one Friday was to listen to Smetana’s “Moldau” and tell him what we thought it was about the following Monday.

Smetana

I spent a good part of that weekend prone on the carpet in my dorm room, staring at the ceiling, listening. Sometimes I listened with Sharzhad Karimi, an Iranian woman from our class I had a raging crush on. Sometimes I listened alone. It was a fine weekend, and the music filled my mind with all sorts of strange and wonderful imagery. It reminded me of the times I spent listening to “Revolver” and “After Bathing At Baxters” as a 14-year old. I would come home from school and before anyone would get home I would put on one of those records and recline with my head between the speakers. The imagery that unfolded is still tied to the music, to this day.

So it was disappointing to hear Harry’s lecture that Monday about Smetana’s visual program for the music. The wind instruments that start the piece symbolize a cold stream and a warm stream that eventually combine, form the Moldau, and finally parade through Prague. Getting that information completely destroyed my own imagery, which had involved a desert, an Iranian princess, myself as a centaur, and so on.

I think it’s better not to know about the programmatic intentions of musicians and composers. I’m so grateful that the Beatles never made a video to go with “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Until my dying day I will have the strange vision of a raft and a river of barking puppies whenever I hear that song.

This Album

This album is ripe for another version of the review that I had in the San Francisco Examiner for “The Fall of Us All.” It said something like, “The good news about the new Steve Tibbetts record is that it sounds like…a Steve Tibbetts record!”

It’s very dense and very layered. There are lots of things in there that hover just under or just over the threshold of audio discrimination. Voices, clapping and more; it’s folded in and peeking out.

With Sumandhi and his Father in Tunjuk

I made my own sample library. I work for study abroad programs in north and south Asia occasionally. On one of my last evenings in Ubud (in Bali) I dragged the student gamelan set into my room and sampled it, note by note. It was a hot night, so I left the doors and shutters to my room open. There was a rice paddy right outside my window, and lots of bugs, frogs, and twittery things ended up on the samples. It lends a nice, living high end to the sounds.

The big drum patterns were learned from studying in Indonesia. My drum teacher took me to his friend’s gong shop the day they were doing a bronze pour. We watched them pour molten bronze into the forms. Afterward, since his shop was closed for the pour he let me sample all the gongs in his shop. The samples include his chicken, who wouldn’t stop screeching.

Voices

I spent three weeks studying at a retreat center in Vermont. There were about 250 people there. All would read through a particular text out loud before studying it, in this case, the Hevajra Tantra. After about 10 days of this I noticed that people were unconsciously arranging themselves into sort of a chorus. By the second week it was like a symphony of voices: the Vienna Tantric Choir. The men and women would be split an octave, as is usually the case in groups, but people began to find the 5th, the 4th, and even the 2nds and 9ths. Someone would pick up the 6th, and others follow. Some would move between pitches, more and more confidently, unconsciously confident. It was quite beautiful. I taped some of it.

In my studio I took the words and layered them in with the percussion and guitars. I tried moving the voices in and out of focus so that some words were audible and others were not. Eventually I mixed them so that they would fold in with the high end swish of the cymbals and the attack of the percussion.

Synthesesia: seeing sound, hearing colors. The voices roll along the top of the cymbals, hide in the shakers, and whisper along with the gongs. I like playing with the imagery that music forms in consciousness. The voices are like something you are trying to remember but can’t.

Marc’s Drumming

Marc Tries Out His French in Lyon

A lot of the drumming is mine, but I had Marc double many drum patterns to cover up my lack of technique and to put some air around electronic drum sounds. After that I asked him to bring his favorite instruments to the studio and we set up one, all-purpose Marc-instrument for him to play. He brought a few cymbals, jingly things, a kick drum he’d found in a dumpster, springs, and lots of percussion toys. I set up two microphones to give him a nice stereo soundstage and rolled tape. I made an effort to confuse Marc by occasionally playing with the reels on the tape machine as they rolled. I’d speed things up or slow the tape down. Marc rose to it, and played beautifully. There’s a lot of his talking in there, simply because his first takes were the best ones. Marc starts out playing a little loudly 20 seconds into “Lochana” and says, “Never mind my distortion. You will learn to live with it.” Wendy, who stopped by to listen said, “That’s what I tell my husband.”

Guitar Setup

I’ve set up my guitar to play diatonic masses of instruments and sounds I’ve sampled over the years. Each string triggers a different midi channel, and each midi channel has a scale that doesn’t necessarily correspond to the notes I’m playing. Playing an E note on the b-string might trigger an C gong, an A jublang, and so on. You can hear that most clearly at the end of “Red Temple.” The 6-string acoustic guitar I played triggered gong samples in real time.

Recording and Mixing

I used my old analog 16-track for a lot of the tracks, and dubbed some things to Digital Performer, a computer music program.

I had the time to mix it and mix it, due to the flexibility of the computer program. There’s a trade-off in doing that. I got the beautiful and detailed mix I wanted, but there was none of the tension, release, and surprise that comes from the old way of mixing. The old way: you would set up the mixing console, stick little notes and markers everywhere, get ready, and go for it. When you get a good mix that way there are mistakes, but it has a wild and fresh feeling. The mix is part of the performance.

I tried to mix with a reference, as I always do. A stereo reference test. Year ago Marc and I set up a turntable and performed A/B tests between “Physical Graffiti” and our in-progress mix of “Exploded View” just for fun. We hauled in two huge JBL speakers we called the “butts” because the tweeter was deep in the speaker with two ass-like curves coming out, dispersing the sound. It was an enjoyable mix, and it worked out well.

This time I used “Lateralus” by Tool and “Solid Ether” by Molvaer (on ECM, actually) as references. I like the sound of both of those CDs.

But I couldn’t seem to get the EQ right on this one. On most CDs these days the high end is incredibly bright and the overall level (especially on the Tool CD) is extremely compressed. I’d switch back and forth between the CDs and the mix, Tool/Horse, Ether/Horse/Tool/Horse, and it always sounded like mine was swaddled in muslin. What to do? The shroud of Turin, I couldn’t get it off the speakers. I tried a lot of things, but all of them just seemed to make the music sound brassy and coarse. Not right. I called Lee Townsend, an old friend and ex-ECM worker and asked him what he did. Did he make his mixes sound real bright? He said, “Don’t fall for that–don’t crank up the treble.” So I left it mostly as it was. I left it for the mastering engineer to sort out.

I’d Change

What would I change? I wish I had not been so fascinated with the cut-and-paste compositional possibilities of the computer program. Sometimes the music became more of a technical and visual challenge that an audial one. I was seduced by the process. I wish I had spent more time in basic appraisal of the composition before I went deep into the overdubbing and mixing. Sometimes elements that might not fit together naturally were welded to each other. A donkey’s head on a cow. A cat in a dog suit. Deer with claws.

The mix is very cool.

Cover

I had a brown leather jacket that I had bought when I was 16. I wore it as an accessory to my underpowered Honda 175 motorcycle. I wore it on the road, to Europe, and all over Asia. I wore it on the back cover of “Northern Song.” It was starting to rot apart and had to be retired. Throwing it in the garbage seemed a little heartless. I took it to a friend’s cabin on the St. Croix River, crucified it on two wooden beams, filled the pockets with fireworks, doused it with gasoline, set it on fire, and photographed its immolation. The next photos on the strip of negatives were taken in Thailand, so I must have gone to Asia soon after that. Without my jacket. I saved the zipper, though.

Booklet

In my first trip to Nepal I took about 10 rolls of slide film and accidentally ran 5 of the rolls through the camera twice. They were the best slides. Multiple images were layered in the same picture. It was more evocative of travel memories than a simple picture. Layers upon layers of meaningless and meaningful juxtapositions. From then on whenever I traveled I would often run the film through the camera twice. The photograph with the temples and clouds is a double exposure from Pagan, in Burma. It has the shape of Minnesota, sort of. Another photo is of the Irawaddy River and a boat. Waiting for a boat.

Marc Anderson

I’ve worked with Marc for a long time. A friend called me up one evening in 1977 and said, “You have to come see this guy play congas.” We went, five of us, to the North Star Ballroom at the University of Minnesota where his band (“Clear”) was playing, to about twenty people. Marc was playing like he was possessed. Voodoo-boy. I knew he would be good in the studio. Marc is now the number one call for percussion in the Twin Cities and will be ordained next year sometime as a Zen Priest in the Soto order. True. Marc has played with Taj Mahal, Prince, Robert Fripp, and David Sylvian, among others.

Jim Anton

Jim Anton is the number one call in town for bass. Jim is a big guy, and can shave any design he wants out of his beard, since it is so all-pervasive and fast growing. For that reason he can be scary looking if he wants to. That’s good to have on the road, but not when crossing the Canadian border late at night, coming home. Jim has played with Jonny Lang, the Rembrants, Shannon Curfman, and many others.

Marcus Wise

Marcus Wise works each summer as a mason; tuck-pointing chimneys. He saves enough money to spend the entire winter playing tabla. He tours about four months of the year with Coleman Barks and Robert Bly, accompanying their spoken word performances. He’s played with, among others, Sultan Khan, Zakir Hussain, and members of the Grateful Dead and the Doors.

Marcus is tenacious. He calls me up and says, “Let’s play, I’m coming over.” I’m never too sure if I want to do this, until he gets here and we start playing. He plays fast, and so do I. It’s fun. Faster! Faster! “Let’s try something in 9, but fast.” He brings a six-pack of Moosehead beer, and drinks four of them. After two beers he says, “Hey, let’s record something.” That’s how those two pieces got on the CD. Out of 50 hours of recording we had two things that really worked. Finally, after four beers he gets up, goes to the toilet and urinates loudly, leaving the door open. He’ll shout out something like “You know why I like Moosehead?” I say, “No, why do you like Moosehead, Marcus?” He says, “Because you can just PISS IT RIGHT OUT.” Wow. Talk about pleasure. Now my wife, whenever we go out says, “You know why I like Moosehead?”

Touring

“Will you tour?” Probably not. The travel is grueling, the crowds are thin, and there’s not much money in it. We’ve done enough late-night hell-bound drives in Ford Econoline vans. Too much driving through the night to gigs in college grills.

I remember Marc (from the stage) asking the four people who came to see us at the “Ahoy Lounge” at the University of California Irvine if they would help us load out. They all helped. I remember a college grill in Tennessee where, when the someone in the kitchen would yell, “Toaster!” I would know that my side of stage was about to go dark, along with my amp.

I remember too many gigs where, after setting up and going out for something to eat, we’d come back to the venue to see far too many parking spaces. Plenty of free parking. Or we’d load in and the promoter would have set up the floor “cabaret style”–meaning: few advance ticket sales, so they set up round tables, chairs, and put those nice candles on the tables: the ones in the red glass holders with the white plastic mesh around them. Very stylish.

I remember a particularly tough drive from L.A. to Winnipeg, climaxing with the confiscation of our truck on the way home by the US Customs Service. Our sound man had left his pinch-hitter on the dashboard. Oops.

Cody ready to drive through the night after a gig: coffee, smokes, Waffle House

I remember one drive in particular, a long one. Salt Lake City to Portland. We had a bed set up in the back of the Ryder truck we’d rented. Sort of a bed. Cody (Marc’s brother and our sound guy) would pack the truck after the gig so that the soundboard road case was closest to the cab of the truck. Then we’d put sleeping bags down on it. The only possible problem was that if the driver were to make a sudden, emergency stop the bass cabinets and mid-bins would fall on the sleeping musician. So sleep was not so restful. We decided to drive through the night and sleep for a few hours at a motel outside of Portland. I took the first shift. Drive drive drive. Sometime around 3AM Marc came up to the front of the truck. He poked his head in, then plopped in the passenger seat. He was all mussed up and sleepy looking. He said, “Cody and I were curled up on the soundboard like little mice.” Marc thought for awhile. Drive drive drive. He said, “I bet Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette have never curled up on a soundboard like little mice.” He was probably right. We talked about the gig. Drive drive drive. He said, “Steve, I like playing music with you, and going on the road with you, and loading in and loading out with you, but I don’t like looking out at the first three rows of people and seeing three rows of versions of you.”

I looked out at the crowd the next few gigs, and he was right. But these fine people are kind enough to help us load out.

Part Two:  Electric Guitar in Madison

Electric Guitar

I started playing guitar at the age of six to get attention. My father was a union organizer in Danville, Virginia and professor of labor law at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and he also played his 12-string to get attention. His job was to drive all over the state of Wisconsin and give evening seminars on labor law and union strategies to very fatigued shoe and boot workers. To get their attention, and to have a little fun he would pull his guitar out of its case and they would all sing union songs. “Union Maid”, “Drill Ye Tarriers Drill”, and so on.

There were a lot of union and church sing-alongs at our home as well. People from the university and our church would come over and, after dinner, they’d break out instruments and sing for hours. Banjos, guitars, bass, dulcimers, mandolins, whatever anyone had. It was smoky, out of tune, and fun.

Whenever my dad opened his guitar case conversations would stop and people would wait for something. I noticed this. When someone opened up a guitar case and pulled out a guitar they might as well have been pulling a sword out of a stone. The room was magnetized. This was not lost on me, the smallest and most sports-challenged kid in school. I wanted one of those guitars, but an electric one.

My dad and I fought over this. He said he would buy me an acoustic guitar, but not an electric one. I couldn’t understand why, and whined persistently for six months. Finally he said, “Well, with an electric guitar, what are you going to play at a beach party?” That stopped me. There was no answer to that one. I didn’t stop to think that beach parties were rare in Madison and that there were few prospects of me galvanizing teen beach-goers in some Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello fantasy.

After many months we compromised on an acoustic/electric model, in case the beach option came up. He bought me a Gretsch Clipper hollow-body guitar and an Epiphone amp with the condition that I take lessons.

Steve w/ Clipper

Greg Heroic

My friend Greg Wallace, who had a very shiny Japanese electric guitar with 8 pickups and 30 switches on it immediately brought his camera and guitar over and we took pictures of ourselves posing heroically with our new guitar/swords.

I took lessons at a music store called Ward-Brodt. In those days music stores made most of their money selling band instruments. The store floor at Ward-Brodt was a sea of brass instruments, marching drums, and sheet music. But they were one of the first stores in Madison to sell a few electric guitars, and that’s all they had: a few. They kept them in an alcove off to the side along with a stack of amps. All the amps and guitars were jammed in there, very concentrated. It was the the hot spot. Vox teardrop guitars, Gretsch, Hofner basses, Kustom amps with sparkly Naugahyde covers and some abomination called a “2×4″ that was just a plank of red wood bristling with pickups and switches.

Fender Wildwood Coronado

Lessons took place in the back storerooms, so while we were waiting Greg and I would surreptitiously crack the cases of new, unsold guitars. I remember being overwhelmed by the varnishy smell and sight of a Fender Coronado guitar in a plush red case. We opened the case and gasped. The power and the glory–it was a Wildwood model–made from the wood of trees injected with brown, green and orange dye as they grew. It looked like a guitar made from an oil slick. Fender only made them for a year or two.

All the freaks and self-styled musical revolutionaries hung out or worked at Ward-Brodt. Adam Mickey was the electric guitar curator. He had a ponytail. He had an earring. We stared at his ponytail and earring. Later Adam moved to San Francisco and joined a band called Lamb and made an actual vinyl album that came out on an actual record label. His little brother showed it to me. Gasp. We all immediately started growing our hair out. (Grow, hair, grow.)

There was no rock music on TV. It was all Ray Coniff, Robert Goulet, Edie Gorme and other crooning lounge lizards. When something with electric guitars was rumored to be on afternoon TV our school would partially empty out. Everybody went home to see Blue Cheer on the “Mike Douglas Show.” (Who booked that?) We engaged in heavy parental negotiations to stay up late to see Jimi Hendrix on the Dick Cavett show, Janis Joplin on some other late-night show.

We patiently sat through Topo Gigio (the talking mouse-puppet) and the ever-present plate spinning guys on the Ed Sullivan Show to get to the occasional rock band playing in front of a goofy backdrop (big birds for the Byrds, airplane models for the Jefferson Airplane, and so on).

Existentialism

Greg and I formed a band. I needed more gear. My mother had once won a set of books by asking a question of the “Great Books” column in the Capital Times.  She wrote in and asked, “What is existentialism, anyway? Is it a fad?” They answered her question and put her picture in the paper, pointy glasses and all. Then they sent her about 25 books, Great Books; a series. Plato, Pascal, Socrates, and others.

I thought I could do that. I submitted a question to the “Tell Me Why” column and they bit. (“What do bees do in winter?”) I won a set of encyclopedias (not very good ones), they came over and took my picture amidst the books, and put it in the paper with a short article. The very next week I made my mother take me and the encyclopedias down to the Buy/Sell shop where I swapped them for a fuzzbox. I still don’t know what bees do in winter.

I spent the next two years growing my hair.

Tibbetts Basement 1970

Greg and I found a drummer (Doug Ross) and practiced in our basement. We were very loud and had lots of people over.  20 kids in the basement. To this day, when I am home shoveling snow over the Christmas holidays, some elderly neighbor, also out shoveling snow will totter over and say, “How did your parents ever put up with that? Veblen Place just shook. It just shook.” I asked my father about that and he said, “Well, we did know where you were.” (Did they ever.)

I learned that if you had a guitar and played in a band it was quite OK to have an attitude problem. People expected it. That was handy. Later, in my twenties, I learned that if you were a composing guitar player people also expect you to be spiritual, or tortured, or spiritually tortured. Also handy.

Besides buying more and more gear, we invested heavily in psychedelic lighting (both Greg and I had income from paper routes). Black lights. Strobe lights. If we washed our white shirts in Tide and wore dark vests we appeared to be a bunch of glowing arms playing music under black lights. We thought playing under the right lighting might enhance some state of mind related to creative music-making.

Failing that we would put down our instruments and set the strobe light to flash every 1/2 second. If we jumped up and down in sync with the strobe it looked like everyone was levitating. This was great fun until the time Greg landed on the neck of my Gretsch hollow-body electric. Crack. Just as well. I got a red Gibson SG then, a real electric guitar. No beach parties with that one.

Our first great humiliation as a band was at the James Madison Memorial High School Rock Festival. This was in the wake of Woodstock and our set list reflected it. We played “Soul Sacrifice” by Santana, some Who songs, some Blind Faith, and (my moment) “I’m Going Home” by Ten Years After. It didn’t go that well. The next day, sitting in homeroom, Mark Gongieu, who I thought was one of the cooler guys at school said, “You guys were great last night.” Hopefully, I said, “Really?” He said, “No. You were terrible.” He went into detail about why we were so terrible.

After that we wrote our own songs. We were inspired by the extended pieces bands were writing. Concept music. Rock operas. Different time signatures. Dynamics. We were inspired by “Thick as a Brick” (Jethro Tull) “Tommy” (The Who) and by our new-found interest in psychotropic drugs.

Drugs

Madison, being a college town and self-styled crucible of revolution had powerful, clean drugs and they found their way to the suburbs, or the suburbs would bike downtown to the revolution and find them there. We had a good gang of freaks, intellectuals, non-jock types, and budding musicians. We spent many magical evenings in each other’s company, heads filled with LSD-25. I’m not sure how I’d feel or will feel about my kids taking mescaline or acid, but it was wonderful for us. A universe of color and sound opened up. Our minds engaged each other in ways that have kept us life-long friends. Intelligent company, a warm summer night, good music to see, bikes to ride, and clean blue microdot. We’d go downtown and wander the fringes of the block party or riot or both, get tear-gassed, ride to our homes, pretend to go to bed, sneak out, meet somewhere, and walk all night. We’d look for Mescalito. One person would take the Don Juan role and the other would play Carlos Castaneda.

Guitar Players

There was a lot of music coming through Madison and a lot of bands in Madison. More than the big guns (Hendrix, Clapton, and Jimmy Page) I think I was warped by what I could see in town. Gary Geisler, Mark Hambrecht, and Jim Pharo were my age and my competition and I stole from them. Further up the ladder were the road bands that came from Chicago and Milwaukee: Short Stuff, The Siegal-Schwall Band (Jim Schwall with his DeArmond pickup taped to an acoustic guitar) and especially Harvey Mandel. Soup was a band from Appleton with an amazing guitar player (Doug Yankus).  Bob Schmidke was Madison guitarist who played in the band Tayles.

St. Paul

I left Madison to go to Macalester College in St. Paul. Starting college life in 1972 was like showing up at a party at 2:30 AM. The revolution was over.

Grandpa's Gibson

Before I left my father gave me his twelve-string Martin and my Grandpa’s guitar, a 1912 Gibson. The Gibson is the guitar I’m holding on the back cover of “Yr.”

When my dad gave it to me I took it out of the case and did some high hammer-ons ala Harvey Mandel. He said, “That’s probably the first time that guitar has been played above the third fret.”

I played lots of acoustic guitar in my dorm room. Towards the end of my junior year a guy named Scott Stevens told me he had a two-track tape recorder that had overdubbing capabilities, a “Howard” reel-to-reel. He lent it to me for a long weekend. I barricaded myself in my room and, sleepless, overdubbed everything that made a sound in my room.  The water coming out of the tap. My keys. Clapping. Playing my desk. Many guitars. At the end of a few days I had a nice little piece of sound sculpture and a flat hairdo from wearing my vise-like Koss headphones around the clock. A friend knocked on my door, distraught over her finals and moving plans. I asked her if she wanted to listen to what I had recorded. She lay down on the floor with the headphones on, I spooled the tape, played it for her, and waited anxiously. When it was over she got up, took the headphones off and said, “That was just what I needed.” I was thrilled.

First Album

In my senior year the music department put in a small electronic music studio. It had a four-track Dokoder, an EML 101 synthesizer, one battered microphone, and a tiny mixer. The studio was put in the only space available; a large closet where the Macalester pipers would store their kilts and bagpipes.  (Macalester has a Scottish sort of theme). Even though the electronic music studio smelled like sweaty kilts it was heaven to me. I finished up my fine arts major and spent the last year in that studio. That’s where I recorded my first album.

Studio

I worked as a board operator on the overnight shift at Minnesota Public Radio for about five years. My job was simply to tend the station in downtown St. Paul, since all the programming came from Collegeville. I listened to a lot of classical music during the night.

I would eat my bag lunch at 2AM, up in the newsroom with whomever was around. Bill Tilton was a frequent MPR night owl. Bill had spent some time in jail for burning up Minnesota draft records.

In jail he studied law, and on his release became the only convicted felon to pass the bar exam in Minnesota. He worked for legal aid, made public-interest programs for MPR, and made frequent forays to Africa. He told me that being in jail for some time inspired him to now forgo sleep, work at night, and travel everywhere. He showed me photographs of Africa (I used one of them for the cover of “Safe Journey”) and sent me postcards from strange places. I determined that I would go stranger places and send him postcards in return.

I set up a studio in a warehouse space with a Tascam 8-track tape recorder, a small mixer, and three mics. I didn’t have a reverb unit, so I ran mics and speakers across the hall to an abandoned sculpture studio. That was my reverb chamber for “Yr,” my second album, which I put out myself after collecting about 200 rejection letters. Reviews praised the “organic” sound, but it was just the sound of ignorance and lack of gear. The time I spent in that studio taught me how to get as much of the sound I was looking for from just an instrument and a microphone.

“Yr” was sort of a hit. It had many great reviews. I sold some. I got to know my local UPS man well. I made some money. (“Maybe I can make a living at this!”) I was always shipping boxes of vinyl around, many of them to New Music Distribution Service in New York. Carla Bley and Mike Mantler started the company when they found it hard to get their label (Jazz Composer’s Orchestra-JCOA) into shops. I believe that early on, NMDS/JCOA was the only company who would take the fledgling ECM label for distribution in the USA.

Norway

I got a letter from Rich Frank, the music director at a college radio station in California who suggested I send copies of “Yr” to Ricky Schultz at Warner Brothers and ECM Records in Munich. Sure. Why not? Ricky called soon after I sent him the LP and said he was on his way to Munich to meet with the ECM staff. At that time ECM was distributed by Warner’s in the states. He said he’d “buttonhole” Manfred Eicher, and suggest we do an album together. (Fat chance.)

Ricky took my record and press kit over. My press kit, at that time, was a William S. Burroughs type cut-up of all the rejection slips I’d received.

The ECM staff had a good laugh at my press kit, and Steve Lake (from ECM) sent me a letter duplicating the typewriter strikeovers from my Flying Fish rejection letter. He said no, they would not be interested in putting out my album, but making a record with them would be a possibility.

A few months later Marc Anderson and I found ourselves, to our great surprise, on an flight from Minneapolis to Oslo, Norway. The plan was to record an album in three days with Manfred Eicher and mix it on the fourth. This is how ECM did things. It was alternatively grueling and inspiring. This was a new way of working for me.

I was already a big fan of the label. At our meals out I would press Manfred for details on all the recordings and musicians I was already so familiar with, but familiar with as a fan. I couldn’t believe it was happening, that I was in such exalted company and would be part of the label.

When we finished mixing Manfred called up Jan Garbarek, who lived in Oslo, to come over to listen to the final product. We listened. I didn’t like it. Marc’s two congas had gone flat from a major 2nd to a minor 3rd for the final 21 minute song, and the resulting minor second against the tonic made it impossible for me to bring in the tape loops I had planned for that piece. Manfred said, “It’s enough, it’s beautiful already, more loops would be too much.” I was in a foul mood, and at the conclusion of the playback I stalked out of the control room in a huff to pack up my gear in the studio. Jan followed me out and said in his Norwegian accent, “I think it’s good, I think it’s a good album.” I said, “Doesn’t Manfred just drive you crazy sometimes? Don’t you ever want to run out screaming into the streets of Oslo?” He nodded and said, “Yes, yes, yes. I do not think it would be a good record if you did not feel that way.”

I like the album now.

Wax

From 1979 to about 1985 I worked in a record store in Minneapolis called “The Wax Museum.” I learned a lot about music and the music business from that time. Those years were a fertile time for music in Minneapolis. There were lots of bands breaking out. Working in a store made it possible to go see lots of shows for free. Lots of metal and punk-rock, which I never would have liked unless I had to hear it over, and over and over and over. Joy Division, Roxy Music, Brian Eno and his productions, Stiff records, Pere Ubu, The Replacements, pre-famous Talking Heads and U2. Once after work we all went to see U2 play a club in Minneapolis. The band was barely out of nappies. We’d go see Prince in clubs. We’d hear about his secret club shows first at the record store. The pulse of the cities.

Nepal

In 1985 I applied for a grant from the Minnesota Composer’s Forum. A very nice lady from the MCF called me up at home and said, “You got your grant.” I thought I had won the lottery. My girlfriend asked, “How much is it for?” I didn’t know. I called back the nice lady and asked. She laughed and said, “Six thousand dollars.” A tidy sum.

My grant proposal was to go travel somewhere, record sounds, and use the pitch or event quality of the sound to spark the composition process. Because I had been teaching a recording class at the Naropa Institute in Boulder I knew the school was starting up a study abroad program. The first trip would be to Nepal, and I signed on as quasi-faculty though I never really did anything in that capacity.

Going to Nepal was as good as LSD had been in terms of brain-stretching, and the experience of difficult travel in strange countries changed how I approached many things, including working with my mind. I learned that it was a good thing to go far far away for as long a time as possible. It was good to leave mental baggage at home and to turn one’s world completely upside down. It was good for me to leave my guitars at home and let the calluses fall off of my fingers. It was good to get away from the phone, friends, lovers, familiar food, familiar smells, and familiar ways of thinking.

It was also good to travel and record sounds to use in sparking the creative process. “Three Letters” from the album “Big Map Idea” is from that first trip to Asia.

Asia

Hat-hair at 17,000 feet

From 1985-97 I traveled all over Asia. I worked for the Naropa Institute and I got a few grants. It was exhilarating to study Balinese drumming in Bali and to hear endless Javanese gong cycles in Java. Sounds were much different far away from my studio and guitars. My passport ran out of spaces for visas. I had more pages put in, and then I filled those up. At my Minneapolis apartment I had a grocery box from Country Store where I’d throw my travel items, always ready to go away again. ”I’ll be gone for the autumn,” I’d say to Marc. “You’re always gone,” he’d reply.

Bill Tilton got lots of postcards from exotic locales. I liked Asia; the food, the vibe, the long steamy days, and the endless possibilities for strange travel. It was easy to travel with next to nothing. Endless travel under trying circumstances. A friend of mine said, after his difficult trip in Spiti, “I just learned to be comfortable with being uncomfortable and that solved everything.”

Questions

In 1993 Brian Eno came through the Twin Cities doing an interview tour. He was promoting his album with John Cale (“Wrong Way Up”). His interviews on this tour took place in front of an audience, and he asked to be interviewed by local art/musician types, and so Chuck Helm at the Walker Art Center asked me to be involved. In advance of the interview Brian sent out a 6-page letter titled “To the person who is interviewing me.” It listed a lot of questions that he’d rather not be asked, which I thought was incredibly arrogant until I read the letter. He had found that, having done hundreds of interviews over the years, many of the familiar questions he was asked led nowhere, and he was rarely asked things that really interested him. For instance, he was often asked about some sound on some album that he had long since forgotten about. “What was the buzzing sound 20 seconds into cut three of ‘Another Green World?’” “What’s David Bowie like?” He suggested that the interviewer ask him about other things that interested him like, for instance, perfume.

I thought about all the familiar questions I’d been asked over the years.

1. Where do you get your ideas?

Besides just getting ideas from mucking around on guitar I get some by setting up chaotic events in the studio and picking the best bits. I’ll play a certain line on guitar or keyboard, have the guitar or keyboard create midi events, record them to a sequencer, then have the midi events play different samples tuned in unisons or diatonic scales. Then I’ll have other musicians come in and play to those parts. Eventually I have something good, and I overdub instruments over that.

Another approach is to record a solo guitar line or drum track and play different instruments to that track. On Monday I’ll work out a 12-string line in E. Not listening to Monday’s work on Tuesday I’ll play a mandolin line in A to the same basic drum or vocal track. By Friday I’ll have five tracks filled up and I’ll finally listen to them all together and keep what works. It’s not like sitting down in a bare white room with a quill pen and manuscript paper. I wish I could do that, but it’s not a tool in my toolbox.

A friend of mine, Homer Lambrect, told me about one summer when he decided to do a month of composing. He set things up so he had all his paperwork done, his family out of town, and nothing to do except hold a pen and stare at music paper. The time came. He waited, pen poised over the paper. Nothing happened. Nothing happened for a week. He finally decided to give up and refinish his bathroom. That’s when things happened. He was flooded with ideas while working with his hands.

I think traveling a long way from home or doing non-music things with your body will have the same result. It’s good to put the music tools down and do something that will erase or engage your mind. Go away, remove all the supports that tell you how and why you are. It’s amazing to me that guitar and gear-oriented magazines place such an emphasis on gear and guitars and so little emphasis on creativity. What do people do to free up their minds to be creative? How can you use the tendencies and forces in your mind in the service of creativity?

2. How would you describe your music?

It’s too bad that the words “fusion” and “progressive rock” have such horrible connotations. How about “post-modern neo-primitivism?”  (That’s Willie Murphy’s suggestion.)

3. What kind of gear do you use?

I have a friend who is a good amateur photographer. She told me that when she shows someone a particularly good photograph she’s taken the response will often be “That’s nice. That’s really good. What kind of camera do you have?”

Whenever musicians I meet get all wound up about whatever they do or don’t have in their studio I point out that most home studios have more and better equipment than the Beatles had for “Revolver.” Whenever guitarists get all wound up about whatever guitar or device they do or don’t have I point them to Jimi Hendrix’s solo in “Machine Gun” from the Band of Gypsys album. He had a guitar, a few amps, a fuzzbox and wah-wah, and he played the solo on that record in one take.  The only guitar solo that approaches those heights is his “Star Spangled Banner” solo from Woodstock.

4. How do you get that electric guitar sound?

When the pickups of my Stratocaster are close to the speaker there’s some sort of magnetic interference that takes place between the speaker coils and the coils in the pickups. They fight. It creates a ripping, tearing sound. When I took my amp in to have it fixed once the tech called me up to tell me that the transformer in the amp was bent and peeling apart. He asked me if the amp had ever been dropped. I remembered that when we had inebriated help loading out after a gig in Winnepeg that some guy dropped my amp 5 feet off of a loading dock.

That’s how I get my electric guitar sound. If there’s ever a Steve Tibbetts Signature Marshall Amp, there will have to be an inebriated guy at the end of the assembly line who drops each Steve Signature Model about five feet on to a concrete floor.

5. What are your main influences?

Marcus Wise called me up one day and said, “You should come hear Zakir Hussain play this concert that’s happening in town. He’s playing with Allah Rakah, his dad.” I went in order to see Zakir and his father play dueling tablas. With them was Sultan Kahn, playing a Sarangi, a bowed Indian instrument fretted with the back of the fingers. I had never heard so much color from an instrument in my life. I was stunned and thought that perhaps I had just been caught by surprise by something new. Days later Marcus gave me a tape of the concert, and it was the music, not the surprise. I listened to his playing over and over and tried to imitate the singing, voice-like quality of the Sarangi. The frets ground down on my 12-string and sounded more and more like what I had seen and heard. The frets are nearly flat now. I took it to Hoffman Guitars to have it re-fretted and Ron Tracy said, “Do you like the sound? Don’t fix it.”

Here is a selection from Marcus’ recording of Sultan Khan that night.

Sultan Khan

Synthesesia

Lazy Eye

When I was in third grade I needed eye surgery. My right eye would often turn towards my nose and stay there. This was disconcerting to my parents. I wore a patch on my glasses.  My ophthalmologist said I had a “lazy eye.” I felt bad about my lazy eye.

My ophthalmologist operated on the muscles of my eyes. After surgery I had to stay in a dark room with patches and bandages over my eyes for a week. There was no light at all. My parents came in and read to me every day, for hours on end. They read “The Five Children” by E. Nesbitt and “Just So Stories” by Rudyard Kipling over and over, at my request. My brain, having no visual input, made a startlingly clear set of visual images to go with the words in Kipling’s book. “The Butterfly That Stamped” was huge, glowing, and iridescent. “The Cat That Walked Alone” was two stories high and made of rainbow-hued metal.

When my parents left the hospital the images stayed. They stayed with me through the night, in dreams. When I would wake up I would not be sure I was awake. There was total darkness, and the dream animals still there, right in front of me.

Years later, when I had my own studio and was able to spend a lot of time mixing the music I had recorded I noticed that my mind would always settle on some imagery to go with the music. Sometimes I would follow the imagery, and let it help direct the music. Later, I noticed this sort of thing happened all the time, not just in the mixing stage. Make a sound, see a form. Other artists have told me it happens to them as well. Draw a line, hear a sound.

I had forgotten about the metal cat and the luminous butterfly until I came home from the studio one May evening, this year. My children were asleep and my wife was previewing stories on tape for the kids. She said, “Listen to this.” It was Jack Nicholson reading “The Butterfly That Stamped” Think of it–Jack Nicholson’s voice, all oily, soothing, menace saying, “Once upon a time…” I listened for awhile and remembered everything.

In 1976 I had a job in a record store in St. Paul. One of my co-workers was a guy named Morrey Nellis. He became director of intramural athletics at Macalester College where I used to go for a run every now and then. In 1990 or ’91 he gave me a tape of Hardingfele music saying, “Listen to this.” He got it from his wife who was director of the Hardingfele Society of America.

A Hardingfele

A Hardingfele is a Norwegian fiddle that has sympathetic (drone) strings under the fingerboard. It has a rich and resonant tone. A huge sound. They are beautiful instruments, decorated with pearl inlay, rosette patterns and other sorts of filigrees. Besides having a beautiful sound, the Hardingfele (or “Hardangar fiddle”) has a lore and mythology all its own. The fiddlers and their instruments were sometimes thought to be in league with certain spirits, or even Satan himself, or Satan herself.

It was thought that, in order to play his (or her) best, a fiddler must make a pilgrimage on a moonlit night to certain waterfalls and throw in a leg of mutton to invite the spirit of the waterfall out. The spirit (“fossegrim”) would break the fingers of the fiddler’s left hand so he or she could reach formerly impossible fingerings, and then break the fingers of the fiddler’s right hand so the bow could be held more efficiently. The fiddler would then be beholden to the spirit and begin his career of roaming the countryside and playing. A good fiddler was said to be able to play in such a way that a glass of whiskey would dance across a table and up the fiddler’s arm. The Lutheran church took a dim view of these legends and encouraged mass smashings and burnings of these instruments.

I took the cassette that Morrey gave me back to my studio and, after it started, had to sit down and listen to it. It was good. The cassette had little in the way of information. It was all in Norwegian. I did figure out that the fiddler was a man named Vidar Lande.

Vidar Lande

In’93 or’94 I went to a concert by the Finnish band “Vartinna.” I bought a CD at the show and the guy selling me the CD looked at my check and recognized my name from my ECM releases. He said he had a record shop in Helsinki. I asked him if he knew where I could find Vidar, and he said he would try to hunt down his address. About two months later he sent it to me. I took two tunes I liked from Vidar’s cassette, dubbed them up to my 16-track, and added a few tracks of guitar and gongs around them. Then I sent a tape off to Vidar and asked him if he’d like to do an album together. He wrote back and said he would.

This was about the time Chö (my album with the Tibetan singer Chöying Drolma) was coming out. I was looking forward to doing a project that seemed simple. The project with the Tibetan nuns was complex. There was a lot of travel involved, and a great deal of conflict with structures of power, both institutional and personal. Norway seemed simpler. Norwegians in Minnesota seem more up front about things. In Asia it’s hard to figure out what people really want, and what the real story behind a situation is. As it turned out, there was just as much mysticism and intrigue in Norway as there was in Nepal.

At that time I was preparing to travel to Bali to administer a study abroad program, and just before I left Vidar wrote and said he couldn’t do the project. He said he hadn’t been playing music much and had been busy with his duties teaching Kierkegaard at Oslo University. However, he did recommend a player from Folkedal named Knut Hamre. He said Knut had great tone and was easy to work with.

I sent a letter to Knut, and he replied favorably to me at my address in Ubud, in Bali. I had brought a cassette copy of his CD to Indonesia, and listened to it a lot. The cyclical nature of the Hardangar fiddle music seemed to mesh nicely with the gong cycles of Javanese and Balinese music.

Marc Anderson and I flew to Oslo and caught the train to the western side of the country. We spent about 10 days recording with Knut and Turid in a small church in Utne. Every morning we would board a ferry to cross the fjord from Granvin to Utne. We would run through the tunes together and work on arrangements, then Turid and Knut would play while we recorded them.

Knut, Turid, and Friends

The recording project in Norway was fairly straightforward. Knut plays about eight to ten hours a day, so this type of recording session was easy for him. There were moments when his instrument was warmed up, the room felt right, and he would say, “The song is coming now.” And it would.

The distant sounds of the ferry or fishing boats (“fiske boats”) sometimes crept into the recordings. Knut’s wife Aud would pack a lunch of lefse, coffee, and goat cheese for us. At the end of the day we’d get the ferry back home. On the ferry, or drinking cider waiting for the ferry, we’d talk about the lore that swirled around the instrument, its players, and the subjects of the songs. A lot of the songs are about Huldres, mythical mountain beauties who come and sing songs to fiddlers asleep under trees. “Underground people,” Turid called them.

Huldre Talking to a Farmer

There isn’t much that happens in that part of the country, so our recording project attracted the attention of the national television and ratio stations. They came to interview us at the end of a long day of recording. They asked us if we thought the CD would sell. We surprised them by saying, “No.” Hardingfele music is not all that popular in Norway, and I could tell that the album would edge towards the stranger side of the instrument. On the ferry home Knut mentioned an old saying, something like, “The only exercise my father got was leaping across the room to shut off the radio when Hardingfele music came on.”

After the end of the television interview in the church Knut said, “I remember a song, a song is coming.” He unpacked his fiddle, we set the microphones back up, and everybody sat down and listened while we recorded him. Knut seemed to invoke something. Huldres, maybe. The wood grain in the walls started to crawl. Marc wrote these notes on the tape box: “With everyone around, T.V., radio museum. Fiske boats and evening traffic throbbing about. We sat in rapt attention. Chocolate and caffeine hardly noticeable this late in the day. Underground people.”

Recording notes: I didn’t like the sound of the DAT I used to record the nuns in Nepal, so I brought an analog Nagra reel-to-reel tape deck. I used two Neumann U-87s with the Nagra.

I was looking for advice on microphones from a friend and he said, “I never heard a good recording of a violin that didn’t have a lot of the room in the sound.” I found that to be true with the Hardangfele. I put one microphone close to Knut, and one about 20 feet away in the church. This worked well, so we used the same approach with Marc’s drums and my guitars. We used very little EQ or reverb in the mix, and kept the recording chain analog all the way to the end. I’m not an analog purist, but the medium seemed to suit the music.

I did a lot of gong sampling in Bali. The school I work for there has a Balinese Gamelan orchestra, and when time permitted I would drag each instrument into my room and get good samples of it. My room was right on a rice paddy, and I did most of my sampling at night, so that’s why you can hear insect sounds in some of the samples. It wasn’t my intention to be overly pastoral, though the bugs twittering and frogs croaking seems to fit in some places.

THE FALL OF US ALL

The Fall Of Us All is the sixth ECM recording by Steve Tibbetts; this long-awaited tour de force from theunique guitarist will be greeted with cries of delight and one question: “What took so long?” Fortunately, we have the answer to that and all other questions about Tibbetts and his music.

First, for those of you who don’t know, Tibbetts was born in Madison in 1954; at the age of 12, he heard the distorted guitar of the Blind Joe Mendelbaum Blues Band in the Teen Tent at the Dane County Junior Fair, and “was overwhelmed by the splendor and majesty of it all. They were very loud.”  He has been playing distorted and loud guitar ever since, recording such highly acclaimed albums as Yr, Exploded View, and Big Map Idea, as well as occasionally touring, with long-suffering percussionist / partner Marc Anderson. In between, he has traveled to Asia to study music, bum around, and even work, and this album is the result of that journeying, outlined here by Steve:

1989 Feb-May: Deliver Big Map Idea to ECM, hop flight from Frankfurt to Delhi. Throw up on plane to Kathmandu. India closes Nepal border, (riots force government to chopper out Westerners, first ride on a helicopter piloted by a guy with a green turban). Hitch back to Kathmandu, get ride from Swiss man in Land Rover who gets hopelessly lost. Attacked by dogs in Darjeeling. May: Beat jaywalking charge in U.S.Jun-Aug: Travel with wife-to-be through Thailand, Malaysia, Java, and Bali. Propose to wife-to-be at summit of volcano. Study drumming. Jump off wrong train in Thailand (moving) and out of burning van in Bali (also moving). Monkeys steal wife-to-be’s glasses. More dog attacks.

1990 Mar-Dec: Midwest tour, German tour, studio work, buy house in awful neighborhood, get married.

1991 Jan-Apr: Back to Indonesia. See trances in South Bali. See guy eat light bulb in Java. Apr-May: Tour midwest and east coast. Aug: Canadian tour. Driving truck, tear off gate at tollbooth in Chicago and peel off front of Honda Accord in Montreal. Same night in Montreal, walk up stairs to stage at Club Foufounes Electriques and gash head on lit-up metal sign that says “Dangereux”. Bleed all over self and Strat, causing crowd to go wild.

1992 Mar: Tour midwest, west coast, and east coast. Batman (Michael Keaton) comes to see gig in L.A. Blow up P.A. at L.A. gig. Sound guy leaves pinch-hitter on dashboard of truck returning from Winnipeg gig. Busted at border by U.S. Customs, truck seized. Marc and Steve, sick of life in general and each other in particular, nearly strangle each other in cab of truck driving between horrible gigs in Columbus and Detroit. August: Wife shakes Clinton’s hand at rally in Baldwin, Wisconsin. Sep-Dec: Travel to Nepal again. Bhutanese government waives $120/day fee for tourists and lets Naropa Institute Study Abroad program in free for cremation of high lama. Jim Reeves tape playing in hotel lobby in Paro, Bhutan.

1993: Sep: Finish The Fall Of Us All and deliver to ECM. Go to Nepal, India, and Tibet with wife. Get out of van after arriving at guest house in Lhasa and hear someone yell, “Hey, Steve, I like your album.” Turns out to be monk gave cassette to in Sikkim in ’89. Survive dog attack near Samye in Tibet.

1994: Feb: The Fall Of Us All released in U.S.

In Indonesia, Tibbetts was moved by the furious double drumming styles of Balinese Gong Kybar, in ’89 and again in ’91, he studied drumming with I Nyoman Pak Sumandhi, in Denpasar. The endless gong cycles of music in Indonesia fascinated him; “In the course of an eight-hour nighttime performance, one’s ears would begin to hear more and more clearly the long arc of sound that anchors a piece of music.” In Nepal, Bhutan, and Tibet, Tibbetts stayed in or near monasteries, awaking and going to sleep to the sounds of the horns, crashing cymbals, and drums used in the pujas (prayer services). Between travels, Tibbetts “tried to forget what I’d heard and learned, lest the music I was working on become a cheap and all-too-easy grafting of mutually disparate forms.”

The Fall Of Us All is the fourth and last of a series that started with Safe Journey and includes Exploded View and Big Map Idea (“Why not impose order on chaos?”).

Tibbetts began his recording career in 1977 with a record released on his own label, Frammis; this youthful effort was followed by the five-star “guitar freak’s dream” (DownBeat), Yr, also on Frammis originally but now available via ECM. Northern Song was Tibbetts’s first ECM release; the second was Safe Journey. Steve has been joined on all his recordings by percussionist Marc Anderson, who also tours with him. Marc released his first album as a leader, Time Fish, in 1993. On The Fall Of Us All, other contributors include Marcus Wise on tabla, double basses in Jim Anton and Eric Andersen, Claudia Schmidt and Rhea Valentine on vocals, and Mike Olson (synth, Linn).

The Fall Of Us All is two albums; the first six electric songs are one suite, the last five acoustic ones another. (“There’s a lot of electric guitar in the first few songs, probably because we did a fair amount of frustrating touring, and we’re loud when we’re frustrated.”) Tibbetts’s explanation: “It’s a big meal all around, easy to choke on. The best way to listen to it: You’ve got a fine new driveaway car with a top-notch stereo system. You’re traveling cross-country from Ohio to California. It’s 1:30 am and you’ve just finished your greasy dinner at a truck stop in Council Bluffs, Iowa. You drive off. You’ve got a large, weak, and extremely hot coffee positioned between your legs, and you listen to the album between Kearney, Nebraska, and Sterling, Colorado. It needs that kind of captive audience.”

Most reviews of Steve Tibbetts’s music describe it in the context of what it’s not; what it is, plain and simple, is Tibbettsian.

By Steve Tibbetts
Special to the Minneapolis StarTribune – May 4, 2003
Photos by Megan Yalkut

Some years ago I took a group of students studying abroad to an Odalan, an annual, daylong ceremony at a temple in Bali. Only priests and villagers were allowed into the inner part of the temple, but one of our adjunct faculty, Degung, had promised to get our properly garbed group in later, after the trance had started.

“You want to see trance, right? The great Balinese freak show,” Degung said.

After a good three hours in the blazing sun we saw the gates open and villagers in trance being led out to circumambulate the temple. I’ll never forget the look on one young woman’s face: an incredible mix of astonishment, grief and transcendence.

photo: Megan Yalkut

We followed the crowd into the inner temple and stayed five hours. The scene that burned itself into memory was one in which a young Balinese man in trance, facing a row of mute priests, drove a dull kris knife into his chest, rotating it in slow movements while moaning / shrieking / ululating / singing.

The music that brings on this sort of trance is represented on Nonesuch’s series of Indonesian recordings. Some of the best are by the eminent musicologist Robert Brown, who coined the term “world music” back in 1962. Brown leads student workshops and tours in Bali and Indonesia and maintains a residence there.

Brown has been around the block. Just in passing, he mentioned during a recent phone conversation that in 1959 he was in northeast India, researching music, when the Dalai Lama fled Tibet. I asked him if he had seen the Dalai Lama.

“Oh yes, sure,” Brown said. “The whole troop on horseback. I was visiting some almost totally isolated monasteries on islands in the Brahmaputra River, where joyful monks, donated to Krishna by pious families before the age of 5, spent the day singing, dancing, drumming and working in their gardens.

“It was a happy coincidence to be there when that line of men and women arrived on horseback. I remember the date well: It was my 32nd birthday, April 18, 1959. There were some reporters covering the event, and I remember one, probably under the spell of ‘Shangri-La,’ saying, “See that old woman, I’ll bet she’s at least 200 years old!”

Robert Brown

Here are Brown’s responses to some questions I asked him in March. He spoke to me by phone from his home base in San Diego.

Q: A friend of mine who’s a frequent visitor to Indonesia said the Balinese recordings had a lot of taksu. What’s your translation of that word?

A: I feel a little inadequate to translate that properly. I suppose it could be “charisma” or some kind of spiritual power. One very powerful dalang [shadow puppeteer] I knew transferred his taksu just before he died. Not to his son, surprisingly enough, but to his great-grandson. I was there for the ceremony, a beautiful ceremony welcoming the spirit back to the family. A little boy, 1 or 2 years old.

Q: Do you see some correlation between the cyclical nature of their music and life ceremonies?

A: My old friend Nyoman Wenten’s grandfather was a dalang who lived to be almost 100 years old, or maybe a little more. Nyoman Wenten is the head of world music at California Institute of the Arts, and a performer of Balinese and Javanese dance and gamelan. He and his grandfather were always very close. [The old man] told Nyoman, who often goes home to Bali in the summer, to be there on a specific day the following summer. Wenten understood what that meant.

On the appointed day the old man, with some difficulty, bathed himself, lay down peacefully on his bed and died. Older Balinese know how to do that. Because he was not of high caste, the old man was carried to the cemetery, about 10 minutes’ walk from the house, in a rather plain coffin with just one roof over it. Kings get 13 roofs.

What surprised me was that Wenten actually climbed up and sat on the white-shrouded corpse, as the procession left for the cemetery. I suspect that he did this to protect his grand- father’s spirit, in an unusually vulnerable state while still associated with the husk of the body before its release by fire.

In Bali, the body is simply something to be disposed of as soon as possible, having served its purpose as a temporary home for the spirit, which is released by the ceremony to fly away, ready to return as part of the next cycle of rebirth.

Balinese live in an interlocking complexity of cycles, including 10 different lengths of weeks, and this is mirrored in the cyclical nature of the gong patterns, wherein gongs of different size and pitch maintain a repetitive and interlocking alternation of sounds.

Unlike much western music, there is no ultimate goal for Balinese melodies, and the final gong in a cycle simply closes that cycle for that particular moment in time. Some Indonesians believe that all music exists in perpetuity, and that all one does in performance is simply to “bring it down” into audible range.

Q: What’s your take on the artistic influence of Westerners who took up residence in Bali in the 30s?

A: I tend to think of Bali as about as complicated a culture as you can find. They take things in, and don’t take other things in. Their culture is like a lodestone; the Balinese will never be anything other than Balinese. The music they do for the tourists is not different from what they do in the temples.

The basic sound of the Kecak, for example, is something that goes back into the past, it’s part of a ritual.

The monkey chant

The famous Kecak chant of Bali dramatizes the section of the epic South Asian poem the Ramayana in which the monkey god Hanuman marshals his troops and attacks the evil King Rawana. Its interlocking rhythms – and the interlocking rhythms of much of Balinese and Javanese music – have influenced composers as notable as Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

The Kecak came into its pre- sent form in the 1930s, when a Balinese dancer was encouraged by Walter Spies, a German living in Bali, to adapt an ancient form of chanting for a tourist performance.

Tourist music or not, the vocalizations and rhythmic acuity of these groups are astonishing. Of the two Kecak CDs on Nonesuch, Golden Rain better captures the insane, hell-bent quality of this music. The more recent CD Gamelan & Kecak is a better all-around recording.

However, neither can supply the unearthly torchlight they use for the performance, the bugs humming in the background, the masks, the dancing, the chanters swaying, the upthrust arms, or the 99-percent humidity. You’ll just have to go there for that.

In some ways the tourist industry has invigorated Bali’s music scene. Your basic savvy traveler wants to see the best, and Bali will try to oblige. Ensembles meet for competitions in order to determine which village has the “No. 1 gamelan ensemble of Bali.”

Three or four ensembles will set up in a courtyard and play simultaneously and deafeningly, trying to throw the others off. It’s sort of like sumo wrestling, except with sound.

‘Big mice’

Tourism to Indonesia is down, as you might imagine, and even a cursory Internet search found round-trip flights from Los Angeles at about $800.

Start by buying a map of Bali. The island is shaped roughly like a heart with volcanos in the middle – which is fitting, somehow. After getting to Denpasar, head upcountry to Ubud, and stay there for a month or two. You’ll make lots of friends (they’ll find you), and with their help you’ll penetrate the Bali theme-park tourist veneer. It’s also possible to get a cheap flight to Singapore, where you can get a cargo ship from Tanjunpinang to Jakarta, and from there take the train and ferries across Java to Bali.

My wife and I signed up for deck space on a cargo ship and were ready to go when the deck master asked us if we minded the “big mice at night.”

I said, “Big mice?” The man held his hands about nine inches apart. My wife said, “You mean rats?” He said, “OK, rats.” We took a plane.

Barring a trip to Asia you can engineer a total sense immersion in the comfort of your home. Get one or two of the Nonesuch CDs: Java: Court Gamelan or Bali: Gamelan & Kecak are good places to start.

Then move your stereo into your bathroom, release 37 frogs and 100 crickets, run hot water until it’s nice and steamy, light a clove cigarette and start playing the CDs. Turn the shower on and off to simulate falling rain. Arrange for an occasional earthquake.

Steve Tibbetts / First Album

In 1975 I had a sort-of girlfriend named Anne, and she had a sort-of boyfriend named Tim, and Tim and I got to be pretty good friends mostly because we admired each other. He admired the motorcycle that I kept in my 3rd floor dorm room at Macalester College and my exquisite ponytail, and I admired Tim’s beard, his IQ of 4000 and his Digitoke.

Bored college students were always looking for new ways to inhale in those days and Tim, being a brilliant engineer and a pothead, invented the Digitoke. The Digitoke was a modified air compressor with a bowl and screen arrangement on the top that could hold half an ounce of reefer. The rest of the machine was a science fiction-like amalgam of blinking lights, keyboards, readouts, and a hose that terminated in a gas mask-like device that was secured to the head with elastic straps. Tim would invite his friends over, fill up the bowl and use a keyboard to type in length of hit, proportion of air / pot mixture, and strength of air flow. He’d strap the mask on his customer, grin his fiendish grin, turn on the Digitoke, and play the flame of an acetylene torch over the bowl. After we’d all had our turn we’d listen to Tim’s state of the art stereo, in silence. We’d listen either to some record on the Impulse label (Coltrane or Pharaoh Sanders) or whatever new Mountain record Tim had. This went on for a few weeks until we got bored again.

One fall evening in 1975 Tim stopped by my dorm room on a social call to find me deep in the midst of my first multi-track experience. A friend named Scott Stevens had lent me his Roberts tape recorder. This particular Roberts was a two-track affair that had sound-on-sound capability. It was a little slice of heaven for me, having been a fan of Paul McCartney and Todd Rundgren’s one man band recordings. “I bet I could do that,” I thought. I found out I couldn’t, at least not with the Roberts, but Tim said, “Listen, I’m the proctor of the new electronic music studio. I’m the only one they know who can solder, so the music department offered me a work-study job. They have a four track. Do you want to see it?” Well, sure. We went to look at the studio.

Macalester, having a Scottish motif, had student bagpipers play at football games and bagpipers needed somewhere to store their kilts. The music department had kindly donated the kilt closet to house the new electronic music studio. It was about five feet by ten, unventilated, and smelled like forty years of sweaty kilts. It was wretched, but it had the sacred four-track (a Dokorder 7140), one microphone, a 4-channel mixer, an EML 101 synthesizer, and two Revox tape recorders.

It also had a note scribbled on a piece of paper and stuck up on the wall: “It’s all too beautiful.” (From the Small Faces tune “Itchycoo Park“) That’s how it seemed to me. In spite of the squalor and sweaty kilt smell it seemed like a dream about to come true. Tim played me a piece he had written on the synthesizer called “Avalanche.” The power and majesty of it was overwhelming. Tim could tell I was smitten. “You should work in here,” he said. I agreed.

I walked home feeling I was viewing everything from a great height. “This is better that the Digitoke,” I thought.

I finished up my art major, decided I wasn’t going to be an art teacher, and spent the fall and spring of 1975-76 in the studio. Unfortunately, I graduated in 1976 and could no longer use it as a legally enrolled student, so I used it illegally during the summer of 1976. 1 would stroll innocently through the music department sometime late on a summer day and prop open one of the inward-swinging windows on the ground floor. At about 11pm I would ride my bike over with the “Mission Impossible” theme in my head, slip in, and work until about 4AM. It seemed daring, mysterious, and clandestine. Up all night. Ride home at dawn. My secret work.

By late summer of 1976 I had enough music for an album but little chance of getting a label to put it out. I did have something I could use for a cover from my art major days and a little money saved from my night shift job at Minnesota Public Radio, so I found a pressing plant in Arizona that would manufacture 200 albums for $600 and I sent them my stuff.  About a month later they sent me the finished albums.

I mounted an aggressive ad campaign, sent flyers to my friends, and wondered what to do with 4 boxes of records.

I gave one to my friend Pig.  Pig Munson.  I don’t know how he got the nickname Pig. He took it home to Rapid City during Christmas ’76 and played it for his friend Bull. Bull’s real name was Kevin Bitz.

Bull took it to San Francisco and played it for his friend, David, who had the afternoon drive shift at KTIM in San Rafael.  David and the rest of the staff at KTIM put the album in heavy rotation.  Suddenly I was more popular than AWB, but not as big as Queen.  That seemed right.

Bull invested $1000 to press and distribute the album in the Bay area, and that’s the last I heard from him except for two phone calls.   The first call was to tell me that television broadcasts of the Bay Area Bombers roller derby team were using “Jungle Rhythm” as their theme music.   He called me just as the broadcast was starting; “And now, the Bay Area Bombers take on the San Jose Rockets…” There it was, the throbbing sound of “Jungle Rhythm,” and as Bull described it, footage of women in helmets crashing into each other. The second call was to tell me that Clive Davis (then president of Arista Records) might be calling me soon. I hovered around the phone for about two weeks.

I sold enough of my first album to buy an eight-track recorder and set up my own studio. I recorded my second album there (Yr) and collected about 200 rejection slips from record companies for it. I put the album out myself and included in the press kit selections from the rejection slips I’d cut up and reassembled in a fit of wrath.

I sent the album and press kit to ECM and they thought it was funny enough to give the album a listen. They were not interested in releasing it but they did send me a letter (with the same strikeovers as the fake rejection letter) offering to do an album “with them directly.”

So we recorded Northern Song in Oslo in 3 days, an album that I had some difficulty with at the time. That was followed with albums recorded in my studio: Safe Journey (1984), Exploded View (1987), Big Map (1989) The Fall Of Us All (1994) and more. Between albums I traveled in Asia, sometimes working for study abroad programs (I have no idea what “Director of Health and Well-being” means).

Sometimes I received small arts grants to study music abroad, or to travel and record sounds to use in the studio.

Every now and then a writer will come to interview me at my studio. When they walk in the door they usually pause for a moment and look around slowly.  I always think they are amazed and thinking something along the lines of, “It’s all too beautiful,” but, no. They interview me,  leave, and then begin their story with something like, “In an airless, dark room in an abandoned warehouse…”

The last I heard from Tim he was working for Canadian Bell. He’s their resident computer genius, responsible for the software that handles all phone lines in Canada. Pig is now Mark, and makes prosthetic limbs. Bull disappeared. Clive never called.