For decades, pioneering sonic collagist Steve
"Steinski" Stein has led a curious double life: mild-mannered adman by day,
hip-hop legend by night. Along with longtime former partner Doug "Double Dee"
DiFranco, Steinski recorded a series of wildly influential sonic pastiches collectively
known as "Lessons," beginning with a remix of "Play That Beat, Mr. DJ" that won
a remix contest sponsored by legendary hip-hop label Tommy Boy.
Steinski
and Double Dee's revolutionary mixes combined hip-hop grooves with a
mind-bendingly eclectic array of sound bites and left-field samples from across
the pop-culture spectrum, from old commercials to Groucho Marx one-liners.
Though the sheer number of recognizable samples made legal releases
prohibitively expensive, the mixes quickly developed a devoted underground
following, especially among DJs and instrumentalists. Cut Chemist and DJ Shadow
paid Steinski the ultimate homage by recording "Lessons" of their own, and
Madlib gave Steinski a vocal cameo on Shades Of Blue, his Blue Note
tribute/remix album. Steinski appeared in the seminal 2001 DJ documentary Scratch and is
increasingly acknowledged as an important influence on multiple generations of
beat junkies, collagists, and crate-diggers. This year witnessed another
milestone in Steinski's career: the release of Illegal Arts' achingly essential
two-disc compilation What Does It All Mean?1983-2006 Retrospective. The A.V.
Club recently
spoke with the unlikely hip-hop godfather about selling drugs, advertising,
being a sonic outlaw, and finding the humor in the Kennedy assassination.
The A.V. Club: The liner notes for What Does
It All Mean? discuss
how you used innovative marketing techniques to sell drugs in college. Could
you talk a little about that?
Steinski: What happened was that the school I went
to, Franconia College, was a tiny little college in New Hampshire. I'm not sure
whether the enrollment was ever more than 400 people, and it was located in an
old vacation hotel up in the mountains in northern New Hampshire. Fantastic
place. In the early '70s, it existed as an almost fully accredited school where
you could go and not be in the army. So it got a lot of interesting people who
were more interested in not being in the army than in getting a traditional
education. It was one of those schools where you could choose your own
electives, set your own curriculum, and then cut all the classes.
AVC: Did they offer classes in draft-dodging?
S: No, you didn't need that, man, because if you were
there, it was de facto you were out. It was a pretty great place—it was
very, very hipster-oriented. I remember when I got there, I was told that there
was a union of dope dealers called the Space Patrol. I think in its 10 years of
existence, the school had graduated perhaps 70 people. It had enormous turnover,
because people would come through, drop out, move on, go do something else,
leave the country. It was as much a way station as it was anything else. When I
got there, the Space Patrol was no longer in existence. Although there were
still things like "welcome to the school" parties with punch bowls full of
murky liquid that could kill an elephant. People would drink this stuff, not
knowing what was going on, and then spend three days lying in their beds,
raving and seeing things. After a while, some friends of mine and I got
together and decided, just sort of as a lark—not because we were such
great business people—to sell some weed. Everybody and their brother sold
weed. It was that sort of time in the world and the United States, and very
much at this school. You'd come back from vacation with half a pound of
something you had bought from somebody back home.
What we'd do is call ourselves Junior Achievement,
thereby pre-dating Tom Cruise in Risky Business by quite a while. We gave
out premiums to people, we had parties in my room where you could come and try
it for nothing, and just the idea that there was—like in any branding
experiment—when there's something, if you're up against nothing, people
tend to gravitate toward something, for the most part. So there we were, Junior
Achievement, as the successors to the Space Patrol. We did pretty well,
actually. Didn't handle anything that hurt anybody, and sold to just about
everybody, which was kind of a problem there. At one point, one of the people
in the school management took me aside and went "You know, Steve, perhaps you
ought to tone it down just a little." That was good advice. So we basically
dissolved the business after a year or so, but it was great fun while it lasted,
and we made some money.
AVC: It mentions in the liner notes that you
put an ad in the student paper.
S: Well, the student paper, you have to imagine what
the student paper was like. The personals column had hate mail toward the
people who owned cars that drove too close to the side of the road. It was a
pretty lunatic paper to begin with. But, yes, we had ads touting Junior
Achievement. And
we never had to say what it was, because everybody knew.
AVC: A "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" sort of
situation?
S: More or less. In a school that small, you didn't
even need "wink, wink, nudge, nudge." It was just sort of like "Okay, yeah, oh
sure, cool, excellent."
AVC: What sort of music were you into back
then?
S: Oh, goodness. I guess rock, folk, some funk. I
didn't categorize it too much in my head; I listened to a lot of Grateful Dead.
It was a hippie school—we listened to hippie music. I don't really listen
to Grateful Dead that much any more, but I listen to it occasionally. I'm
trying to think what else. I remember the two Stones records at that time. The
one with "Brown Sugar" on it and Exile On Main St. were huge up there. Huge.
Also, in my dorm, we were seriously into Miles Davis. We used to play Jack
Johnson
on a stereo that we took out into the common area. The dorm really loved that. I
was getting into jazz a lot at that time, too.
AVC: How did you segue from being a college drug dealer to working
in advertising?
S: [Laughs.] Not that far a leap. Let's see. There
was a lot in between. I dropped out of school and moved to West Virginia, where
I was a public park supervisor and me and my girlfriend and a couple of friends
lived in a shack that did not have running water, didn't have an indoor toilet.
For heat, we dug coal out of the hillside and burnt it in our pot-bellied
stove. For a city boy, I have to say I gave country living about as much of a
run as I could. It was a very rural part of West Virginia that we were living
in, so being Jewish was a wild novelty. I eventually moved back to
Philadelphia, where my wife is from and where I had lived previously in
college. Before I went up to this nutty place up in New Hampshire, I went to
Temple University, which didn't last long at all. I ended up working at Gimbels
in Philadelphia, in their advertising department. And then when my girlfriend
and I got married and we moved to New York, I wound up working in advertising
in New York. Back then, I was very enthusiastic about it. It was really
interesting to me, it was something I wanted to learn more about and be
involved in. It seemed like a great industry. After six or seven years of being
involved in it, my initial rapture had pretty much worn away. Most of the
people I worked with were pretty shallow, unpleasant people. The skill itself,
while it was very interesting and has wound up being valuable to me all my
life, once I learned it, exercising it in a large agency context was pretty
boring.
AVC: Was there any advertising that you created
that particularly stands out in your mind?
S: I still work in advertising, but it's not like
there's any one thing in terms of advertising that I would point to and go "Oh
yeah, I'm real proud of that." Fuck no, that's why I got out of it as a staff
job.
AVC: Have you watched the show Mad Men?
S: You know, I don't have television. I haven't
watched television for 25 years.
AVC: Why?
S: Well, it's a little like being an alcoholic and
joining AA. I'm so susceptible to having my attention being hooked by it that
it's better if I don't fuck with it. I think the last time I watched TV was for
two or three hours on Sept. 11. It's not like I walk around in a sheet with a
sign saying "Don't watch television," because that would be pretty stupid. It's
just for me, it's better not to watch television. I have more time to read.
AVC: That's surprising, since your work is so
saturated in pop culture.
S: I guess I'm really lucky in some ways. I'm a quick
study when it comes to popular culture, so I can use things and not appear to
be too out of it. This was a problem with the advertising industry, because I
stopped watching television before I stopped working at the advertising agency.
I remember at one point, back when Atari was really hot shit, I was working on
Atari as one of the writers. A guy walked into my office and said "Listen, I
got this really great idea for a campaign—we'll use Mr. T." I said "Who?"
He went "I knew it," pulled out a copy of Time that had Mr. T on the
cover, and said "Here, read this shit and then we'll do the campaign." It was
like he knew I wasn't going to know who Mr. T was. I was really lucky that
people accommodated to my little eccentricity.
AVC: Did you end up using Mr. T?
S: I think it was probably proposed, and they
certainly had the money to do it, but for some reason or other, that didn't
happen.
AVC: Throughout the '70s, hip-hop was an
underground thing. Did you have any experience with it then, in the
pre-"Rapper's Delight" age?
S: Gosh, I wish. In the pre-record age, I was not
aware of it. I became aware of hip-hop when Deborah Harry and Chris Stein
played some on the radio on a station in New York where they were guest DJs. I
happened, by mistake, to tape the show, and when I went back and listened to
it, I was absolutely galvanized. That's when I started getting into hip-hop. There
were a couple of records out at that time, and I bought almost every one I
could get hold of. At that point, everyone I played it for was absolutely
repulsed. "Oh, this is awful, don't you know that?" Gosh, no. It didn't make me
not love hip-hop; it just made me stop playing it for other people.
AVC: In the early days, there was a sense that
it was a novelty, a fad.
S: There was definitely a feeling of that. "This is
music for impoverished people and whatnot, and this ain't gonna fly."
AVC: What was your first hip-hop show? What was
your first engagement with the culture?
S: First time, I went to Negril, which was this
tiny little bar on 2nd Avenue that Cool Lady Blue had a once-a-week party at. I
went down there and probably the first show was the Cold Crush Brothers. That's
what I talked about in the Scratch movie. It was just fabulous, man. I had the
greatest time. After that, I went back there a couple of times, and when the
party moved to The Roxy, I was there probably three Fridays out of four,
because it was a Friday-night party.
AVC: What was the audience like in shows like
that? Was it integrated? Was it an African-American crowd?
S: No, no, I would say probably more than 50 percent
were African-American, but past that, very integrated and extremely… How would
I put it? Everybody was friendly, because at that point, hip-hop was completely
so, so tiny that anybody who was in it was welcome. It was that sort of a
thing. It was just like "Yup, you're here—you belong here." There was no
question. It
didn't start to get segmented until a while later. Years later, actually.
AVC: At that point, there was a lot of
crossover. Grandmaster Flash was opening for The Clash, though it apparently
didn't go over well.
S: They got bottles thrown at them.
AVC: It seems so backward that people who love
The Clash would be so hostile to black music.
S: Well, I don't think they saw it that way. They saw
it as some sort of ghetto crap. Like, "What are these guys? I came here to see
The Clash and see guitar-based stuff, not a bunch of these chanting guys with
records." Shit got thrown at them, man. That's pretty normal. You're always
gonna find some
people who think that this thing is not as good as the last thing. I'm sure
that there's a lot of rock people going "Well, fuck, man, what is it, just
talking over records? Well, fuck that!" You know, some guitar guy who's really
disappointed that this other type of music seems to have taken over the world. Before
that, there's probably some jazz musician, figuratively, with a goatee and a
beret, sitting around with a saxophone going "What the fuck? A bunch of guys
with guitars that can't fucking play!" You know, there's always going to be
that. When something else comes in and takes over hip-hop, a bunch of people
are going to be sitting around going "Holy shit, at least I could rap over
records. These
motherfuckers…" You know, whatever.
[pagebreak]
AVC: How did you go from soaking in the culture
to actually making mixes yourself?
S: A friend of [Double Dee] Douglas'—who
produced radio commercials for CBS, back when there was a CBS, and there were
commercials for record companies—had seen an ad in Billboard for a remix contest that
Tommy Boy was running. Sort of a "remix it yourself" thing for amateurs who at
least were in touch with Billboard. And he said, "You guys should enter this
contest." It seemed like a reasonable idea, and we had a weekend coming up
where we weren't doing anything, so we did.
AVC: Did remixing come naturally to you?
S: I think that because it was me and Douglas—already,
we had spent quite a bit of time together hanging out, listening to records
together, working in the studio as co-producers on freelance advertising jobs
and other things, and also going to The Roxy a lot. We already had a knowledge
of hip-hop and a shared vocabulary of what we thought worked and was
interesting. And we were both also from New York, both relatively close in age,
so we remembered various cultural things together, and were enthusiastic about
them together. It was instinctive, yes, but there was a lot of underlying
factors that made the instinct work.
AVC: When you were working on your earliest
mixes, did the concept of copyrights ever enter your mind?
S: It still doesn't enter my mind.
AVC: There were red lights everywhere, but you
didn't pay attention to them?
S: Well, to be honest, no it didn't. We didn't even
think about it. Certainly not the first one, not the James Brown mix. By the
time we got to "Lesson 3: History Of Hip-Hop," that was supposed to be a record
that was gonna accompany a book about hip-hop. We were told to keep it around
"Dance To The Drummer's Beat," because that's what we're going to use. Although
apparently no one had bothered to consult with Herman Kelly, who still owned
the rights to "Dance To The Drummer's Beat." When he heard about this, he was
like, "Well, sure, pay me some outrageous amount of money, and I'll let you do
it." And they were like, "We don't have an outrageous amount of money." "Well
then, tough shit." So that made it a bootleg again.
AVC: Did you feel like an outlaw, making albums
that could never really be released?
S: Yeah, I suppose. Look, if you're a white, Jewish,
middle-class kid who grew up in the '50s and '60s, the idea of being some sort
of a hip-hop outlaw is very romantic, and very attractive. So, yeah, I kept
that idea for a while until I read one of Lawrence Lessig's books about culture
and copyrights. And then I thought, "Okay, this really changed the concept. I
can put away my bandanna, and put away the gun, and sort of be… This is a
legitimate thing I'm doing in the world of culture, and the fault here is the
legal system." Not that I have come up with some revolutionary idea regarding
culture—people have been doing this for a long time, fucking with
existing culture.
AVC: You have a lot of creative heirs, like
Prince Paul and Madlib. Was there anybody who you felt was doing something
similar to what you and Double Dee were doing? Was there any kind of precedent?
S: The Buchanan & Goodman Flying Saucer records,
I'd say, were records Douglas and I were both acquainted with, which were
called break-in records. They were these two music-industry guys who came up
with this wild, wacky idea of making singles. What they had done was, they had
come up with a sort of loose, lunatic scenario of a flying saucer landing in the
middle of New York. And the reporter who was describing the scene is
interviewing various people and the spacemen, and describing things. Except
every sentence that he uses ends in the clip of a song.
It becomes either a piece of a verse or a piece of
a chorus of a popular song. These records were enormously popular. I remember
hearing one when I was 5 or 6, and they were all over the radio, and they were
complete collage records. Not in the way that Douglas and I had done them, but
certainly we're in a direct line from these guys, from [Bill] Buchanan and [Dickie]
Goodman. That would be probably the most obviously direct thing. I was listening
to lots and lots of arty-type stuff. You know, like Laurie Anderson and a bunch
of other stuff that other people were listening to also. But I would have to
say that the Buchanan and Goodman stuff is the most directly influential.
AVC: It seems like one of the reasons they
could get away with that kind of borrowing is because they were doing satire.
S: Well, they were called parodies. However, the
actual story is that Buchanan and Goodman were both music-industry guys, and
after the records came out, there were some legal rumblings that they were
going to get sued by various people. What they did is, they went around and
made peace individually with all the music publishers so they could use this
stuff in a legal way. But it wasn't an arrangement that would apply to
everyone. It was a uniquely Buchanan and Goodman arrangement. They kept on
making records into the '70s. They made like 30 or 40 records. They made a
record on Jaws.
I think they made records based on Star Wars. They just went around
doing all kinds of shit.
AVC: 2 Live Crew were famously sued by Roy
Orbison's people for using "Pretty Woman" and got away with it because the
Supreme Court ruled that parody was protected by the First Amendment. Did you
feel like that ruling maybe gave you some wiggle room, some artistic license?
S: No, to be honest. Because the records I was making
after I made records with Douglas and the records I made with Douglas were not
like that. That was a record where they took pieces of the song, but there was
plenty of rapping and stuff like that. In my mind, we were kind of like… This
sounds a little overblown, but if you look at visual artists like Joseph
Cornell or Louise Nevelson, I felt like our stuff was more like that. People
who were complete appropriation artists who then made another piece out of
appropriated stuff, and maybe, in Louise Nevelson's case, painted everything
white. But you still knew what it was and where it came from. Whereas 2 Live
Crew were adding a bunch of their own stuff. I was not, and still am not. I'm
not a lawyer. I didn't go "Oh, this is the major difference, this is a legal
point, this is why my stuff applies to that." I didn't even think about it
much. Hooray for 2 Live Crew, I'm really glad they did it, and they did a good
thing for the culture, I think. But no, I wasn't sitting around thinking that I
should be rich.
AVC: Do you see yourself as part of the
tradition of culture-jamming?
S: To a certain extent. I think it's a little
disappointing how non-analytical I am about what I do. I just sort of do it. I
do whatever feels right at the time, whatever feels natural. The classification
and categorization and a lot of the "I was trying to express thus and so," that
all comes later. When I do it, I just do it. It's kind of a caveman approach: "Me
want that! Ungh!" That's pretty much it. It's very non-intellectual.
AVC: When you started out, did you feel more like
an outsider being white, or being over 30?
S: [Laughs.] At the time, even though both of those
were obvious differences—no, neither. I could walk into studios and there
would be Chuck Chillout and [DJ] Red Alert, and everybody would be like "Oh,
hey man, how you doing?" It wasn't like "Here's that old white guy." That
happened after a while, certainly—things evolve, things change. But in
the beginning, like I said, hip-hop was very inclusive. The idea wasn't so much
who was out, it was more like "Wow, they're in, that's great." This was a big
deal.
AVC: When you first started making a name for
yourself as Steinski, did people who worked with you in advertising know about
your hip-hop sideline? Did they know you were creating art in your spare time?
S: A teeny, weeny, weeny bit. But not really, you
know. That was one of the interesting things about it. It was a very distinct,
other existence. And as things went on, later down the road when the DJ Shadow
and Cut Chemist records happened, the tribute records, I started going way down
that road, and I started going to shows, deejaying in England, and started
going to shows in the United States. It really was like stepping through the
looking glass; it was a completely other world. In this world here, I was in
advertising, and some freelance supplier. Then I'd walk through the
wall—all of a sudden, it was like, "Wow! You're the guy who made those
records!" It's very rare that there's a combination. In England, where some of
my work got licensed or I got asked to do commercials based on my records, that
was different. In England, I would say those two things came together, but not
here.
AVC: You had a sort of secret identity. You
would take off your suit and transform into a hip-hop superhero.
S: [Laughs.] That's very generous of you. Thanks. It
was a little bit like having a secret identity.
AVC: Was it frustrating knowing that you're
making these things that people loved, but you couldn't legally put out?
S: Never really occurred to me, to tell you the
truth. I had taken it for granted, because after the first mix Douglas and I
did, everything was so obviously illegal that I was like, "Yeah, you can't sell
them. So what?" I'm not making them to get rich. I got a job. It's nice to get
paid for it. I don't knock that. When they were much more widely bootlegged,
somebody was getting paid. Not us. It never really occurred to me, to tell you
the truth. It was like, "We make them, and if they get people's attention,
that's nice."
AVC: You mentioned DJ Shadow and the Chemist
tribute records. How did you feel when you first heard them?
S: Amazed. For any number of reasons. Douglas and I,
our mutual reaction was, "Those guys know who we are?" No one knew who we were.
As far as we were concerned, we were in the dustbins of history. This was
before the period I was talking about, where I could walk through the looking
glass and I was slightly famous. This was before I even knew I had a looking
glass to walk through. When rap became very commercial and gangsta-oriented, I
dropped out of it for the most part, and didn't pay a lot of attention to it.
Yeah, I stayed in touch with music, because I still really loved music, but it
was different kinds of music. Old jazz, a lot of other kinds of music. And
while there was still even some gangsta stuff that I liked, there was just so
much of it going on that it was boring to me. I didn't like it. So when I came
back and discovered that there was indie hip-hop and backpacker hip-hop and
Native Tongues hip-hop—I mean huge movements—I'm like, "Gee, look
at all this. This is a real surprise." Someone walked into my studio one day
with a copy of Endtroducing… and went, "Have you heard of this guy, DJ Shadow?
He namechecks you on this record." I'm like, "No. Who's DJ Shadow?" Then I call
up Douglas and am like, "You ever heard of this guy? He put our names on his
record." And he's like, "No. Who is he?" This is like complete news to us, that
they would even remember who we were.
AVC: When you listen to De La Soul, '88-'89,
did you think there was a commonality to what you were doing and what Prince
Paul was doing?
S: To a certain extent. I felt like he was taking a
little bit of cut-and-paste and adding it to these lovely rap tracks, which we
had never done. I guess I saw the difference more than I saw the commonality.
AVC: It's like in your early records, you were
planting these seeds in the culture that would take 10, 15 years to really
bloom.
S: I never felt like that stuff
was so proprietarily ours. For whatever reason, we were the right guys in the
right place at the right time. I didn't feel like it wasn't going to happen if
we hadn't done it. Someone would probably do this. We were just lucky that we
were the most high-profile guys who did it mostly first.
AVC: You were building on the music and the
legacies of other people.
S: Oh, absolutely. That's very much the case. There
were songs that used samples to do stuff before we came along. There was some
dance record, I forget what the name of the group was, but they used a sample
of a piece of glass breaking that was packaged with the sampler at the time.
They used that, and of course everyone was like, "Wow! Did you hear the sample
of the glass breaking? That was so cool." And that was before us, and we were
aware of that. It was gratifying that everyone else thought it was so great.
But I never really thought that if somebody else did it, that we were entitled
to sit around and say, "Oh, yeah. We are definitely the progenitors here."
AVC: Another landmark hip-hop legal sampling
situation was the Biz Markie lawsuit.
S: Right, with Gilbert O'Sullivan.
AVC: When that verdict came in, did you feel
like it was the end of innocence for hip-hop, in that now all the samples had
to be cleared and paid for?
S: It was the kind of thing that since all the stuff
I had done was so illegal anyway, I felt like it didn't really apply to me. I'm
not making anything that anybody's selling.
AVC: Did you think that maybe someday if things
turned around, you might be able to put things out legally?
S: Never. I mean, it's amazing to me and gratifying
that anyone gives a shit at all. No, it does not occur to me. I don't walk
around feeling like I'm filled with great artistic expression that's yearning
to get out. I just do stuff, for the most part, when I feel like it. I enjoy
it. I have a really great time making these things. That second record in the
compilation, the "Nothing To Fear" mix: That took a year and a half. And I was
so happy the whole time I was doing that, it was ridiculous. It never occurred
to me that the legality was completely up in the air. I was like, "Meh." I
didn't even think about it. I just wanted to do this.
AVC: Speaking of legality, one of my favorite
tracks on the retrospective is "The Motorcade Sped On." How did that one come
about?
S: Well, after we had done three records, Douglas
moved in with his girlfriend in Queens and got a regular job. He didn't like being
a freelancer, so he went back to a job and moved in with his girlfriend. It
wasn't like we weren't hanging out. We were still having dinner and being
friends, but he didn't want to make records anymore. He didn't really have
time. "Well," I thought, "I'd like to make a record on my own." At that point,
making records was a very different thing than "I'll just learn a piece of
software on my computer." There weren't any computers, there wasn't software.
So what you did was, you hired a studio with an engineer and you told him what
to do with the tape, the meter running every minute, and you started doing
stuff. I thought, "Okay, I want to make a record with some sort of emotional
content to it, that isn't just a straight-up party record." So I was listening
to spoken-word… Once again, this is before the Internet. You couldn't just grab
stuff off the Internet. Then I thought, "The Kennedy stuff just really stops me
dead. Maybe that." And so I walked into the studio—it was the cheap
hip-hop studio that everybody in the city used at the time. It was called INS;
it was down by City Hall. And I walked in to an engineer who had never seen me
before and I said "I want to base the beat around 'Honky Tonk Women,'" and
asked him to work out a new beat on a drum machine, which he could do very
quickly. He was great. I still know him. Craig Bevan. Then he said, "Then what
are we going to do?"
I said, "Then we are going to sample the Kennedy assassination
and put it down on top." He just looked at me like, "Okaaaay, buddy. It's your
money and it's your time." So we started doing that. We did six or seven
sessions, then I did a mix of what he had did at that point, and just laid back
at home for a while. I figured out how else I wanted to do it. Sat down for a
couple more sessions, put down the rest of the parts, and I had what I wanted.
I had a record with a song structure that was very emotional. At the time more
so than now, because at the time there were more people listening to music who remembered
the Kennedy assassination. So I went to Tommy Boy, and they owed me money for
other stuff, for other projects I was doing for them. You know, ad work and
things. And I said, "Instead of paying me, put this out." And they were like,
"Yeah, okay. No problem." They put it out. It got some play on college radio,
almost no play on commercial radio, as you can imagine. Some people were
offended. "This is in very bad taste. How dare you?" Okay, I guess I didn't
feel that way, really. I thought it was more of an experiment than it was a
vast statement.
AVC: Were there people that were like, "Too
soon, bro. Too soon?"
S: It wasn't like putting out a record about 9/11
now. I guess the feeling was the older the person was, the more likely they
were not to like it for that reason. But there were lots of people who liked it
here. It still gets played on some college radio at the end of November
everywhere. But in England, they didn't have that problem. It wasn't their
president. And so they looked at it, and they went, "My God. How interesting."
There, it got a very good reception. New Music Express pressed up a quarter-million
plexidiscs of it and stapled them to the cover of that week's issue and gave it
out, which instantaneously made it a gold record in England. There was a nice
interview in there with me. Nice pictures. And that was really—goddamn,
that was really something.
AVC: How does it feel to finally have a CD of
yours that's commercially available, that's legal, that's above ground? Is it
validating?
S: Well yeah, it is. It's nice. It's sort of
comforting. It will help my mother become a little more adjusted to this side
of me. Suddenly, I can put it in front of her and go, "Look! It looks real,
doesn't it?" And that's pretty much it. Obviously, I am grateful to Illegal
Art, because it isn't like I approached them. They came to me and said, "Would
you be interested in doing this?" and we talked about it for a while, and I was
like, "Okay, sure. Let's do it. That would be really great." I suppose it's my
caveman approach again as usual. "Mmm, mmm, good." Once again, I don't really
think about it that much, but it does make me feel pretty great, in a
non-intellectualized, non-analytical sort of way.