The Watt from Pedro show, 25th January 2009
Mike Watt: Trip. And before that we heard, uh, Myaku, by newryokutanshi. I think it’s a father and son. This guy’s playing bass, he’s like, in his mid forties and his got his boy playing with him, half his age. It’s kind of a trippy concept. Father and son. I saw Amin Ali and Rashid Ali like that.
John Frusciante: Mmhmm.
Mike Watt: Rashid played with Train and Amin a bass player. In fact, at first he was with James Blood Ulmer, a wild guitarist. And the drummer, a young guy, this is early 80s, and the drummer’s this guy named Calvin Weston, a Philadelphia guy, and last year he came out from Philly and played some gigs with him, 25 years later. And uh, he told me Amin Ali stopped bass, put it away, doesn’t play it anymore.
John Frusciante: Mmhmm
Mike Watt: The guy was a monster bass player
John Frusciante: Yeah
Mike Watt: Like freight train coming out of his chest. I remember meeting Rashid and his hat was a turtle shell.
Mike Watt: Trippy drummer. Oh yeah, before that we had a band called, People, with Eyeball Balls Reporting Faster, and then we started that chunk of music…with another song from John Frusciante’s new solo album, The Empyrean, Before The Beginning, which is the first track.
John Frusciante: Yeah
Mike Watt: Any thoughts?
John Frusciante: Wanna say something about the first song?
Josh Klinghoffer: Umm…it was kind of our Maggot Brain
John Frusciante: Yeah
Mike Watt: Oh, wow!
John Frusciante: Yeah, it was inspired by that idea of having an album have a slow start that kind of invites you into a place rather than pushing itself out at you. But…
Josh Klinghoffer: It’s not in a hurry.
John Frusciante: Yeah, it’s not in a hurry to get anything started, and just doing all kind of tripped out, you know, tripped out backwards effects of different types and, uh, playing the mixing board like an instrument, you know
Josh Klinghoffer: That was another one that was done a lot later
John Frusciante: Yeah, it was one of the last things we did. And it was done really quickly, and uh, you know, it was just kinda trying to round out the record. The album already had this song called After The Ending that seems like a real specific type of ending so I figured I wanted to have a really specific type of beginning. And uh, I just thought there’s not enough records that start out slowly like that, like Maggot Brain does. People just often try to put their, you know, their big people pleaser out front, so we figured we’d start out in the mirky depths of darkness and kind of rise up out of there and uh, just for the whole album we were really into trying to do new things with old styles of recording that, uh, in terms of doing all tape edits, and uh, no automation on the board, but like, me and Josh, and our engineer Adam would just be there with our hands on the board (inaudible??)
John Frusciante: It was just, like, uh, you know, sort of trying to do new things with old techniques that in a lot of ways have been discarded.
Mike Watt: (Laughs) Sorry.
John Frusciante: Typically in the computer world.
