Part 2 Bill Lake Interview 18/8/01

Part 2:

Have there been any good white players of the blues? Bill’s religious beliefs and his upbringing and how these aspects of his early life relate to any spiritual influence that exists in his music or improvising, his attitude to improvisation and playing slide guitar, the influence of Little Feat and Lowell George on Bill, early songwriting attempts, meeting songwriting partner Arthur Baysting, their approach to writing songs and how it has changed over the years.

 Bill Lake: Photo by John-Paul Winger 

“It’s only fairly recently that I've written Blues based songs and in a way I don't like writing twelve bars. I don't think I've ever written a strict twelve bar song because I guess I've just heard so much of that, I don't know.”

Interviewer: How does Soul relate to the Blues for you?

Well it’s not hard to hear the blues in it especially in a really intense singer like Otis Redding or someone like the Temptations: they all sing Blues.

Getting to that point. A lot of the people that you really admire are black people. I’m just sort of trying to go down that line. Do you think that white people are capable of making blues to a decent level?

Oh yeah, I think that in the past, I don't know, I think my attitude now is I will listen and see if they can. I think there have been some especially good white instrumentalists in Blues, like some great guitarists and harmonica players. On various instruments there are white guys who have managed to get there, but there are very few singers because the singing is the hardest part.

What is it about the singing that makes it difficult for a white person?

I don't know I'm puzzled over this. I mean you could say that there are inherent differences. I mean I have read that there is a whole difference in the structure of the mouth and the palette and you know all the throat and vocal chords and stuff so there is actually no way that a white person could sing like that. But I think there are a whole lot of cultural factors as well. The more you learn about black life, the more you realise there's a huge... there’s much more emphasis on oral play I suppose you'd call it. Even from an early age, there's a lot of talk, it's the sort of thing that rap builds on: its rhyming, throwing verses, throwing rhymes at each other and then there’s... well for a long time there was the black church which everyone went to and you all learnt to sing in this very free way where you know it wasn't regimented it wasn't uptight.

Tony Backhouse[1] has really gotten into that, that approach to music and I think if you are going to church from the age of three or four and singing every Sunday for hours, three or four hours at a stretch, you can't help but get pretty good. You know I've heard some bad black singers but not very many (laughs).  And, whereas for me I just didn't go to church at all and even if I had I would have only learned correct harmony. At best I would have learnt some sort of correct harmony for hymns, there was no abandon in it, you know.

Abandon. Right so what are you religious beliefs now?

Oh I don't know I don't have any. I think I'm in a bit of a, my parents were, particularly my mother was sort of militantly anti-religious. She was bought up a Catholic and she lapsed and she felt that she really didn't want any of her children to get a religious background. She actually took me out of religious instruction classes at school and that's why I use to go the library instead, so I grew up without any inculcation. You know, I never had any of it put into me and as a result I'm sort of curious about it I suppose.

More than that my other big interest in life is philosophy and I've always had, it takes you up to those questions that religion sort of tries to talk about. I don't believe in anything: any sort of institutional answer that I have ever seen but I like to think sometimes that I understand some of it and some ways religious talk or religious writing is...writing with that sort of slant in it is the best writing I know. The thing I get the most from is that, even though they may not be Catholics or they may not be anything, any kind of believer, but that sort of take on the world because it is a very big take on the world, it's not narrow, that's what I like about it I suppose. But that doesn't really come into the music. I don't, in so far as I'm interested in gospel music, it’s not because of what it says really...very minimally maybe.

Is there any sacred element or religious element, say in your improvisation for example?

No, I don't think of it that way. I probably haven't done enough of it (laughs) but you’re coming from a point of view where like in jazz improvisation it is kind of really really important. It's not just something that you do, you know I'm not...At the other end of the continuum there's classical musicians who only learn how to play to a written score and they actually can't improvise and find it really hard and find it quite scary the idea of.... I’m sort of somewhere in the middle because I learn a song by learning a head arrangement which is usually just the chords and so on.

And the melody.

And the melody, and I tend to pretty much do those each time but I fiddle around in the singing but I don't fiddle around much in the playing because I'm not really much of a lead guitarist. I can just do a few...I usually work out a break and just do that.

But I would say of the various people that I've played with in my life your slide playing has got sort of an intensity about it that I've only noticed in higher level improvisors.

Ah well.

So what's going on there when your playing slide because there's something going on!

Yeah, well slide is, I guess that's my first, in so far as I play sort of solos that's what I love: slide solos. I love slide players like Ry Cooder and Lowell George[2] in particular and the black guys they learnt from. I mean Ry Cooder and Lowell George to me are two white people who did something taking off from the blues that I think is among the best music there is. But the black guys they learnt from like Muddy Waters and other slide players, it's just great stuff and it's very fluid. I like that about it, it’s very, I don't know really. I just love...it sort of sings, its like singing.

I probably would like to be a good singer. I mean I would, I know I would, but I think all along in a way I have wanted to be a good singer but I haven't...kind of something's not been there to help me do that, so I've become a sort of singer of some sort, but you know I haven't worked at it like Rick Bryant, well mainly him, and I've always had his example of course to sort of help me in the shade as well you know (laughs). But still, apart from that I just I haven't got a really strong voice to start with.

Rick Bryant warming up in France in October 2005: Photo by Steve Cournane

Anyway, so slide for me is like singing you know, a lot of lead guitarists are like this, like Robert Taylor.[3] He plays guitar instead of singing and he does sing, but he's not that great as a singer, but it's all in his playing; it's all in there. So as for sacredness, I don't think of it like that and as I say I think if I were... You know, there have been moments when I'm playing live when things really sort of take off and you do think well gosh, I've certainly... Every gig you do you are aware that things are happening that haven't been intended and I like that, I really do like that.

I'm just surprised. I mean the reason I've gone down this alleyway. I'm surprised that you say that you are not really an improvisor because as a drummer there are certain people I've played with and I feel straight away that they are real improvisors.

I mean relative to some people I am, but I'm not a soloist, I play mostly rhythms and tracks and I improvise in the rhythms - yeah sure I do that a lot but that's different, and I don't call that, it’s not melody, I'm not playing melodies, I'm playing two or three note little-chords or proper big chords and fiddling around with the rhythms and the phrasing of them I suppose. And that's how I think of it. I learnt that sort of rhythmic... It’s not like playing chords all the time.

Like a lot of people think about rhythm guitar as primarily a matter of playing chords and Ry Cooder basically taught me that that's not what it's about at all. You know his style is to play something that's neither solo single string work. He does that one on the slide but basically he's playing these little chords and versions of chords and little additions to chords and part chords and that sort of stuff all the time and that's how he carries the melody along with this little, this basis and I guess I've learnt from him that, I like it, I think that's great and it is...it is a blue, it's a technique I think that does arise out of Country Blues particularly because those guys played by themselves, they had to be the whole band.

Yes.

You find over and over again with those guys they've got a really strong bass pulse and then they play, they can't play single notes much either because otherwise everything, there’s no chord. So they have a lot of chord stuff going on but it's not usually just (sings and gestures strong guitar down strokes) hing hing you know there are very few of them that just do that sort of thing they play... they play sort of licks usually with two or three notes, (corrects himself) two or three strings involved.

What about your tone, like particularly on the acoustic with the slide? You've got a very big tone

Is it? Oh yeah?

I mean you must have worked on that?

Yeah. I guess you know Ry Cooder has a lot to answer for (laughs). I guess I learnt, I listened to him when his records first come out and I've gone on listening and he's gone into areas that I can't really follow now like the Cuban thing and all that. I guess I'm not interested enough but you know up to a point I sort of can understand what he's doing and with the slide, I've just listened a lot to him and of course he's modelled himself on people I'm familiar with as well and I think a lot of ... it's like the Black singing style: it's a very special thing and it’s...

One of the things about it is to be fairly... as precise as you can about what notes you're actually playing even if it is a microtone you know it's not... it may not be a concert pitch third or something, you've gotta be precise about it or it will sound shit and I've always tried to be precise with that... tried to give it attack, give it plenty of attack ‘cause otherwise it just it doesn't say anything, you know its not gonna get to people. I don't know what it's like, it’s like not speaking definitely, it’s not like... I'm pretty good at not speaking definitely (we both laugh). But when I play guitar I do try to get to make it definite if I am playing a slide or something on the slide. I want it to be definite, so yeah that's where it goes (pours more wine).

I've sort of managed quite a few of the things I wanted to ask. Ok, we haven't talked about your songwriting. Is it an everyday thing or is it somewhat dictated to by your emotions?

The latter, and that's probably always been the case, well that's not quite right. I mean the very earliest songs I wrote, I wrote a couple for Mammal and they were primarily guitar licks: things I'd figured out on guitar. I didn't have any idea of what words would go with them and basically other people wrote the words, I think that's right. The words that I wrote were pretty awful so we left that (laughs). Yeah, so they were guitar riffs and despite all this grounding in Blues and so on the things that I wrote weren't Blues at all, the first one was sort of a "cop" of a song on the Beatles White album, just a little minor sixth to minor seven alternation and then some chords that followed that note structure, it was mathematical, it was just like figuring out the chord that followed that and it was very simple, that song Masquerade do you remember that one we did it with Mammal at Bodega[4]

Oh really, ok. (I actually do not remember at all).

We did it pretty much as an instrumental of course but we were just so crappy really (laughs). Anyway that was the first one and then the second one was, I hate to say it, it wasn't modelled on Jethro Tull, because I didn't like Jethro Tull, but it did sound like Jethro Tull and it had three different time signatures (laughs) and you know it was one of these art-rock things so oddly enough the first songs that I tried to write came from a completely different field than the one that I was most familiar with.

It’s only fairly recently that I've written Blues based songs and in a way I don't like writing twelve bars. I don't think I've ever written a strict twelve bar song because I guess I've just heard so much of that, I don't know. I just don't write in the way that those guys write so already; although part of me belongs to Blues another part of me is something else. I'm basically a white middle class guy with some kind of an abstract brain or something so I tend to... when I think about songs, I'm tending to write something more sophisticated, in terms of chords and things.

So then I got the influence of Little Feat which was huge, it was a really huge influence on me, both as a songwriting influence and as an approach to playing in a band because Lowell George, as well as being one of the great slide players, he's one of the all time great songwriters to me so I imbibed a lot of that and my next song was emotionally driven by a particular event, but it was based very obviously on Little Feat and it sounded like it.

What was that?

It was called Texas Revenge and we did record it.[5] It's on this funny little record called Homegrown, sort of local bands of the time and Rick's band, Rough Justice accompanied me on that but the real songwriting started with Arthur Baysting because I had sort of known him vaguely early on but I got to meet him when he came to Wellington in the late ‘70s to be in his TV show: the Neville Purvis show.  He was living not very far from me and I went round and we sat down and I started fiddling around on the guitar and he said, “play that again,” and I didn't even know what he meant, what particular thing I was supposed to play but I just played something and he said, keep playing that and within two minutes he wrote most of Can't Get Back.[7]

That was the first thing you did? Wow.

And then the same day, the same afternoon I don't know how it went, but he said “Play something fast” and I played this sort of thing and we wrote TV Blues[8] so those two songs came out of that very first session. For a long time whenever Arthur and I would meet, we would write a song, a finished song, every time and it was amazing and he just, without even really saying anything, he just made it clear to me that these things I just fiddled around with and just thought of as nothing inspired him.

Inspired him?

That they were songs: they could be made into songs. It was just a matter of listening for something that you liked enough to keep playing it and then looking for the words and you know for a long time they were his words because I didn't really have much. I didn't seem to have a whole lot of words in me to say, but gradually I started writing words as well and you know they were pretty duff but they've got better, they've got a lot better over the years, but anyway, Arthur was the prime influence. For a long time it was he and I that wrote the songs and it would be him sort of hauling out of me some chord sequence or something that I was just sort of fiddling around with. 

We got to a different phase after a while where I couldn't think of something on the spot like that, that I felt was good enough, you know Arthur was often quite happy with them, but I felt, oh no it's too simple, it's too kind of hackneyed or something like that. That was usually the feeling I had, and so then we would write the song to that music but I would often go back later with a really good set of lyrics that Arthur had written. I could work on that with better music. It sometimes took years to come up with the better music and several different attempts for some songs. But you know it’s got that way that we don't, we can't really write a song on the spot anymore cause it's....

Just bang them out?

I think the last one we did was Margaret.[9] That was written on the spot cause it's a very simple thing, but it's nice, it doesn't need a whole lot. Well it certainly couldn't do with any impro... with any elaboration of what's there.  There might be another one like that and sometimes I would have a piece that I had been playing to myself but no words. That's always been harder for him, cause you know it's not... His way round is to pick out something I'm doing and put a rhythm in his head to it and get the words that way, but if I've already got a rhythm established and stuff it's harder, but you know he's done it. He's pretty good; he's pretty great, like as a songwriter, as a lyric writer. So yeah, it’s gone on from there and I've just gradually...

Does he ever advise you about where the chords should go, does he ever say that should go there or...

Well he's musically quite...like he doesn't know chords or even notes really but he knows sort of up and down as melodic and he knows phrasing, he's very good on phrasing and sort of the way the rhythm of a lyric should move. He's not really interested in the rhythm, what I call the musical rhythm.

The accompaniment?

Yeah, but he's interested in; he wants drama to be there and he doesn't want it to be the same rhythmic...verbal cycle over and over again. He wants it to change and he's taught me a lot about that, how to do that and these days he often does say to me, oh I'm just singing a line, or something or playing a line on the guitar and he'll be saying," it's gotta go up there, its gotta go up", and I can't, it's quite difficult, and you know it's really hard nowadays to get something figured out because a lot of times it's not my intuition to go that way and I go a different way left to myself, I mean sometimes he gives me a good idea which I can build on, and sometimes... we have had these things: that song Sip of Your Wine[10] that we do.

Yeah.

That's written, that was written in a session we did and I don't think I had any music for it at all at the time I just kind of went thump, thump, thump along under him and at the certain point in the evening, I poured myself a glass of wine and he said "Can I have a sip of your wine" and that was the start of it and we had the tape machine running and he just said all these lyrics, they had rhymes, but they were very loose, really loose and so I had this recording of it and when I listened back to it I thought this is great because it's so...what's good about it is that it starts out quite sparse and ends up with words really stumbling out of this guys mouth and then its got a little punch line at the end as if to say well he knew. Well Arthur did know where this song was going to go right from the start.

Really?

That's always a thing about him, he knows what the plot is, you know what the storyline is right from the start: he's always got this idea of how it goes and so he had this punch line at the end and it was free association, but with a sort of object in mind and I think it really works because all I had to do was get a basic sort of bluesy bit of music going and then chop it about a bit: the stumbling and kind of incoherent words of a guy whose getting increasingly excited about the woman that he's talking to and at the beginning he's trying to be sort of polite and not come on too heavy but by the end he's sort of pretty much gone and it’s great, I mean I just loved it when I heard the lyric back. I thought, this is just a complete lyric and I shouldn't touch it; I shouldn't fiddle about and regularise it and all that and I like lyrics like that nowadays, I've written a couple myself where I just write down what I feel like saying and afterwards you often find rhymes in them that you didn't even know about and even if you don't its not hard to supply a rhyme, but you can also have some lines that are quite sparse and other lines that are kind of, phew, like hundreds of words in the one line and it’s much more like speech and I like that approach.

Ah...ok.

It’s not always Arthur's approach. That's just one thing that he does but so you know there's all these different things. Recently, that's shall we say starting from about three years ago, I wrote songs which were very close to an emotional situation I was going through. You know about it and this was different for me because I'd written quite a lot of songs and even done an album: Home Truths[11]  made up of songs which I'd written half the lyrics to and including love songs and stuff but their autobiographical content was quite often none at all and sometimes very obscure, like I deliberately kept it obscure and sometimes, well looking back I could see that it was autobiographical, but I didn't...

You didn't realise it at the time?

No and I didn't realise how autobiographical it was.

Strange that.

Yeah, but this time with these songs it was explicitly autobiographical. I was writing because I was in quite a state and they were written on occasions as this business went on: there were certain occasions when things happened and I would sit down and write something, a song. So they came right out of immediate situations and that was pretty new to me: that was not a common thing.

So you think that was probably helping you therapeutically in some way?

Oh yeah, they were real self expression, I mean along side that I was writing words, like thousands of them and I still am. But the songs were particularly expressive. They said it and I guess what you realise is that's what the Blues guys were doing. They, well not always, like someone like Lightning Hopkins is improvising verses straight out of his life: he was actually an improvisor of words. He had, like a lot of old Blues singers he had heaps and heaps of verses floating around in his head, and he could adapt them and then he could think of something that related directly to his immediate situation. John Lee Hooker does the same thing, and this was really the first time that I guess I'd got that close, I mean I don't know, some of them probably do, I think some of the other ones did come out of direct situations, but I didn't really think of them that way. Anyway I wrote, well there are about twenty-five (laughs) of these songs written that way and it has permanently changed my attitude to songwriting in way.

Now none of these were written with Arthur. You haven't taken any or have you?

No, one or two of them were written, let me think. I think there's only one that was written thinking... I mean he and I sat down to write a song and I had, I figured out this little thing on the guitar and then he said “what's this called” and I said, “oh no!” Actually he said what the title was: strangely enough. He said what the content was and it exactly fitted the situation that was bugging me at the time and we wrote this song and his lyrics would keep going in one direction and I'd keep saying no, no it goes like this, so really I wrote it, I suppose. In the end I sort of finished it and made it a song that expressed my position on my situation at the time, but he did really kind of help, he got me going on it.

What's that one called?

Seeing You, and I think that's the only one that he sort of had a hand in and he realised there was something going on that was making me write on my own, this whole series of songs that he couldn't really tamper with because it would only sort of spoil them until I was finished with them and then maybe he could have suggestions, but he's had very few suggestions, he's left me alone (laughs).

Has he?

Well I think he's a bit scared to make suggestions actually, at one point I didn't want them touched at all. I wasn't willing to accept any kind of changing ‘cause they meant so much, but then I've written a few, no this thing has gradually sort of calmed down. I've written...I can only think of one that I've written lately that doesn't directly relate to that situation at all. It’s sort of a little short story and so on about a character I just heard about. I mean the theme is actually to do with that stuff but it's told in the form of a story about someone else and I haven't... say I haven't written a song for a while and you know it doesn't bother me, I've never thought of it as something I should be doing. I've always thought... when Arthur turns up, if we have a session, if something comes out of it then that's good but if I don't write a song for six months or something I don't. I'm not worried,

You're not worried?

Well...

That comes and goes?

Ooh yeah.

You don't take it sort of diligently?

No

Every day I’m gonna get up type approach?

No, I've never been that sort of writer.

---

[1] Member of the NZ band Mammal: expert vocalist who runs gospel choirs worldwide today. An author of a book on gospel singing.

[2] Guitarist, lead singer for USA band Little Feat who died in1979 aged only 34.

[3] Robert Taylor was an original guitarist in Mammal, who was an integral part of the Australian band Dragon during the "April Sun In Cuba" years.

[4] A Reunion gig of the band Mammal in 1999 after twenty years of non-playing - a celebration of the old Duke Tavern in Wellington.

[5] See discography that accompanies transcription in Part 1.

[6] Arthur Baysting still writes with Bill today.

[7] Possibly the Windy City Strugglers most popular tune to date. RRROO2 On Top Of the World.

[8] Strangely enough, the song TV Blues was finally recorded for the new album Snow on the Desert Road due out 2001.

[9] Margaret is very pretty song on the Snow on the Desert Road album in a slightly Cuban Feel.

[10] On the new album, the soon to be released third album Snow on the Desert Road.
[11] Home Truths is Bill’s first solo album, released on Red Rocks Records RRR001.