Mayo Thompson Interview - 1/29/10

Chris Gray Interviews Mayo Thompson of the Red Krayola:

Rocks Off: Which came first for you, art or music?

Mayo Thompson: I was never a visual artist. I did some drawings and stuff in those days, but I was never a visual artist. Music was something I backed into in a way, something I found myself making. I don't know what you mean, 'which came first.' Like did I choose between two careers or something like that?

RO: Right.

MT: No, I didn't. Music was the thing. I studied art history at St. Thomas. They did not have a studio art department at that time, and I don't know that I would have used it anyway. I studied art history there and made music.

RO: What are the origins of the Krayola in Houston?

MT: You mean why did we start a band? It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. One was looking for something to do, some way forward, to use a figure of speech. Seems as good as any. Popular music was something I had known about for a long time, and been exposed to all my life. My mother played music around the house, and I knew about it.

RO: Would you characterize what the Krayola was doing back then as 'psychedelic'?

MT: I don't know. The Elevators were interested in Psychedelic with a capital P, Psychedelic as a way of life, as a mode, as a strategy, as a philosophy, whatever. We would own up that there was something that was psychedelic in the small-p sense, in the sense that something could expand your mind, and perhaps some medium was required, some substance was required to perform the magic that was discussed in the Elevators' thing.

But it was also possible to look at that as a characteristic of a relationship where you look at a sunset and you have kind of a 'Gee whiz! Isn't that beautiful' kind of effect, which takes you a little bit out of time and puts you in a slightly different space. That we thought of as psychedelic in some way, in the small things and the mundane things, that there were also moments where other worlds and other ways of thinking and other kinds of ideas came into the foreground in some way.

We weren't advocates of psychedelia in the way that the Elevators were, nor were we interested in perpetually occupying ourselves with those states or being in those states. Do you know what I mean?

RO: Are you talking about drugs, or just the...?

MT: I'm just talking about the whole way of things. I don't know. To me, it seemed to be weak thinking.

RO: Was there a lot of friction between the Krayola and Lelan Rogers?

MT: No. We never had any friction with him. We were naïve in extremis; we knew nothing about the business, and we just wanted to make records. We were crazy to make music, and crazy to make records, and our first contract that we signed with International Artists was a piece of boilerplate. It's unbelievable when I look back on it.

I have had occasion to have a lawyer explain to me what that first paragraph of that contract meant, and I signed away a lot of... I wanted to get on with it, and I wasn't paying attention to the business part of it. And Lelan, we had a misimpression of Lelan - we thought that was his record company. It wasn't. It was owned by two lawyers who had bought it from another lawyer. We made that first record, and pretty soon after that, Lelan was out.

When they asked me to come back and make God Bless The Red Krayola, the second album, Lelan wasn't even around. He wasn't even part of their operation; they had gotten rid of him. Instead, Ray Rush was in charge of A&R there, and Fred Carroll was involved in the production side of it.

IA was a shaky organization. They didn't do anything the regular way. They didn't advertise, and they turned around and tried to make a virtue out of that. As we see from what happened in the later years, that this is actually a feasible way of going on, but at the time we didn't think much about it. We just wanted to make a record.

It never occurred to us to try to send tapes to the major labels and try to get a deal in the usual sort of way. We just felt like there was an opportunity there, and we went for it. Lelan was an adventurous thinker in his way. He had an imagination, and he had a show-business nose. He came along and saw us playing one night in a battle of the bands. KNUZ had a battle of the bands we were invited to play. We played one night in Gulfgate Mall, and he came to that looking for a parakeet and found us and asked us to make a record.

I later read in interviews where he said he thought we couldn't play, and I suppose from the point of view of musicianship, I guess we couldn't play. We were not your standard-issue musicians. We just weren't interested in the techniques in quite the same sort of way. Like I said, for us instrumentality was tied to a notion of expressing ideas.

Our understanding of adequacy was a little different. But at the same time, music is a form that has a powerful, phenomenal effect on the body. And one has a feel for time, a feel for frequency, and even without knowing much about it, being 'primitives of the form,' we still managed to touch some things that actually do work, and are characteristic of music that works generally. So I think it was valid as music. I don't think there's any question of that.

We didn't have any friction with anybody, particularly. We were not really - I mean, Steve Cunningham was much more deeply steeped in the scene than I was or Bartheleme was. Bartheleme and I came from a slightly different world. We were a little bit older than he. It was a kind of craziness. It was making it up as we went along. We were determined that we wanted to do it differently, and we had some funny ideas.

We wanted to change the name of the band all the time, and the record company thought, 'Oh, my God.' We had also made up our minds that we would not record the same thing twice, and once we were done with one kind of idea, one way of doing things, we'd move on and find something else.

RO: Did you find living in Houston back then to be constricting at all?

MT: No. I mean, I had other horizons on my mind. But Houston was a perfectly fine place. It worked for a lot of people, and a lot of people that we knew were doing very well there, and things were going on. It was just fine. I personally wanted out, but not because of anything about Houston.

One gets older [and] after all these years, I think 'I can live anywhere if I have to.' And I will. I'll live wherever I have to and I'll make the best of it that I can, whatever's going on. It's certainly the case that Houston suffered from a kind of second-rate, like a hierarchy of relations in relation to culture - you know, New York is where art came from, and Chicago is where music came from. There were all those kinds of clichés around about how the world is organized and how it's built.

That's all nonsense anyway. I mean, not nonsense, but it's not really a problem. Anything anywhere - I mean, look at ZZ Top. They stayed right there and they've done fine. So it's not about the town, it's about your state of mind, I think. Me, I said I wanted out, so I got out.

Also in the '60s, music changed a little bit. The folk thing had been rolling for a while, but then it gave way to electric music. I was interested in those forms, and I was interested in those ideas. I went to Europe in 1965 and sat there for a while and looked around.

When I came back, I got in touch with my friend Frederick Barthelme and suggested to him that we should start a band, that that seemed like as good a way forward as any. I had done a little bit of playing at that time, and Rick had played a little bit of drums, so we just had a bash.

RO: Were you trying to consciously go against the grain of the music that was popular at the time?

MT: I always consciously try to go against the grain of anything that's popular at the time. I'm contrarian by disposition, and unorthodox and iconoclastic and all those things. That makes sense to me. At the same time, I wouldn't want to characterize what I do as going against the grain for its own sake. It's just the way I do it, the way I see it.

The orthodoxies and the standard-issue ideas and so on, things like that, have never been satisfying to me in any way. They always seemed to me to be pious in some way... or I shouldn't say that. That's judgemental. Let's just put it this way: It's not for me. It never spoke in a voice that spoke to me or for me. So I was interested in trying to find something that I could say grace over that made some sense in relation to the ideas, at the same time, that wasn't what was already going on.

Plus I come from a school of thought where if somebody's already doing something, you don't do it. You don't duplicate those relations, you try to find something else. Those kind of constraints informed it, and certainly I have to confess that to a young fella it's a lot of fun to get in people's faces. Getting knee-jerk reactions out of people and stuff like that, there's a certain kind of transitory gratification involved in that, and I confess to having done some of that kind of thing.

But it was not really the main impulse. I always hoped, perhaps, and dreamed to some extent, that one was involved in a conversation where everybody was doing pretty much doing the same thing, looking not for just for the known goods but looking for what else might be there in some sort of developmental sense.

That was still an idea in the '60s, that there was somewhere to go with those things. I've since been disabused of this idea. There is nowhere to go, apart from across the road, maybe. Does that make any sense?

RO: I think so. How did you translate those sorts of ideas into the music you were making?

MT: Just to talk about different things than 'Baby, I love you' and 'It's a pretty day.' Rather than trade in tried and true, to find something new. It also operated at the limits of one's abilities, of course.

When we started playing, one of the things that was palpable to us was how our musicianship stood up to the quality of musicianship with which we were familiar, which included classical music, and then jazz, and then on down to people who were adept at various idioms, like great guitar players like Hendrix or those kind of things. The music made by the Beatles, or the music made by the Rolling Stones, all of which is derived from other kinds. The Beatles, I hear English music-hall music, you know, and the Rolling Stones are obviously R&B.

We were moved by the intensity of jazz bands to some extent, like Albert Ayler was certainly a figure that we admired and had great respect for, partly because he knew his way around his instrument and he could play very well, but he chose to use it in a fairly expressive sort of way and to treat it as an instrument where it was not about technique, and it wasn't about mastery over the scales or those kind of things, but it was about an activist relationship to the ideas, and that the instrument was an instrument conveying those ideas.

So we started from those principles. And we also had some kind of understanding of art, as a kind of progression or series of movements, which it had been up until that time. Those days are over, but it had been up until that time. And we were familiar with notions of avant-garde and notions of [phone rings] Can you hang on one second?

RO: Mm-hmm. [Mayo talks to wife on phone]

MT: Sorry. My wife was calling to report she had survived the traffic. Yeah. You know, in the '60s the world was a lot different than it is now. The '50s had been a glorious time for the United States, and in the '60s things were starting to look a little frayed around the edges in terms of some of the verities that one was taught, or expected to live up to in some way.

I don't know. The war in Vietnam was getting going real good. It was just a different world. The civil rights movement, all that stuff. It was a time of change, and we were as anxious as anybody to change it, and we were perhaps a little disrespectful. I will say that.

RO: How did you wind up assisting Robert Rauschenberg?

MT: Accident. I was sitting in Europe in the summer of '73, and I went to Greece to make a record with a guy named Manos Hadjidakis, the guy who wrote "Never on Sunday." And he was ill and couldn't work, so I just sat there for a month waiting and waiting and waiting and finally I just couldn't stay there anymore. I was running out of money; there was nothing I could do. And there was nothing for me to do there.

I begged his pardon and said, 'I think I'm just going to have to leave. I can't stick around here and wait forever.' And I went, 'On my way home I think I want to stop in Paris.' So he organized a ticket for me and I went to Paris. I was sitting there and it was August, and I was walking around one day with my second wife, who was an artist, and we were walking down the street one day and we saw Rauschenberg sitting in front of Illyana Sonovan's [sp?] gallery.

[My wife] knew him from New York a little bit, and we got to chatting and he invited us to come in, and I wound up working for him through that. He needed to write a press release for this exhibition they were putting together, and they needed a little something because they were launching this printing company. He had a printing press called Untitled Press, and they needed something to write. I knew how to use a pencil, and so I got the job. 'Oh yeah, I can do that. Sure, I'll help you do that.'

So I helped write the press release, and in proving oneself handy at this and that, opportunity will knock. And so when we got back to New York, where I was living at the time, there wasn't much of anything going on and I asked Bob could we have a job. And he found something for us to do because he liked us.

He liked people around him, he liked to hang out, he liked to have fun, and we had had some fun together. So it seemed a natural, and pretty soon we were working for him. I worked for him for about 18 months, almost two years.

RO: What other kind of work did you do for him?

MT: Walked the dog, pick up the dry-cleaning, you know, wash the dishes. Whatever. I suppose the most interesting thing I got to do was working on a film about him. There was a documentary being made about him by a French film company, and the guy who was making it - when Bob saw this film, he said, 'Oh, I can't let this out this way. I need to do some more on it.'

So he asked my wife at the time, Christine, he asked her, 'Do you know anybody that can make movies?' And it happened that I had made some movies when I was at St. Thomas; I had gotten interested in film there. They didn't have a media department there, but I was just making movies. Barthelme and I were working on a film together before we started the band.

And she said, 'Oh, he can.' Like the press release, you know: 'Can anybody write around here?' 'Yeah, I can write.' 'Okay, you get the pencil.' 'Can anybody make a film?' 'Yeah, I think I can probably do it.' I'm not easily intimidated by those kinds of things, or as nervous as it might make me, I'm not going to be so scared that I won't have a go. So he said, 'Can you?' and I said, 'Sure, we'll try.'

I went and rented a camera and wound up finishing this film. The guy who had been making it before was terminally ill, and it fell to Rauschenberg. He backed it up and we did some more filming on it. It's a film called Mostly About Rauschenberg. My version of it, I should say, or our version of it, was never shown until after Bob's death, in fact, in Munich. We were invited to show it there. We went along with some people from Bob's organization, David White, and showed the film then. That was the most interesting thing I got to do.

We traveled around with him some, and worked on installations of exhibitions in various places. We went with him to Israel, for example, and we sat in Jerusalem for a couple of weeks and helped put together a show of his work there, and helped make things. We helped make things in Paris. The usual stuff that assistants do. Some of this, some of that.

RO: I was looking over your discography and it's just staggering. What do you think it is that's made you so prolific?

MT: Well... I don't know. After The Parable of Arable Land and Coconut Hotel and God Bless The Red Krayola and Corky, I thought pretty much I was finished. I thought I had done about everything there was left to do with music. It seemed to me to be exhausted, at least in terms of formal development. I was thinking along the lines of where Schonberg leads to Cage and Stockhausen, out of classical music.

Unless you're really a technician and interested in musicianship and interpretation and stuff like that, which is what players do classically - not being a player and not being interested in music in that way, I thought, 'Well, I've exhausted this form.' I stopped making music for a while, until I met those guys in Art & Language. Then I got to thinking, 'Well, maybe there is something more to do with this stuff, maybe some kind of lyrical content that I haven't explored the possibilities of putting down and dealing with, and some other kinds of expressive relations, some other kinds of politics of relations.'

So there's always been some reason for it - it's always been reason-driven, let's say, where it's like 'Gosh, there is something else to say, there is something else to do.' And production, my motto has always been 'Produce and the world will run to keep up,' or 'Produce and be damned' and 'Take a stand somewhere, do something and see what happens.' So that's what I did, and over the years it's happened that I've had opportunities to make records.

I haven't always pushed it. Sometimes I've pushed it out of necessity, fiscal necessity. I've thought to myself, 'I better go find something to do' a couple of times. That happened to me in England - that's how I got involved in all that stuff with Rough Trade. I found myself in need of a way of making a living, and doing some things, and found out that there was interesting things going on in music, punk rock and all that kind of stuff, and got involved in that.

RO: Of all the collaborations you've done over the years, which ones kind of stand out in your mind today?

MT: The ones I can remember (laughs). If I see it down on paper, I'll go 'Oh yeah, I remember doing that!' or 'I remember them.' The most constant, I suppose, is obviously my association with Art & Language. That persists, and we still find things which are of interest to both of us, sufficiently interesting to animate us [on] both sides, and we get things together and do stuff from time to time.

But every collection of people who have gotten together to do something has been interesting in its way, and I don't rate it one over another.

RO: On this most recent album, why did you choose these five people that you did?

MT: I didn't choose them; Art & Language chose them.

N: Do you know why they did?

MT: (laughs) No. I don't. George Bush, I can think that they might have chosen him because historically they've done portraits in various styles. They've done "Portrait of V.I. Lenin" in the style of Jackson Pollock, so there's a relation there. And they've done a portrait of Bush in the style of a certain Pollock painting which had a certain history. I can't remember exactly how it worked out, but it was shown somewhere in the East, and Lenin's name had to be taken off of it.

I don't know - there are certain kinds of indexicalities that they could answer better than I, and I don't really know them. And I haven't really concerned myself with them, not because I'm not interested in them or anything else like that. It's just that, you know, I wanted to make the record. They've written lyrics and given them to me over the years - well, these things were not written as lyrics. They were written as descriptions of representational works they were making.

RO: Kind of like instructions.

MT: Well, yeah. They describe the features, and when they looked at the lyrics, they thought to themselves, 'Ah, Mayo might like this.' So they called me up and asked if I'd like to see what they were doing with these texts that they had gotten together, and I said by all means, send 'em to me. I looked at 'em and I said, 'Oh hell yeah, I'll do something with that.'

I started thinking about the problem of the very idea of making portraits of these people, and what would go into a portrait, what makes something a portrait, what makes it possible to see these people and to bring them to life, so to speak, or to bring them before one, to conjure them before yourself. It's an interesting formal technical problem. I'm interested in the problems of representation. I have the privilege to involve myself in those kinds of questions rather than other sorts of stuff. So I do.

RO: How did you go about composing the music to match each one of these portraits?

MT: All of those people are very familiar to me. My being an American, I happen to know all those characters. Wile E. Coyote, I saw the first Roadrunner cartoon back when they came out. I always liked Wile E. Coyote and thought he was a very sympathetic figure and, you know, one of the most charming villains in film history.

And I also liked Bo Diddley, and I know Bo Diddley wrote a song called 'Roadrunner.' So I started putting two and two together, things like that, you know, just one step after another, that leads to another thing - the 'knock on' effect with ideas. It was about generating something that was familiar.

You know how portraits are - when you go and look at a portrait of somebody you'll see in a museum, and if they were an explorer there'll be a little globe on the table, and they'll have their hand on a book of geography, that kind of stuff. And so it was pretty simple putting together the atmosphere that goes around these kinds of people. Their worlds, so to speak.

Wile E. Coyote's world is his life in the imagination of people. And I thought about Bo Diddley, of course, and Bo Diddley had just passed away not too long before I started working on that thing. I had always liked his music, and I always felt a great deal of sympathy for him, and understanding, because when I hear 'Roadrunner,' which is a little bit different from his jungle thing, I thought, 'That's the pop musician's perennial problem, that the idea is to make something that everybody will like, and to do something that makes a kind of sense.'

So I went online and saw a couple of performances of Bo Diddley performing 'Roadrunner' with his ensemble, and it just struck me how alienated the whole thing was, about how much it wasn't idea-driven, about how it was a project to do something, and to get something that really resonated with the people.

And who knows? Bo Diddley, at the time he did that, I think he was living in New Mexico. Maybe he saw a roadrunner, or maybe he saw the Roadrunner cartoon and thought that it had captured people's imagination and he was going to get him a little piece of that action, he was going to get in on that, so he wrote that tune, and that tune seemed to be good enough to me.

So I rearranged it and added a few little thises and little thats, but it seemed to be an ideal way of portraying Wile E., a good backdrop. And it seemed to capture some of the energy and the frenetic aspect of it, which is something like a cartoon.

So I got that, and I thought of George Bush as being a figure who is intimately associated with the very idea of Texas. I thought, 'Well, that's my turf.' So I borrowed the University of Texas' fight song, which they borrowed from some other tune they borrowed from, you know, the levee song and 'I've Been Working on the Railroad,' and then I had some other music which I had written. Back in the '80s I wrote a piece called 'The New Eyes of Texas' which I had never done anything with, but I had this piece sitting around.

I thought about 'Home, Home on the Range,' which was written in Texas I believe, and 'Red River Valley' and 'Oh Texas, My Texas,' 'The Yellow Rose of Texas' - I just thought of all that Texiana and thought about George Bush, thought about there being a piano in the White House and, you know... it was pretty straightforward, you know what I mean? It was just a game of association.

And Jimmy Carter being from Georgia, you know, 'Georgia On My Mind.' 'Rainy Night In Georgia.' And then 'Dixie's Land,' something - sort of the forbidden, the hot icon, because it's associated with the Confederacy and associated with the old slaveholding South and the contradictions which persist and continue to this time, continue to haunt the whole relation, as we see. So all of that came into it.

At the same time, with John Wayne, I grew up with John Wayne in the movie house. Back in the day in Houston, there used to be a theater on the corner of Main Street and Richmond Avenue that was called the Delman. I lived around the corner from that theater, and I used to go there every Saturday to the movies. I think I probably saw most of the movies that John Wayne was in from the late '40s all the way through the '50s.

John Wayne was a hero to me. He's one of those figures that I just admired and respected. And of course in the '60s, when there was a question of are you a patriot and how does patriotism express itself, and there was some controversy over what counted as a legitimate expression of patriotism and 'Do you love your country?' and 'Would you die for it?', etc. The Green Berets, and all that moment. And John Wayne had always been a conviction player on the side of flying the flag, which is something I understand.

Of course my father's generation, those people went out and fought the war. That was the world I grew up in. I was born in '44, the war ended a year later, no connection I'm sure, but that colored my relationship to John Wayne. And Ad Reinhardt I got to know about when I got to know about art. And Mozart of course I had known about since I was an infant. I've heard his music all my life.

The funny thing about the Mozart piece is that my wife is a molecular biologist. We were living in Scotland at the time and she had a piano. She's also an accomplished pianist, although she doesn't play any more. At one time she had to choose between biology and the piano, and she chose biology.

Anyway, she would come home and sit down at the piano sometimes and play. One evening she came in and started playing this Mozart piece. She was working on some passage of it that didn't quite satisfy her. She's quite technically accomplished, so she was working on the left hand. I heard this figure, and I said, 'Honey, what's that you're playing?' She told me what it was, the name of the piece, and I'd heard it before but just didn't know what the name of it was.

And I said, 'Would you play that again? Just the left hand, and play it slowly.' She did, and it's the motif from 'Paint It, Black' by the Rolling Stones. This is in the second section of Piano Sonata No. 6 in D (sings). The first 32 bars of the second section of the Piano Sonata in D, that is a motif. It changes register and changes around, it doesn't stay the same way it does in the Stones' version of it, but then I thought to myself, 'Brian Jones, surely he heard that. He had piano lessons as a kid and knew Mozart, and that line had always stuck in his head. Who knows?'

So that was an easy association. And it turns out, of course, that Ad Reinhardt always painted all of his pictures black. They're all black. So there's a certain kind of literalism and a kind of associationism, trading in familiarities, some straightforward representation, which is a little bit different from what I've ever done, but like I said I don't like to do the same thing twice. So that's how that stuff came about.

The John Wayne thing, the movie, one of my favorites of his is The Searchers. It's got music by Max Steiner. I think he must be a German émigré who came to America after the war, somebody like Franz Waxman, who wrote for Hitchcock, somebody who was trained in the academy and knew musical tropes very well, and who was able to adapt things, sitting out there in Hollywood and knew this one and knew that one, and one thing led to another and pretty soon he's writing the music to this movie.

So because it's a Western, he's obliged to bring it down to earth at some level, and there's some fairly prosaic music, and I'm sure that he listened to some American music in the same way that, you know, Bartok listened to folk music and stuff like that. When I listened to The Searchers, I thought, 'Well, there's 'Just a Closer Walk With Thee' in there, it's an adaptation from this old spiritual, but it's also the tune to a thousand songs.' So it's deeply ingrained in American culture, and so it seemed to me to be deeply noncontroversial.

Plus, in that setting, you have all the chromatic excitement, which is all the clichés of soundtrack music versus this homely tune, and that kind of thinking.

RO: What's your attitude toward performing live these days? Do you do much of that?

MT: I confess that I still get a thrill standing in front of people. I don't know why. I really don't. I can't explain it. I mean, there's something completely absurd about the relationship of standing in front of people with a guitar around your neck yowling down a microphone. Like, 'What?' But somehow people will go, and people seem to enjoy it, and I like standing on the other side of the footlights.

And for me, it's a way of being in public. I don't go out much at all, and it's one time I can get out and be in public, and it's when I can play a little bit of a role and get out there and do my thing, and I go on tour sometimes or play shows sometimes, and that makes a kind of sense to me. Plus there's something I really like about the process. I like the way that time passes when you're onstage. I like sharing a vibe with a lot of people in a room. That's a strange feeling, and an interesting feeling. Very powerful.

You notice, like, 'Oh, he dropped his beer. Oh, they're leaving. Oh, she's dancing. Oh, he's not. He's sneering, and that one's laughing, and they're not listening at all.' But the thing about music is, as you know, is whether you're listening to it or not, it's playing you. It's got hold of you. It's got hold of your body and it's moving you around, even if you're not listening to it. Even if you don't like it, or if you do like it, one way or the other it's got you. If you're present, and music is present, it's happening. You know what I mean?

So I like that relation about it as well. I still like playing in public, yeah. I do. And partly because of the, like I said, one of the most interesting parts about it for me is the ability to get out and be with other people.

RO: Are there any plans to play out with this new record?

MT: No, no plans. If something comes up, and somebody has an idea and makes me an offer, you know, maybe I'd do it, maybe I don't. Maybe we will do something. The only place I go on tour in the traditional fashion is in Japan and in Europe, those two places. In America, the band gets invited to play maybe in New York, or somebody will give us a gig in San Francisco maybe. Or we could play in Chicago.

But when I first came back to America and started playing here in the '90s, when I first started working with Drag City, I played in some places in the middle, in St. Louis, maybe somewhere in Wisconsin someplace, I can't remember all the places we played, and Philadelphia. But it's not like Will Oldham, for example, who's out there and who plays every town in America. He goes everywhere and does all those things.

We're not that kind of band. We're difficult, and the music that we play is not - I read a review of something recently that said, 'The Red Krayola's music is not practical.' And I thought, 'That's really a great observation.' There is no practical justification whatsoever for what we do. It's not functional, it's not the kind of music you can put on when you want to dance, it's not the kind of music you can put on at a barbecue.

You might find one or two tunes here and there that'll fit if you had a whole medley of other kinds of things. You can shoehorn something in there, you know? But largely it's unique stuff, and it's the kind of music that was made on the premise of 'Now listen to this' rather than 'Put this on while you're cooking fried chicken' or something like that.

If somebody does that, I'm happy. I'm not ruling that out, but it's not functional music in the usual sense. It's not dance floor. It doesn't sit comfortably in any of the genres that I know of or in any of the categories that I know of, except in the broadest category of them all, which is popular music. There, I think we've got a foothold, along with everything else.

And people say to me, 'Oh, you're part of the alternative music scene.' And I say, 'Look, if there's any kind of music, all music is alternative.' And ours is alternative to all other kinds, and there is no hierarchy of values which is implied in these stances. I refuse a lot of the usual category closures. So it's really not the kind of music that you can - you really have to want to go and hear the Red Krayola do its thing. There ain't many people out there who want to do that.

It's unfortunate. There's nothing I'd like better than to play. Part of the game of popular music, of course, is to do something that catches the public imagination on a grand scale, and I'd love to see that happen. I keep that possibility open, and I wouldn't be surprised. People have funny ideas. Maybe one of our funny ideas meets up with everybody else's funny idea one of these days. Who knows?

So it's that kind of a thing that keeps it going, as impractical as it is in terms of the known applications.

RO: Do you make it back to Houston much anymore?

MT: I haven't been back since 2007. My mother and father are deceased, and my great-aunt, they were the people who brought me to Houston. That was why I went to Houston, was to be with them. I still have some friends who live there, but I haven't been back in a while. I communicate with them.

I've got some cousins who live there, but we were never very close and we don't communicate with each other, so I don't have strong family reasons that bring me back to town. I've got some stuff in storage there, which I need to visit, but I just can't get myself together to do it.

I don't know. I like that city very much. I think Houston is a great city. I've seen it grow from 'The Biggest Little Town In the World,' as they used to call it, and where they zipped up the sidewalks, as they used to say, at 10 o'clock at night. That was back in the day when men went out and they wore hats and ties and stuff like that, and ladies didn't go anywhere without hats and gloves. But that world's gone, and Houston now is a whole new thing.

I like the city, though, very much. I particularly like it between October and March; between March and October I'm not very fond of it. The weather. But I can endure it. How are things there? How is Houston?

RO: Houston's a busy place. We have a nice little art scene here, and a music scene that's improving every year.

MT: Oh, I know. There's always been a lot going on. There are a lot of fine people. What is the Houston Press? I remember back in the day there used to be a newspaper that was owned by Scripps-Howard that was called the Houston Press.

RO: That was a daily. We're a weekly. I guess we've been around maybe 20 years.

MT: I was a paperboy for the Houston Press. That was a good paper. They had a bulldog edition and a morning edition, all those things that came out. That was when Houston had three newspapers.

RO: Right. The Post, the Chronicle and the Press.

MT: I've heard of the Press, and I've seen articles here and there, online for example, where it says Houston Press. I hope y'all are doing well. Twenty years is a good record.

RO: Yeah. Especially these days.

MT: I would come back to Houston if it was a little closer. I'm far away, and my wife works, and our life is here in L.A. at the moment. That's just the way it is. I could live in Houston easily. Now, it would be easy for me, but I just don't see anything happening for me along those lines.

RO: Well, one of these days I know we hope to talk you into coming to Rice or downtown somewhere and doing some Red Krayola stuff.

MT: I appreciate that thought very much. I really do. That's awfully sweet of you, but I have to confess that the very idea of playing in Houston makes me a little nervous. Playing in Texas - people talked about 'Would the Red Krayola play a tour of Texas?' and I've thought about it a number of times; it is a card that one could play. But I'm reluctant. I'm really reluctant. Because... I don't really know why. It just makes me nervous to think about it.

N: Just because you were raised here?

MT: Maybe that's what it is. I don't play in L.A. anymore. When I first came out here, I was kind of going back and forth between here and Houston, spending time with my mother out there. I played some shows here, and played in L.A. for a while. And after a while, I thought to myself, 'I ain't never playing here again.' I live here, and you don't play where you live. It just seems like not a good idea.

There's something like that about it. And I really wouldn't know where to play. The other night I turned on the TV and I saw Roky Erickson playing on Austin City Limits. And that's a natural for him. He's an Austin man, and he's part of an authentic, official music world, a music scene. He can play all kinds of venues, and there was Billy Gibbons onstage with him, and some other people like a guitar player and a solid bass player and a good drummer, and some kind of keyboard.

They're on there doing their thing and I thought to myself, 'What we do sounds something like that, but it also sounds something not like that.' I just don't want to go and face the vagaries of it, I suppose. I'm lacking in nerve on that front. But it's a nice idea, to come to Houston and do something. I like it. I like the town, and Rice is an amazing, amazing campus. Are you affiliated with them? Did you go there?

RO: No.

MT: Are you a Houston man?

RO: Yeah. I grew up here, and lived in Austin for a long time. I'm a UT boy, but I moved back a few years ago.

MT: I joke about Austin and Dallas. Whenever I say I'm from Texas, they always say, 'Dallas, right?' I say, 'I'm from Houston. We admit that Dallas is part of Texas, but that's as far as we'll go. And then Austin, 'Oh, that's a vibrant scene, the music.' And I'll say, 'Yeah, Austin is our state capital.' I underplay it because I believe in rivalry between towns. I kind of like that idea, for one thing. Plus the culture of Austin has always felt a little alien to me, like San Francisco feels a little alien to me. It's too cultured. Too cultivated, and too aware of its own value.

RO: I know exactly what you mean by that.

MT: I bet you do.

RO: I don't think Houston has ever quite had that problem.

MT: That's one of the great things about Houston.

RO: It's always underestimated itself.

MT: It really is a town that's a bit alienated. I like it. You can be as alone there as you want to be, or you can be in the middle of things if you want to be. That's one of the reasons I like Los Angeles, or one of the things Los Angeles has in common with this town, that there's a certain kind of anomie that informs things. You can just make it up as you go along. There is no center, there is no bar where you're going to run into everybody, there's no restaurant where you're bound to run into everybody you already know and all that kind of stuff. I like that. I like that.

RO: I like that too. I like it here because of that.

MT: I can believe it. What did you study at UT?

RO: Different things. Journalism, American Studies, started in the music school actually.

MT: Yeah? You a player?

RO: Formerly. I played cello and bass for a while, classically.

MT: That's great. I'm working on an opera. Man, that's going to be fun. I'm looking forward to locking horns with all those classical people.

RO (laughs): What's the opera about?

MT: It's called Victorine, and it plays in Paris in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Victorine Muron was the model for Manet's painting Olympia. It's this nude, there's a black woman in it and a black cat, a black woman holding a bouquet of flowers. It's largely referred to as a painting of a prostitute.

She plays this role, a courtesan, and anyway, she modeled for a lot of people. She modeled for Courbet, she modeled for Manet, and this thing plays in Paris at the time. The story is occupied largely by a police inspector trying to solve what he thinks are a bunch of murders based on his readings of various paintings of nudes, where he sees them as murdered. He treats these paintings as forensic evidence.

The libretto is by Art & Language. It's very funny. This guy's got a confusion between 'motive' and 'motif.' He looks at the motifs in the paintings and thinks they amount to motives for murder, like there's some sort of message involved, that the killer is trying to tell tales and so on and so on and so on, making political points.

And people are manipulating this copper left, right and center trying to sic him on Courbet. Because Courbet was a lefty, and Courbet got in big trouble for pulling down the Vendome column. He was the minister of culture for the Paris commune, who Karl Marx said of them, 'Their mistake was they didn't march on Versailles and therefore transform all of France.' They were satisfied just to take Paris, that's all they cared about (laughs).

Anyway, this plays in the aftermath of this whole thing, when Louis Napoleon was in charge in France. Art & Language are very good writers. The characterizations are funny, and it's really wordy. It's four acts, and I don't know what the word count is, but let's say there are lots of words there.

It's not like most operas where you have an aria, and a recitative parts where the story is stitched together with some songs. There is only one aria in the whole piece, and one vocal chorus of policemen. The rest of it is all these descriptions of bodies, and then some speculation on the politics of representation.

But it's quite entertaining. I hope it'll be entertaining. I would say if you were to characterize the Red Krayola, I always say we're entertainers. We entertain ideas, and we try to bring these ideas to life so people will be entertained by them as well, or will have the opportunity of entertaining them themselves.

The premium would be on entertainment, and not everybody's entertained by the same kinds of things, of course, and some people have different ideas. Some people, when they think of entertainment, they think of 'ha ha ha,' or, you know, whatever. But this is a more complex relationship to that very idea.

And this opera, I won't say it's traditional, in that it doesn't come out of any particular line of thought, let's say, but I can tell you for sure that my favorite operas in the world are Mozart. Don Giovanni's a fine piece of business. Puccini operas, The Barber of Seville, these are fine, fine, fine pieces of music, and I will not simulate these effects, but I have learned from them and absorbed quite a lot of those ideas, and there will be something in that.

And also, this coincides with my old claim that I can put anything to music - any words, I can find the setting for it, and that's not a problem. The premium has been put on the sense of the language, so that you can follow the story, so it'll be easy to follow the story.

It'll strike a balance between opera as it exists as some kind of spectacle, constrained by the narrative imperatives of Hollywood scriptwriting. In Hollywood they want you to make damn sure that everyone knows exactly what's going on all the time. There will be no mysterious elements or anything like that. Nobody will turn to you in the theater and say, 'Who is she?'

So that would be a criterion, emphasis on sense, and also wedging this thing from the outside into that world and seeing what happens when these worlds collide. That's my entertainment, and Art & Language's entertainment as well, to some extent, would be to go to Salzburg and watch the people who are drenched and steeped in the classical tradition, see how they respond when they have to listen to this stuff.

And they may have to, because there's always a trade-off where commercial necessity dictates that you have to get in bed with some strange people sometimes. That's the card we plan to play.

RO: I sure will. Thank you so much for talking to me.

MT: It was my pleasure. The most recent occasion I had to look at your paper was when Walt Andrus passed away. I really thought y'all did a good job with his obituary, the way you handled it. That was really nice.

RO: Well thank you.

MT: It was really nice. He was a great man.

RO: So I hear. Quite a figure back in those days.

MT: Oh, I mean, he made - so much of the stuff that we know of was done in his studio. Frank Davis still lives in your town, and he's an amazing character. When I first started playing music, he and Guy Clark were two people who were really generous to me. They didn't say, 'Fuck off, kid.' They were playing at the Jester Lounge, which is out on Westheimer right by what is now Loop 610.

It was a folk club, and there were a lot of folk players there. Frank Davis was playing there, and Guy Clark was playing there, and they were the first people who really talked to me in a really straight-up sort of way. We talked about music, and I learned a lot from those two guys.

Corky's Debt I recorded at Walt's, and we recorded Parable at Walt's place. I recorded Corky's Debt for Walt's label, and Rock Romano, who's another Houston stalwart, we did that together. All those players are Houston players that are on Corky's there. There's some good stuff in that town.

Guys I went to college with at St. Thomas, the guys who did the newspaper there, Bob Raines was a drummer, and a guy named Paul Norris, and Bob Raines used to get regularly called by Mickey Gilley to play drums. One time he asked Mickey, 'Why do you call me, Mickey?' He said, 'Because Bob, you play loud. I like that.'

There's some things there, and that obituary brought all that back to life for me. That was really good.

RO: I wish I would have had a chance to sit down with Walt and talk to him before he passed away.

MT: I do too. You know, he and I were talking again on the telephone, about the possibility of remastering that stuff, The Parable of Arable Land and God Bless The Red Krayola, because this record company, Charlie, who have got control of that kind of stuff, there's some sniffing around about maybe making peace over this stuff. We'll see.

We've been cut out of it for years. But I think they did that box set with the Elevators, and I think they wanted to have something of mine along the same lines with us, which eventually might happen. So there was talk about Walter and I getting back together and remastering that material, and I was talking to Walter on the telephone through the past year, up until the time he passed away. It was just great talking to him. He's such an amazing fellow. Funny fellow.

He was one of the people who was not balked by the fact that the things that I was doing were perhaps not official enough, or that they didn't belong to the regular categories. He just heard the sound and he liked the sound. He had a really open mind about things. He was vital to my getting involved in the business as well.

The first thing we ever recorded was with him, in fact. Before we signed with International Artists, we went in his studio and made a single. He was extremely encouraging.

RO: Well, I would very much like to see how that all turns out.

MT: Stay in touch.

Mayo Thompson Interview & Red Crayola Video

Check out this video of Vietnam War footage to some Free Form Freakout by the Red Crayola. Everybody knows that War Sucks. I have pasted below an interesting interview with Mayo Thompson.

MAYO THOMPSON OF THE RED KRAYOLA
Interview November 13, 1996 by Richie Unterberger

The first time that Lelan Rogers, owner of the Texas-based International Artists label, saw the Red Krayola in 1966, they were playing at a shopping mall. Not the most appropriate venue, one would think, for a band that was working up songs like "Hurricane Fighter Plane," "Vile Vile Grass," "Transparent Radiation," and "Pink Stainless Tail." "He couldn't believe that we were serious," remembers guitarist and singer Mayo Thompson, who over the last 30 years has been the constant source of the guiding vision for the band (and indeed, their only permanent member). "He thought it must be comedy."

Rogers, the older brother of country-pop superstar Kenny Rogers, recalled in the liner notes to the Epitaph for a Legendcompilation, "There was this group of kids, three of them, up on a stage that had four or five different kinds of instruments and they could not play a note. They were just making noise and they were really putting the people on. I figured anybody that was able to put on a crowd like that -- there's got to be a market. I went over and I said, 'Hey guys, give me a call.'"

No doubt some listeners think that Red Krayola are still "just making noise" 30 years later. Mayo Thompson's lyrics are still free-associative patterns with little in the way of narrative, anthemic slogans, or, god forbid, feel-good romanticisms. The music is still an admixture of catchy pop tunes and incongruous dischords, delivered in ever-shifting arrangements that sometimes seem to owe more to chance than planning. And Thompson's still singing in his gentle whine, like an off-kilter, slightly off-key Texas cousin of Ray Davies.

Truth to tell, Thompson seems to care less what mainstream or underground critics might think of his discography. For one thing, at the moment he's as busy as ever with another edition of the Red Krayola, and experiencing a greater level of success in his native U.S. than he's ever attained since 1967. Unlike just about any other "underground" rock musician you could name who began recording in the 1960s, Thompson's gone from psychedelia to punk to post-punk without missing many beats. Whether with the noise-psychedelia of the '60s Red Krayola, the scratchier-than-a-blackboard guitars of his late '70s English edition of the band, or a current lineup that falls somewhere between those extremes, he's remained resolutely outside of both pop and "counterculture" trends.

Did you ever see the compilation Epitaph for a Legend?

"Vile Vile Grass" is on there, which has never been recorded in any other form. What that was, was a demo session. They wanted to know, "what material do you have." 'Cause they'd heard us play live and wanted to know what else we had. So they sent us in this small 16-track demo studio. We got there and we thought we were going to be able to do some interesting recording, and found out that they just wanted a version of the tunes. So, one gave them a version of the tunes and that was it. So those tunes on there are stuff that they had lying around in the can from the demo days. I don't know why. They never were meant as releasable material, in the usual sense. Those are archival tapes, I would say. The performances are what they are.

In the liner notes, Leland Rogers remembers seeing you for the first time in a shopping center. He said something like, "these guys couldn't really play, but everyone was really getting into it, so I thought I had to do something with them, even though I didn't really get what was going on."

He said that was funny. He said that he thought he couldn't believe that we were serious. He thought it must be comedy. I never tried to regulate people's responses. It was a Battle of a Bands thing. It was a gig at a shopping mall. We got unplugged in the course of the set, kept playing anyway, and then somebody plugged it back in and we went on playing.

Did the band have any vision then, as far as being different from other ones?

We set out from the beginning to mark our difference from everybody. We wanted to eliminate everybody, and we wanted to tighten the logic. We wanted to say, is there logic in pop music? And, if there is, if there's a claim for a certain kind of progressive logic or certain kind of developmental logic, well, let's see where it goes. So our strategy was totally informed to some extent by art and avant-garde traditions and those kinds of things. But, our aim was to shut everybody else up. 'Cause we hated everything everybody did, just about, with the exception of a few things.

We had a few heroes, a few bits and pieces that would squeak through that would be satisfactory to us. We admired Fahey. We admired Country Joe & the Fish, that EP that they made. Also, Electric Music,the first album, was quite okay. It had some really good stuff on it. We liked Van Dyke Parks, we liked more "out" stuff.

Partly, the logic was a certain kind of extremism, let's say, in relation to the previous standards. Mainstream action--the Beatles and all that stuff--obviously was very influential and informed what one was thinking. The Stones, the same, Dylan, the same. There were certain avenues which obviously were being explored, and closed down, as far as we were concerned. Why do what somebody else was already doing? Why even try? Because we also did not see ourselves as part as what everybody else was doing. We were not hippies, we weren't involved in the worldview that informed counterculture. For us all these kinds of things, these interests and considerations, came out of a general impetus to make art in general.

The first album had a lot of tunes that wouldn't have been called "industrial" then. But looking back on it now, they seemed to anticipate a lot of that kind of stuff. How did the ideas for those arrangements come about? It was pretty different from anything else around that era, on what was nominally a "pop" record.

It's epiphenomenal aspects of learning something, right? You start somewhere, and you know a little bit, and you hear what other people are doing, and you try to figure out what you don't like about that and what you can do. That's what our aim was. So we started off with perhaps some fairly rudimentary musicianship, obviously. But having an ear for how things sound, how they actually sound, and getting involved in the kinds of sounds you can make, and then thinking about what kinds of things are possible. For us it was not like, "Here's a category, we're going to move into this category. Here's a genre, we're going to move into this genre, take it over, and make it our own, blah blah blah." It wasn't any of that kind of stuff at all. It was really about the investigation of forms, to some extent. And I suppose we definitely, like everybody else, we were being ourselves, you know? Trying it on. Trying to find out what did it, what didn't work, what did work, what kinds of reactions we were interested in.

Then there came a moment when it was like the affirmations of a crowd of youth were allegedly going to take over the world were not very interesting, finally. One understood the complaints--against the Vietnam War, etc., and sympathized with all those political sorts of things. But we did not get involved with music for political reasons. For our political reasons, maybe, to some extent. There was this distinction between life and art for us. Life was something, and art is something. It wasn't a question of trying to turn your life into art.

How was the first incarnation of the Krayola received live?

Musicianship was much more important, let's say, in those days, a certain kind of technical expertise. Which meant that people looked at what we were doing as unorthodox in some sort of sense, as neither the mainstream nor the counterculture. Not really the underground. Not the Velvet Underground, not demi-monde, not our thing and forget your world over there, we're gonna have our world over here. None of that kind of stuff at all. We saw ourselves as between all of these spaces, if you like.

I think the reception was generally that we were counted as outsiders somehow, weirdos. Weirder than people who were professional weirdos. Not Frank Zappa, not Beefheart. Not the kind of people that you would expect that we would be lumped with. One of the people in Texas I felt the most affinity with was the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, who for me, did something interesting with his first single--"Paralyzed" and "Who's Knocking At My Door." This was incredible. That was the kind of thing I liked. I understood that was part of a tradition that came out of, like, Stan Freberg records and a whole lot of other kinds of things. Just part of what's fun and what's interesting to do, with the important caveat, has not been done.

What were the circumstances under which the first lineup of the Krayola broke up?

We played the Berkeley Folk Festival in '67, and we recorded some material with John Fahey. And our record company went through the ceiling over this. They threatened not to bring us back from California, even though they had used our publishing royalties to fly us out here in the first place, which is illegal, I have subsequently found out. But they threatened not to bring us back. So Rick and Steve said, "You go to Frisco and get the tapes, and we're going back to Texas." So it became my job to do this, because I had started the band. So I came back up here and picked up the tapes, which were reluctantly handed over. We intended to try to do something with them. And then I had to take these tapes back to Texas, give them to the record company, and then bust up, that was the end of that. Rick went to New York, started writing and making conceptual art, and stopped playing music in the way we had been playing music--made music at home.

I was just at loose ends. I went to southern California and sat there in Los Angeles for a little while, for about a month, two months, trying to see what was going on, seeing what was happening. Met a few people, but nothing ever really happened. I was friendly with the United States of America. We shared rehearsal space with them. I worked with them--I did sound for them a bit in the beginning, and I met Joe [Byrd] and those people. I knew that band. And Nico was around, looking for musicians. She had just left the Velvet Underground and was about to make Marble Indexand those kinds of things. She was looking around for some people to be playing with. She was not interested in what I was doing.. I met her. The idea was, could you work with this person? No.

The first record did business. IA called me and said, let's have a second album, we need another album. We recorded a second album, Coconut Hotel,which the label didn't like at all, which was this abstract music, the most extreme version of the logic that we could conceive of at that time, and also answered to our needs. I mean, if people are going to claim that they're making innovations, we felt anybody who makes these claims had better make them in light of what's going on in jazz, and what's going on in R&B, and places where music is--there's certain kinds of things where experimentation within forms, within closures, are going on.

To talk about experimental music and not know Cage seemed to us a fatuous proposition. You have to know these things. Our music was informed by steering a course through those things that we saw as landmarks, and various things that we saw us piles of dogshit in the street.

Most of your sales were in New York and San Francisco?

One might be interested in numbers, but, I mean, [Rogers] also says in the interview that we've sold something like 50,000 records. I know that we sold 8-10,000 records in New York, and we sold some records in L.A., some Frisco. Major urban centers, obviously. But what he's not alluding to is the fact that International Artists did not advertise. There were no band photographs. There was no promotion. This was making a virtue of your shortcomings. This was the beginnings of alternative rock.

You knew Roky Erickson at that time.

He played on our first album. He plays keyboard on "Hurricane," and he played harmonica on "Transparent Radiation."

Have you been in much contact with him since then?

I have not seen him since he was spirited away to a mental institution when he decided to plead mental incompetence against a charge of marijuana, which at the time in the United States, in Texas particularly, was very dangerous. Police saw themselves as having a crusade against this upstart psychedelic loony fringe. So they worked hard to destroy that band. But I used to see Roky around. We got along. He was an interesting guy. But he was already quite out there in some ways.

Did his subsequent mental problems and instability surprise you?

"Unstable" is only in relation to our norms. Maybe not so unstable, but on another planet, on another wavelength from the beginning. What little I know about his family background--his mother's a very strong woman, very powerful. His father's an architect. I think he comes from a somehow cultured family, and middle-class family. He was one of those people who just never had any doubts about what direction he was going in. It just never occurred to him to think, could this be the wrong thing to do? No! This is it, this is what's happening. But Tommy Hall mediated. Tommy was playing the translator for us for us on the first night: "You must show Roky the changes." One could look at Roky and knew that he knew exactly what was going on, that he knew what we were talking about, he could hear the music, he knew what that was. And he did it. You can hear that he did understand it, because these elements that he had fit perfectly into our program.

My impression of him was that he was an extremely sensitive person and extremely talented, with a great deal of energy, power, charisma, all of those kinds of things. But in a certain sort of sense, somebody who needed somebody to take care of other kinds of affairs for him on some level, that's all. He didn't seem to me to be debilitated in any way. Taking seriously the idea of taking acid every day is questionable. Even to me at the time, being wild child or whatever, you look at that and you go, boy, that's extreme.

What was the original label for Corky's Debt to His Father?

Texas Revolution. Walt Andrus was head of the best studio in Houston, and in that particular period, he recorded everybody. Euphoria, who were definitely West Coast psychedelic progenitors of surf music, South Bay surf music, incredible guitar playing, power trio, the bass player out of the band that made "Pipeline" or "Wipe Out" or one of those kind of things, and a great drummer and a good guitar player. What you saw with Hendrix--the same principle, taken to its highest expression.

Walt recorded this album. The technical level came out of traditional recordings of all kinds of regular kinds of music. Now the music scene has changed immeasurably, and the technology has leaped fucking ahead of the music, and the music expands by developing certain kinds of technological chops which become evident. Or certain kinds of technological possibilities became evident, like sampling or whatever. I'm not poo-poohing anything, I'm just saying that seems to happen a lot. At the time, everybody was making it up as they went along. The first album is mono--the stereo is simulated. It's a trick. It wasn't electronically reprocessed--it was like two tape recorders with one master tape (here), and one master tape (there), and then you'd put your thumb on that one occasionally and slow it down, so that, ooh, the ground gets a little weird. Really ad hoc--all by the ear. How does it work? How can it work? What can you make it do?

Pop music has changed, obviously, with punk, completely. But at the time that I made the solo album, it was Walt Andrus' own label. He had a lot of money which he had gotten to start a label called Gulf Pacific, which was a joke on Gulf & Western, I think. He was partners with a couple lawyers in Southern California who had gotten some money to do a blues reissue from somebody and blah blah blah, and there was this kind of money, so we were able to make this record. And he was like a few weeks short of really having it all together, Texas Revolution being really together. And then the whole partnership collapsed and fell apart for some reason. And the dream ended. But that would have been a really...that was going to be an interesting project, because Walt Andrus and Frank Davis, he was also an early hero of mine, a real legend in Houston, a great musician.

We were going to make records of the news. We were going to put the newspaper to music, and sell it on street corners. Like make it in one day, press it, and sell it the next week. Topical songs, sold out of the back of a truck. All the things that we've later come to see--indie music, the DIY scene, all that stuff.

Did anything else come out on Texas Revolution?

Linden Hudson made an album. He made the first one. He's a vocalist--had incredible falsetto range, like Frankie Valli quality. Good singer.

Did you go for more of a pop sound on the solo album than you had with Red Krayola?

I don't know what exactly to say to those things. My interest was always in popular music. I was interested in the accessibility of this thing. And thought that experimentation was allowed, because I was beginning from a certain kind of consensus position, or at least a set of conventions about what counted in popular music. And that a certain kind of experimentation and variation and difference was sought. You were looking for something that sounded a little bit different. So I saw what I was doing as 100% traditional. Nor was I trying to make something that I thought where I had finally understood [that] people don't want to hear this weird shit, they want to hear more straightahead stuff, and I'm now going to try my hand at this. It was never that kind of thing at all. Those things--they were what I could do.

But it does have a different character from the Red Krayola material. I would say that is largely informed by the fact that the musicians were all from elsewhere. They were not players that I had worked with. People I knew, but I didn't work with them before, from other kinds of bands and stuff like that. Also, the material was very personal, the lyrics were very personal, whereas the Red Krayola was seldom personal.

Did you have any musical projects between the solo album and the mid-'70s?

No. I got involved in art. I was making music, I was involved with a few people here and there, tried a few things, had a band in Texas for a while. But nothing ever really coalesced, particularly in the way that I wanted it to. One could get something going. You could get a band together, they could play tunes, they'd be very competent, make wonderful arrangements and so on and it was kind of like (yawns). I just wasn't that interested. I was always looking for the most radical position. I would say that would be the other thing that would inform. Not trying to seek it out and stake it out or something like that, but radicality in relation to a set of givens was an interesting thing for me. Because, you know, what's the point of reproducing the effect? The point is to enlarge upon or expand upon it. Find out what limits it has, if any.

The period of the complete failure of the solo record--when I found out that people--I had a friend who lived in a commune in New Mexico, and he'd get up and put that record on and people would throw things at him--"Don't put that goddamn record on again!" They hated it. They just didn't want to hear this stuff. And I thought, I wonder why? So I delved more deeply into one of our original thoughts about music. It was original to us, it was one of the origins for our impulse, which was that music is instrumental, in the sense that it's a form in which you can say various things and do various things. Those formal characteristics of music have their own weight and gravity. What you do is you balance them against the other kinds of things that you want to put into them as a carrier or some kind of support structure, if you like.

So I got involved in this whole political discourse as well with Art & Language. I was working in New York, and in the mid-'70s in New York, the art world collapsed, literally crashed. There was a recession, there was an oil crisis, the art market hit the lowest point that it had since World War II. The music industry more or less collapsed from its own grandeur. Not collapsed, but let's say the content aspect of it wore out. There was just nothing left to explore in the kind of sense apart from the fact that we are these kinds of people. You know--we are the people who are now wearing makeup, now wearing stacked boots and funny clothes and all that sort of stuff. So I got involved in the politics.

And then when New York became completely intractable, I moved to England. And that's when I started working with Rough Trade. Just coincidentally, maybe a year before I left New York, I had a conversation with a guy I was working with. He said, "That Red Krayola stuff, that's shit. Nobody cares about that. Nobody knows about it. Nobody wants to know about it. You're a joke." He was mad at me about something else, but he lit into me about this. It rang in my ears for a while, I thought about this. But then when I got to England, I found it was absolutely the opposite. There was a whole bunch of people who, ten years later so to speak, knew those early records, who thought that they were groovy records, and liked them. I began to find out that they had some resonances in Britain. They gave me a kind of entree. Punk was obviously in full flower, if you want to call it that.

This was around '77, '78, when Radar started doing the whole IA catalog?

Exactly. I went to England and I sat there, and after I fell out with Art & Lang--we had a big argument, after I was there for about a year. So I thought, what am I going to do? I thought I would look around and see if there was any possibility for music. I did an interview with Pete Frame, who did Zig Zag and all these family trees and so on--a very nice man. He was the press agent for Stiff Records at the time. The whole thing was just getting going. And he said, yeah, I imagine you could do so and so. So I went around to Virgin and saw Simon Draper, and Simon Draper said yes, he would make a one-off single with me. Virgin was about to do a single with Roky, "Bermuda."

He [Roky] had his fans. I tell you, there were people who adored him. The thing is, you listen to his music now, still, his music works. No matter whether you can make any sense out of how he acts or what he talks about, or anything else like that. That part of his brain is definitely intact and still cranking it out.

I met Andrew, and got to know Geoff at Rough Trade around this time, there was just a lot of possibilities, and found that the ideas that were being traded--I wouldn't go as far as to say I felt a certain proprietorial interest in them, but I had a certain of engagement with, or involvement with some of the issues, let's say. Those kinds of attitudes. So it was just normal for me to get into it, in a sense.

Were you recording or producing first at Rough Trade?

I was recording first. The Radar thing came together first, and then Rough Trade was getting going. When I first started being involved with Rough Trade, it was strictly distribution. But they were beginning to think about making records. They wanted to make a record with Metal Urbain, and that was the first single that was made, associated with Radar. A Parisian punk band. Led to things like Dr. Mix, the beginnings of cut-up music, dancefloor music, things that led to techno, actually. All that kind of stuff came there as well.

Monochrome Set wanted to know if I wanted to produce a single. And Stiff Little Fingers asked Geoff if he would produce for them. And Geoff had never been in a studio very much, and he wanted somebody to be with him. I liked working with other people. I thought, this is an ideal partnership. So Geoff and I struck up a partnership, and we collaborated. We worked on Monochrome Set together. We did Stiff Little Fingers, Raincoats, Fall, Scritti Politti a couple of tracks, and worked together for a long time until Rough Trade got to be quite large and powerful. I was also working in A&R in Rough Trade, just doing press, speaking for the label, spokesman kind of stuff, press representative for the label. Rough Trade had a real moment at this time, very powerful moment.

But the most powerful act at this time was this curve down from punk. People kept trying to push forward power pop. "Well, what's going to be next? It's power pop." Nobody was interested in power pop, basically. I mean, you could sell some records on the basis of the tribal divisions in England. You could get people who thought of themselves as mods in some way to be interested in that kind of thing. But Scritti Politti had real pop potential. And there was a real conflict between Rough Trade, the whole indie scene, and the majors in Britain. That was a real battle, because the majors were outraged when Stiff Little Fingers' album went in at 14 the first week, said "It's a fix!" They cried foul, couldn't believe it. But it was real. That's what punk was, was economic power.

When the Red Krayola started recording again...

The reception was strange. One was counted influential, but somebody still beside the point, shall we say. Not the Sex Pistols, not the Clash. We were counted as in it, because people like Gang of Four would take us seriously and invite us to go and open for them, and invite us to go on tour, because it made sense given the kinds of things that they were investigating. They were also being true to the history of the problems that they had come to, which came partly through the efforts of Art & Language, for example, and art historians like T.J. Clark in Leeds and places like that. So there was this whole left-wing aspect as well which informed the underground and the alternative scene. But a lot of nonsense was talked, obviously.

Was there any sort of quizzical reception, because you were one of the very few people who were active in the underground in both the psychedelic and punk/new wave eras?

What was interesting was, I would say, the mindset of those people in the '70s was something like our mindset in the mid-'60s. They hated everything too that had happened before--"we're not necessarily going to clean the slate, but we're going to burn everything down and then we're going to start over again. Or in the process, we're going to burn down everything as a starting over again." And this relation was understood. So some people would say, this is proto-punk--that was where we got lumped, a little bit. But the same things that were talked about the music then are the same things that people talk about it now--"jazzy, broken, dada, blah blah."

"Fragmented."

Fragmented. I didn't fragment the world--I just happened to notice that it is fragmented. I think that the reception has always been not what one would have wanted. But in the long run it's worked out to be the best thing. Because I'm appetitive, and if a mistake is there to be made, I will make it, just like anybody.

How did you end up producing the Raincoats?

It was one of those things. I came into Rough Trade one day and Geoff said, there's a band called the Raincoats, I want to make a record with them, I want you to go around and listen to rehearsal and help them out and see if there's anything you can contribute. So I went and sit in rehearsal and listened to them play for a couple of hours, and talked to them about, well, maybe the violin could be so and so, slightly different, the Velvet Underground, show 'em some things, without knowing, for example, that Tony Conrad was the man behind all of that, that whole aspect. Just saying that the way John Cale plays viola is something that one daren't ignore. I mean, even Ornette Coleman knows this, about overtone and all that stuff. There was that sort of thing--what about this, what about that. We just worked out arrangements, and eventually they trusted me. They trusted Geoff. And so we were the producers. Simple as that.

That was back in the days, also, when I could sit down at a mixing console and twiddle knobs. I can't do that anymore--it's all changed so much.

What do you think were the band's most distinctive qualities?

The Slits are more of a social phenomenon than a musical phenomenon. What you see there is the liberty of feeling displayed very intense, and a great deal of conviction. Some of the music is interesting. I'm not saying anything against them. But with the Raincoats, you have Vicky Aspinall, who's a trained player. She can read it, and all that kind of stuff. And then, some primitives who have a feeling for music, like Ana da Silva, who's got a certain kind of primitive relationship to it. She likes that scratchy, nasty guitar. I like it too, but I don't want to make that the point of the record. If that's the point of the record, then it's a very simple, straightforward sort of thing to do. Whereas what they were doing seemed to me to be more complex than that. It was about this element, this feeling, that drives one to make music in the first place, and the whole idea that music somehow soothes the savage beast, belongs to the organism, and has something to do with the way we are, the feelings, and all those kinds of things. I would say that the Slits were more attitudinal, and the Raincoats were more musical. The Raincoats were not trying to convince anybody about who they were, or what kind of people they were, or those kinds of things. The Slits were always on duty, so to speak. As much as I love them--they're wonderful as they were, but it was something else.

Did you work with Robert Wyatt while he was with Rough Trade?

No, but I talk to Robert a lot. I saw Soft Machine in Texas in '67, opening for Hendrix. Robert Wyatt came out and played in his underwear, "Did It Again"--you know that one? It was very good. Knew about Soft Machine's music, so when I found out I had a chance to meet Robert, it was a big thrill. He was a huge influence on Scritti Politti--this whole Canterbury sound, the quality of his voice, if you listen to Scritti music early, you can really hear how close those things are, in some respects. Also, Robert was appealing to talk to because he was political. He was a card-carrying Commie. He was one of two, you know. The other one was the guy in Pink Floyd, what's his name--Gilmour.

But Robert had that--it was slightly unfortunate--I don't want to insult anybody's consumer categories, but Charlie Haden's Freedom Liberation Orchestra and Carla Bley's Mexican revolutionaryisms, this whole love of this kind of Brechtian-Weill, that whole kind of ethos--Robert had something to do with that, but really in a much softer and sweeter and stranger way, much more inflected by just jazz per se. Although he'd been turfed out of Soft Machine because of the jazz aspect, 'cause he was not 100% behind jazz. Which made him also, obviously, sympathetic to me. Because I think anybody who lives by a category dies by it. Robert was just interested in possibilities, it seemed. At the same time, it was also poignant to see the state that he was in. He was a vital guy, and at the same time in a tight spot, so to speak, existentially. Hard to keep your spirits up, hard to feel like it's worth it, that sort of stuff.

But the other thing is that Robert also, he's a true musician. Pop music is interesting because you find pros and amateurs working side by side. You find people who are dilettantes working with people who've really got the chops, who can really play anything you like. Then one comes to find out that maybe in that space in between there is where music really is. It's in between somewhere of the potential to have the power to articulate yourself in any way that you want, knowing an instrument, and also then having some kind of discursive spirit that drags you toward this thing, because it's an interesting way of expressing yourself if you like, or an interesting way of going on in the world. Robert to me is more that. He was like in between categories. One of the sweetest guys you ever want to meet--a nice guy, very smart.

Did you envision your association with Pere Ubu as a long-term thing?

When the opportunity came up, I thought, yeah. Because when I heard what Pere Ubu did...I was sitting in England reading Sounds or NME or one of those papers that mentioned Pere Ubu. I thought, okay, I'm going to get one of these records and listen to it. So I went to a record shop in Oxford and said, "Please play me a Pere Ubu record." And they put one on, and I listened to it, and I thought, oh yeah, I know exactly what that's about. Or I had a sneaking suspicion I know what it's about. At least I know some of the things that it goes to in music, even if I don't know exactly where it comes from.

But it also does come from this American suburban alienation effect. Like, I'm living in some place that is patently not the center of the universe. Then somebody's telling you that there is a center of the universe. And there are a lot of people acting like there is one, like, "All culture comes from New York," "All culture comes from Paris." So you're sitting there, and you think, fuck you, you know? I'm going to do something anyway. So I think Pere Ubu came out of that to some extent. Same with the Sex Pistols, went around and inspired everybody in Britain and then a thousand punk bands blossomed. Pere Ubu is a product of that wish to activate, that wish to engage in some way.

But they were very professional from the beginning, and they had a certain kind of thing going for them. They went to New York, and they played New York at Max's, and they were part of that whole sort of thing. They had a very high-powered manager who was at Mercury, Cliff Bernstein, who organized them properly from day one, helped them write contracts which said things like, "Within five years, the tapes revert to the ownership of Pere Ubu." Things that like, if you thought about it, you would think, that's smart. So playing with them was like playing with a big-time organization, for me. I had never really even tasted touring at that level until I got to Britain. We were with Radar, suddenly we were able to rent a station wagon, and have drums, and have an amplifier, and go and play places, and drive around in an orderly fashion and have a tour manager, rent a PA, all those kind of things that I never knew existed. I never knew what the logistics involved where, because we always just had our own crap and threw it in the car and went and did things, you know?

Pere Ubu was operating at that much higher level. And to me, it just seemed to be ripe with potential. And I thought that they also had a lot of interesting things. I really liked a lot of what they did. I persist in thinking their best records are Datapanikand Dub Housing.And the records that I'm on--Art of Walkinghas a few good times, and Song of the Boring Man,as I call it, is a seriously flawed record in my view.

Are you still in contact with those guys?

Got sent a box set the other day. I got my money when they sold it to Geffen. That's how well-organized they are. They're very down the line. They have good management, good organization. But I don't have much contact with them. It was kind of awkward--not awkward, but a funny situation. I liked songs like "Final Solution." One of the things I looked forward to was playing "Final Solution," but we couldn't play it because David didn't want to do that anymore, because of his religious convictions.

I heard Raygun Suitcase. I got sent a complimentary copy, very kindly, by the label, and I thought, yeah, that's Pere Ubu. I recognize that sound. But, for me, Ravenstine was key to that situation. It was also a different socialty than I was used to working in. There were conflicts in that band, at levels, in which people thought of other things about what other people in the band were doing, at levels that I never even dreamed were any business of anybody else's. What difference does it make if the drummer doesn't like blah blah blah, or is interested in so and so? It doesn't matter to me at all. And yet, it seemed to make a difference in this band, because David has this thing. He wants to order things, he wants to control things, he wants to make things happen in certain kinds of ways.

So I got a reputation for being difficult, because I went in there and had an alliance with nobody. I was actually allied, obviously, with David, because David saw me as an ally, and as a force for driving the band in a certain kind of direction. Preventing Scott and Tony, for example, making it a rhythm section band. All those stupidities. So that was educational for me. It was fun. Made some interesting tours with them, played in the United States for the first time, like, all across America--never done that before. That was fun.

What records were you doing between the mid-'80s and the early '90s?

After Black Snakes,I made a record called Three Songs on a Trip to the United States,which had three originals on one side, and the other side was live, recorded at some festival in Switzerland. Then after that, I was still interested in the possibilities of making music. I did some independent projects in the mid-'80s with Connie Plank and Mobius. I produced the Chills, Phil Wilson for Creation, Primal Scream's first album. I really liked him [Phil Wilson]--great songwriter, very nice man, very good man. Interesting stuff, very strange stuff. When I say strange, I just mean that he's got a certain character to it which you can hear how it relates to what everybody else conceives of as standard functional pop music--"this will do the job, right?" And yet it's got this slight angle on things. So for me, it was interesting enough. I produced a Shop Assistants album, I think I did something with Mighty Lemon Drops maybe, can't remember exactly. Did some work with Alan McGee at Creation.

Then left England, moved to Germany. I couldn't stand it anymore and went to Germany and starting working there a bit. But I wasn't making much music until I met Albert Muhlen, this man I started working with recently. Since '87, he and I have made some recordings together. Some of them have been on record. We made a couple of singles, we produced a few things for other people. We put a song in Derek Jarman's Last of England.I produced that soundtrack, so we were able to get a song into this film. Then we made an album for Glass--I think 1000 of them exist in the world, not even that, maybe 700, 800, like Corky's.A rarity. But I was just kind of out of it I wasn't really thinking so much about it. I wasn't not thinking about it. I did it when it came up. When there was something to do, I did it. When there was nothing to do, I didn't think about it.

Then David Grubbs came to Germany and called me, and we talked on the phone, 'cause we'd been put in contact with each other by a German journalist named Diedrich Diederichsen.

How did you end up back in the States?

We made this demo of like six, seven songs and gave it to Drag City. David gave it to Drag City without saying anything to me about it. He just said, there's a label in Chicago that would do something with you if you were interested in it. I thought it would be interesting to try to do something, maybe. And they've been fantastic. Also, my situation in Germany changed. My living situation changed. I was doing a little bit of advertising music and that kind of stuff in Germany, and involved more in art than music, although I did some producing there. I produced a couple of Dutch bands, one thing for a German band. I hadn't lived here in a long time. My mother became ill, so I was drawn here more and more, and spending more and more time here as of about 1993. So the past three years, I've spent more time in America, a lot of time in Texas.

I just look at it, and this thing with Drag City actually clicked. It's real. We're doing business, and it works. It pays for itself, and even makes a little money. I had been, I guess, culturally alienated for a long time from this country, partly by choice. I just didn't want to be part of it. But being here, and having a chance to work again--I started coming over, starting teaching at art school here in Southern California. I started doing some lecturing over there.

It's really a world of possibilities. I never did develop a strategy, never had a master plan after a certain point. I maybe had an idea at the beginning of what I wanted to do, but that fell away. So since then, my cultural life has been pretty ad hoc. Do this? Is that interesting to do? Yes, okay, well, let's go do that. Is this interesting to do? No. I'd just decide. The luxury that I have is that I don't have a huge baggage of a certain kind of success to carry around. And people expect certain kinds of things of you if you have a certain kind of success. And it's easy to become a failure. I mean, I've been a failure from the beginning, no problem, in conventional terms.

Do you see a linkage between the various incarnations of Red Krayola?

Absolutely. I would say that the continuity between them is that I find that we deal, pretty much, with the same kinds of problems. Our attitude remains fairly much the same. It's defined by experimentation--a will to experiment, and a will not to repeat, and a will not to reproduce. Those three things, I would say, inform the decisions that we make. At the same time, it's like wanting to get up on that line where you arouse somebody's understanding that you are like, here's something we know, here's something we understand, but let's twist it this way. Just the possibility of learning is a thing that keeps one going. I would say that that informs every band--every band learns what it can do. Every lineup learns what it can do, it finds out what it can do.

The conditions which operate obviously affect the music. Listen to Kangaroo.Kangaroofor me is a record that is just like Parable of Arable Landor any other record we make in the sense that there is a set of dominant ideas which inform most consumption of music and most production of music in a particular period. In the '60s, it was this kind of psychedelic blah blah blah, and counterculture and youth thing and all that sort of stuff. And we wanted to kind of go, yes and no. We want to be dissidents of the people to whom we should most propitiously belong.

That was one of the beauties of being in Germany, also. I worked with Albert. I learned the slogan, "the enemy of my enemy is also my enemy." That's a concept you could apply to every band. We stand in inimical contestatory evil relationship to everything that people want to feel positive about. I don't want to confirm anybody's worst or best suspicions about what kind of a place this is. I want to trade in instabilities of how one is able to iterate that. What you're actually able to formally to do about anything, to me, is more important than the love of my fellow man.

You're one of the few underground rock musicians who has continuously kept abreast of musical changes, from psychedelia to punk, and now you're collaborating with members of Tortoise and Gastr Del Sol. There are very few musicians who have exhibited that same sort of capability of continuing to participate in alternative musical movements. Would you have any thoughts on why there've been so few, from when you first started doing music in the late '60s, who've progressed in that fashion?

I could be unkind. I think people start off with an idea and then they develop something--let's pick somebody completely respectable, worthy of our respect, like Zappa or somebody like that. Zappa started off, and his records were handled as comedy, the labels that he dealt with. Zappa is like an analog for us in a certain sense. He also, I think, thought hippies were stupid and foolish, and kidding themselves, and congratulating themselves on how hip they were, but only by keeping their eyes closed, not noticing what anybody else was doing. At the same time, he recognizes that humor was one of his most powerful devices. But it ate at him to the point that he wanted actually to be taken seriously. So that became more important to him than anything.

I would say that the difference between me and the people (from past underground rock movements) is that I have no commitments to any one form, or style, or anything else like that. I'm interested in music because it's self-activating, to some extent. I'm interested in art--the democratic aspect of it. I don't mean like, gee whiz, democracy, either. I mean like democracy as democratic expression of a sense of individual human beings getting their own crap together.

At the same time, I recognize that being a self-managing, efficient unit in society is also ugly aspiration somehow. I never read a self-help book, and I won't. I just don't give a damn about that stuff. I just think that the world is a set of fairly consistent problems, because we have certain functional things which have to be satisfied--gotta eat, gotta sleep, blah blah. Comes to entertainment, maybe people want things they can go back in and feel at home with, and comfortable, and sort of things like that. There are certain pieces of music that I would put on just because I love them, or something else like that. But seldom.

I'm not exactly sure how to characterize it as an attitudinal kind of thing. I met a lot of people over the years, like Country Joe and all of those people who were heroes of a certain period. It seems to me they've become encased. They've become trapped in a period that functions for them, where they know where they are. I mean, I don't mind a bit of insecurity. I don't mind a little of instability, don't mind a little quicksand. I like it. More fire, more danger, please. Because otherwise I get bored to death.

I can't imagine what people like. I don't even know what I like. I hate what I like every day. I think to myself, why in the world do you like these tiny stupid pleasures for? Life's supposed to be hard and edgy and all those kind of things. This is a stupid romanticism, of course. But nevertheless, it makes for a certain kind of...for some reason, I cannot stop making music. And believe me, I wouldn't mind. Somehow, it remains an interesting problem. I just learn. I meet people. It's also a challenge to find out, am I irrelevant? Has history passed me by? I don't think so. I think I'm still ahead of the fucking curve! (laughs).

Mayo Thompson - Corky's Debt To His Father

The Red Crayola were visionaries that left music behind to create their fractured sound a little removed from "Trout Mask Replica". Their moonfaced insularity made listening to them a bit taxing at times. They are the kind of band you have to be in the mood for and need to reacquaint yourself with every time you throw them into the stereo. But one does get the lingering sensation that behind all the noise and free form freak outs lies a songwriter of note. That songwriter's name is Mayo Thompson and with his sole solo record "Corky's Debt to His Father" he pretty much outdid everything the Crayola had done, albeit in a much more stripped down fashion.

This album, originally released in 1970 on the vanity "Texas Revolution" label, has its origins in the most unlikely of sources, namely the Texan psychedelic underground, overseen by the 13th Floor Elevators and their International Artists imprint. The spirit of the Red Crayola is still around, the idiosyncratic melodic twists and off kilter chord changes framed by that frail and quavering voice (Robert Wyatt similarities anyone?) are firmly present but this time the songs are indeed better and Mayo seems much more interested in performing affecting compositions than in showing off his improvisational vein. Which makes a world of difference between semi random detached experimentalism (cool in their own right, I know) and devastatingly interpreted bossa nova meets country meets folk pop songs (still ripe with an experimental edge, mind).

Whilst those first two Red Crayola LPs remain absolute classics in the "out-rock"/psych genre (as well as the two subsequently released efforts from the same period put out by Drag City), often forgotten or simply passed by is this once-only solo effort from 'Crayola leader, Mayo Thompson. By Corky's... time (1970), the band had fallen apart and the incredible psych/freak music scene Texas had in the '60s (with fellow gods, the 13th Floor Elevators) had pretty much ceased to exist, so Mayo went into the studio with some hot Texan session musicians to lay his heart on the line. This is the result.

Which is all well and good, because this is by far his finest work, and indeed, one of the first and finest albums in the general singer-songwriter genre. Thompson's voice oddly resembles a pitch-challenged Brian Wilson, and so does his material (note the resemblance of the last section of "Oyster Thins" to some of the more upbeat material on the Beach Boys' 1968 LP, Friends) and posture (sweetly awkward, intermittently melancholy, otherworldly rock and roll adolescent). The backing is here from Texas session pros rather than any of Thompson's slightly more renowned associates, except for on "Black Legs", a striking solo blues co written by the novelist Frederick Barthelme.

Playing it fairly straight as a country/folk disc - musically I'd say it reminds one mostly of Dylan, with a bit of Texan song-writer a la Townes Van Zandt/Guy Clarke in the mix - what really sets it apart are the truly demented lyrics and occasional unexpected swing in the rhythm. Avant-folk? Often compared to Skip Spence's "Oar" LP of the same period, there's certainly some similarities there, but mostly Corky... exists in its own universe. Mayo sounds like a man out of his time, greeting the horrible '70s with just the right level of cynicism and hope. It'd take him another twenty-odd years to really get his due in the "biz" as one of the true innovators, so wait no longer to discover all the different shades and styles of this rather unique individual. Is that "Saddlesore" 7" he did from the same period still in print? If so, investigate...

While the music is decidedly more toned down than Red Crayola efforts, it is a great deal more realized than any earlier works by Thompson’s band. Stand out tracks include Venus in the Morning, and Good Brisk Blues. Why did Thompson not crack big with this album? Lou Reed vocals, Syd Barrett sensibilities, and much better than Dylan blues, couple that with great lyrics. One of the best underground albums of all time (whatever that means).

Highlights include "Horses", an oddly romantic tune reminiscent of something on the first side of Love's Da Capo; "Oyster Thins", an epic, surprisingly touching domestic ballad reminiscent in spots of - of all things! - "Let It Be"; "Dear Betty Baby", a swaying seafaring ballad with mournful, Taps-like horns; "Around the Home", like something from an early Eno record, with a "Snow In San Anselmo"-like chorus; "Fortune", which presages the pensive country-rock of Gram Parsons's two solo LPs; "Worried Worried", like a crabwise sketch for the much later hits of Fastball; and two hysterically erotic blues that evoke bits of Blonde on Blonde.

Mayo Thompson - Cork's Debt to His Father
Released by Texas Revolution (CFS-2270) in 1970

01 - The Lesson
02 - Oyster Thins
03 - Horses
04 - Dear Betty Baby
05 - Venus In The Morning
06 - To You
07 - Fortune
08 - Black Legs
09 - Good Brisk Blues
10 - Around The Home
11 - Worried Worried