Nick
A. Zaino, III: April,
2002

Alastair Moock Interview: Bad Moock Rising

Alastair Moock’s latest CD, A Life I Never Had, features one of the funniest songs put to tape this year. “The Word I Said” is a beatnik jazz poem about young man getting beat up on the playground by a girl he called a slut, complete with smoky vocals and a walking bassline. Humor is nothing new to Moock. It has been an important element of the gutsy country, folk, and blues music he has been cultivating since he released Walking Sounds, his 1997 debut album.

With his third album, the follow-up to 1999’s Bad Moock Rising, Moock is poised to take a big step forward. Over the course of the past year, he has been organizing the “Pastures of Plenty” series at different venues around Massachusetts, gathering together musicians of different backgrounds to offer their interpretations of “American music”. Moock has made a lot of friends in the Boston scene, including local favorites like Ellis Paul, Mark Erelli, and The Resophonics, who play on A Life I Never Had. It’s the first of Moock’s albums that he didn’t produce himself, handing the reigns over to Lorne Entress, who also anchors the disc as a drummer. Visit www.moock.com for more info.

[Note: A shorter version of this interview appears in next week’s Stuff@Night magazine, a Boston nightlife magazine.]

NZ: Is this the first time you’ve worked with an outside producer?

AM: Yeah.

NZ: What made you decide to go that direction?

AM: Well, I did the self-produced CDs twice, and for the expense of making a new CD, it didn’t make sense for me to go and do another along the lines of what I had done. So I waited longer than I planned to for the right situation to come along. And Lorne was it. Mark Erelli introduced me to him, and he liked the stuff, and I liked his stuff, and it clicked.

NZ: Had he produced Mark’s stuff?

AM: He produced all of Mark’s stuff.

NZ: Had you considered any other producers?

AM: I checked out a couple of people, and a couple of people checked out me. You know, it’s such an intense thing, working with a producer. It’s a long period of time, and it’s such a personal thing. You don’t want to just slap something together with somebody.

NZ: Did you find it was a much different process working with a producer?

AM: It was interesting. It was a little bit of a struggle for me to give up control to the extent that I had to. But Lorne and I worked really well together. I have pretty set ideas about what I like when I hear it. But the thing that Lorne can bring that I don’t have to offer at this point is knowing how to get there, how to get the sounds that I like when I hear them. And he’s amazing at that. He pulled in great players that I didn’t have personal connections to, and he just made all the right sonic decisions. And that’s all just experience working in the studio. It’s a crucial part of making an album.

NZ: And he plays on the album, as well?

AM: Well, Lorne’s a great drummer. That’s sort of his first calling.

NZ: Who has he drummed for?

AM: He drums for almost all of the Signature Sounds people - Dave and Tracy, and Mark, and Erin McKeown.

NZ: Does he produce a lot of the Signature Sounds stuff as well?

AM: He’s only produced Mark’s stuff. But he was on Erin McKeown’s album, he was on Dave and Tracy’s, both of their albums. He didn’t produce them, but if you meet Lorne, you’ll see he has a strong way of getting his way about stuff. I have a feeling he ended up contributing a lot to all those albums.

NZ: Did you have a particular sound in mind when you went to him that you asked him to help you achieve? Or did he contribute to the overall sound?

AM: We spent a lot of time talking about that. We did a lot of sort of pre-production talking and listening, and we both started giving each other albums that we liked the sound of, and that we were working as a basis off of. And I brought two of my favorite produced CDs - the Tom Waits Mule Variations CD, closely followed by just about everything else Tom Waits ever did, but that album in particular. And then John Prine’s The Missing Years album.

NZ: I was going to mention Bone Machine.

AM: I definitely had Waits in mind in the sound that I wanted to achieve. Just sonically, he achieved such cool stuff in the studio that’s kind of dark - this big, brooding sound so well. And I love that. And the use of the voice in the background is definitely sort of a tribute to Tom a little bit. But it’s funny how you can, you often have things in mind when you go in the studio to record. You think what you’re doing is a lot like what somebody else does, but it ends up being very different because I’m not Tom Waits. My songs aren’t anything like his. I’m not sure people come away think, “That sounds like a Tom Waits track.” But that is, sonically, he was the guy I particularly had in mind.

NZ: It seems like, without similarities in the actual music, there are similarities in the approach and somewhat in the ability to balance the humorous songs with the darker songs.

AM: And that’s something Prine does so well, too. And the other thing about both of those albums, what I particularly love about them is, they’re successful albums that cover a whole range of styles. And that’s always what I wanted to achieve on this album, because I’ve got pretty varied stuff. Or in my mind it’s pretty varied. I think of “Never Left the Road Behind” as sort of a bluegrass song. I think of “Bottom of the River” as a blues song. The challenge to me on this album, what I really wanted to be able to achieve was to be able to give those songs, a different sound, each of them, but have them connected in a way that made the whole thing work. I think Lorne was a major part of making that - he knew how to keep the thread going between songs to keep them so it doesn’t sound like a tremendous jump to go from one style to the other. There was just something in common there.

NZ: Is “The Word I Said” an autobiographical tune at all?

AM: Um… I can’t divulge that kind of information. Top secret. I would say that, every time I play that song, some guy from the audience comes up to me afterwards and says, “I got my ass kicked by that exact same girl.” Even though they’re like, twenty years younger than me. This girl haunts the playgrounds of America.

NZ: Like “The Boys from Brazil” or something.

AM: And power to her. She’s a strong female figure.

NZ: Or it could be that boys keep making the same dumb mistake.

AM: Yeah, it’s totally. It was clearly all my fault, even though - well, I guess I’ve divulged. I mean, she was completely in the right. I would have kicked my ass, too.

NZ: There’s the sound of children on the beginning of that. Is that from where you used to teach?

AM: Yeah, it is. I went there with a microphone and recorded some kids on the playground, about two hours worth. And then I weeded through, listening.

NZ: Like a field recording.

AM: I wanted to do more of that kind of stuff on the album, but it just didn’t work out. But I really felt on that tun in particular. We talked about that a lot, too, whether and where we were going to be able to fit it in. Because there was no other tune on the record that we could put it out there that it wasn’t going to be a jump to. And having the kids in there, with the sounds of the playground, was sort of a really nice sonic transition at the end of the song.

NZ: It works well to make people wonder what’s coming next. Do you still teach?

AM: I still work at a school in Cambridge, but I’m not teaching this year. I do some administrative work, and I sub a lot, so I guess I am teaching.

NZ: How important is humor to you in music?

AM: That’s a very serious question. I don’t think there’s any room for me to be funny on this []. Humor’s really important. The thing that drew me to folk music in the first place was having gone and seen some concerts, first it was Pete Seeger and Alro Guthrie, but then David Bromberg was one of the most amazing, funny performers. And all of these guys had this connection with the audience where, you feel like you are part of the show. Everyone is involved. And, you know, with Bromberd, it’s more of a comedic experience, and Pete and Arlo are more sort of spiritual in some ways. But there’s this amazing feeling, this energy, and that’s what I’ve always craved with music. It’s the being onstage and interacting. And humor is absolutely critical in making connections with the audience.

NZ: Is it something that came out naturally, or did you at some point say I need to make a connection and start trying different ways to make that connection?

AM: That was really what I wanted to do from the beginning. Not that I started out that I was always comfortable onstage, because I wasn’t. And sometimes I’m still not. You know, humor is an important part of performance, and performance was always a really important part of music to me. And I think, to some extent, that approach is different than a lot of my peers, who - A lot of people feel that performance is sort of what you do in order to play your songs for people to sell CDs. And some people do fine at it. But a lot of people - it’s not real fun to watch. Even if the music is great, and even if the songwriting is intelligent. And I think that sort of approach is just a priority of why you went into it in the first place.

NZ: Even if it’s great music, if the humor element is missing…

AM: Yeah, whether it’s humor or…

NZ: There are different ways to make the same connection.

AM: There are different ways to make the same connection but I don’t know of a more effective tool than humor to make a connection with the audience. Dan Bern is amazing. Have you seen him?

NZ: I haven’t seen him, but I have some of his albums.

AM: He’s an incredible live performer. He has this thing going with the audience the whole time. And unlike a lot of singer/songwriters, he’s riveting when he performs. He can do two sets and have the audience on the edge of their seat. Whereas, there’s a lot of people where, even if you love the person, two hours feel like a long, long time. You start to think about the chair you’re sitting on.

NZ: Have you heard of Hammel on Trial?

AM: Yeah. I opened for him. He’s a great performer. I don’t even have any CDs of those guys. I like their music, but it was the performance that really turned me on when I saw them.

NZ: Have you ever had any awkward moments where your humor didn’t go over with a specific crowd?

AM: [laughs] Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, all the time. I mean, it’s… Well, I’ve had some early experience in coffeehouses where humor didn’t go over because I came out singing my “I’ve Seen Your Mother Naked in the Tub” song and my “Here’s a Latte” song, and it was the wrong crowd for it. They didn’t get it, and it stopped them from appreciating the rest of what I was doing. And you know, the whole language issue is something that I think about a lot, too. “The Word I Said” is all about the power of language. I spent a period of time in college being obsessed by Lenny Bruce. Which I think probably everybody ends up being obsessed with him for a while once they figure out who he is and what he was doing. But it’s amazing, the reaction to language, how powerful it is. Curse words have, on occasion gotten a strong response. I’m not averse to strong responses, you know. I don’t mind shocking an audience sometimes if it feels like its useful, or like, there’s a reason for it. But, going and playing blues songs in a church coffeehouse, I’d sort of gotten tired of that approach because I felt like I have material that I want people to hear, and the fact that that cools them off to that other material seemed like it wasn’t useful for me.

NZ: Did you have to change the places you appear?

AM: No, I just changed what I played. I just don’t play those songs in coffeehouses. But on the other hand, those songs, they’re very useful in bars to make a connection to people because it’s sort of signaling, a lot of times, people in a bar will see somebody stand up with an acoustic guitar and they will immediately turn off. They shut out immediately because they decide it’s all going to be sensitive singer/songwriter stuff. And those songs are useful for grabbing people’s attention, and hopefully getting them to listen to the rest of the songs, too.

It’s not just the language. The “Latte” song, it’s very specific what it’s about. It’s not that it’s curse words, it’s that it’s about the coffeehouse crowd to a large extent. I play that song at clubs, at Johnny D’s and at Passim and stuff, and I love playing for coffeehouse crowds that like that song. It’s always a mark of, it’s going to be a good night. IF people are able to laugh at themselves, they’re probably going to be open to other things too.

NZ: I’d think the Passim crowd would be hard to approach that way.

AM: You know, I stopped thinking about it as a moral issue about, “God damnit I’m going to use whatever language I want, fuck the crowds”. Because if you’re up there performing for an audience, you can’t discount them. They’re a part of the performance. I started thinking of it in terms of what’s useful to me and what’s not, as a performer. The more time you spend onstage, the more you learn to read crowds. And what’s going to get through is different in different situations.

But the worst situation to me is, I’ve never had a really bad night in front of an attentive audience. It’s an inattentive audience that’s tough for me. When I go out on tour, I still will hit those clunker gigs that you end up playing to a crowd that’s there to talk to each other. No matter what you do, they’re not interested in turning their head. That’s a bad night. There are some people who aren’t going to be moved because they’re not there to listen. And sometimes you can win over an audience like that, but often you can’t, and it’s very easy to get down on yourself as a performer after one of those gigs. Or down on yourself as a musician. Because, any musician you talk to will tell you about the gigs they played that are the ones that made them think, “I’m quitting tomorrow”.

NZ: There’s a tendency to blame the audience at times too.

AM: Yeah. Yeah, right. You can’t really blame the audience in that situation. You’re going in it to perform for them, and they didn’t come to see you. It’s not a listening club. It’s our fault for taking the gigs. You just try not to make the same mistake twice, you know.

NZ: When people think of roots music and humor, they think of the easy gag. They think of the easy seventies country beer and bar kind of gag. The humor that you’ve done has been at times more subtle and at times more abstract than to fit into their idea of humor in a song.

AM: Thanks.

NZ: Do you sit down to write a funny song, or do you sit down and think of a story, and the humor comes out of what the characters are doing?

AM: I’ve never successfully sat down to write any song that came out the way I intended to write it. Whenever I do sit down and write a song, and it comes out the way I wanted it to, it’s usually no good. And its usually preachy, is what happens. I often feel like I’d like to write more political material, because I love playing political material. I love playing Woody’s stuff. But when I’ve sat down to write songs about political issues, they always come out preachy if I stay where I started. And I just take that as an indication that that's not my voice. However it is that I’m going to comment on things, is going to be in another direction. I tried to write a song about education reform, and it came out sounding like an Al Gore speech. I immediately chucked it out.

I throw out a lot of material.

NZ: Your political view still comes out on tunes like “Me and My Friend”. You’re writing from your perspective, and the issue comes out.

AM: And that’s what it is. You can’t write outside your experience, and the problem with trying to take on a broad political issue for me is that it’s not tangible enough to me. It’s something I care about intensely and it’s something I spend a lot of my time talking about and thinking about and reading about, but it’s not my experience. You’re best writing, your best observations are always going to be about what you see around you.

That song “Me and My Friend” was about a very specific incident, and I came home angry and wrote this song. But I didn’t sit down to write a song about an issue. The “Latte” song sort of came out the same way on a less serious level.

NZ: Those are actually based on specific incidents?

AM: Yeah. I in college spent a semester in Zimbabwe and the guy who taught us shona, which is the language in Zimbabwe, I was having him over. I was staying the last month of the semester in a hostel. I brought him over for dinner one night. A few of us were going to cook dinner. And these guards at gate wouldn’t let him in. And it quickly became clear what was going on - that he was black in Zimbabwe. And the extraordinary thing is that the guards were black, who were following spoken or unspoken orders of the owner of the hotel, who was also black, but was light-skinned black. And in Africa, that still makes a difference. This is something that a lot of people have a lot more experience with. But this was a time that I was experiencing it up close, and I was furious that I was bringing a friend over for dinner that someone was stopping from coming in. I had never had that experience before. It was traumatic for me. He was much less effected by it, obviously.

NZ: He’d seen it.

AM: Yeah.

NZ: Have you done a lot of traveling in the United States?

AM: No.

NZ: A lot of the songs have that Woody Guthrie, backpacking sort of feel to them.

AM: [smiles] Yeah, that’s all a lie.

NZ: Do you get that through other music? Where does that come from?

AM: Well, I’ve traveled some, but like the road song I wrote on there, was sort of carriage before the horse. I had to tour, I was in New England when I wrote that song. But I was sort of guessing what it was going to be like. And then I crashed my car on the first tour. I don’t write that many songs, and I had already written this one, so I wasn’t going to toss it out.

It’s a hackneyed sentiment in folk music - the drifter. I don’t know if it was hackneyed when Woody was writing about it, but it certainly is now. Everybody has a road song. I’m conscious of that. I don’t know. The sentiment still sticks. There is this romantic image that Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan and a whole host of other gruff sounding guys created about the lure of being on the road. And I’ve never had that. Touring for me is not - I’m a homebody. I’d much rather be at home than go out. And Woody’s life was a mess. He was completely incapable of having good personal relationships. So I’ve always been very aware of that as the flipside to the image. And yet, there is still a romance about it.

I read Travels With Charlie when I was a teenager. Ever read that?

NZ: No.

AM: It’s Steinbeck’s account of traveling the country with his dog Charlie. It totally put the bug in me to do that trip. And I’d still like to. I still want to get out and tour around the country, but not the rest of my life.

NZ: It still fits the dichotomy that arises in some of your songs, especially in “John Lee”. You hark back to all of these heroes, and then mention TNN and more modern references. Sort of looking back at all of these places but realizing you’re in the present.

AM: Yeah. Very much so. I don’t know. The title of the album came from thinking through what the songs were about and what kind of common thread there is. Which is something I love to do, and I didn’t do it on the second album. Cuz I had this little phrase which I thought was funny. And I still think it’s funny. But I like this process and the one I did on the first album a lot more. Cuz it’s a cool process to think back over the material you’ve written and sort of realize what common themes have been running through. And, a life I never had on this one was - Part of the reason it seemed to fit so well was because of that dichotomy between the past and the present. I’m always aware of it. And aware that I’m not living in the Depression era. It was important to me on the album - the title sort of helped me include the traditional material on there that I wanted to include. Because I love that material. I have a real personal connection to it. Yet I’m also very aware that it’s not my experience.

NZ: It’s not directly a part of your experience, but their music is.

AM: Right. But I think it’s important to make that distinction, to be clear about it. Because so much traditional material takes on new meanings today. Prine’s “Paradise” song isn’t that old, but it sounds like it’s that old. It’s a completely relevant song today about all sorts of other industries going into towns and becoming the sole industry. And when those factories pick up and leave, the town is desolated. In the area I went to college, that is what has gone on there, in the Berkshires. All of these textile mills had been there, and they all left. And all of the economy went with them when they left. So that kind of song - I think Woody’s “Pastures of Plenty” is a completely relevant song when you think about immigrant labor in this country. So to me, it’s material that’s still alive, and I feel that connection to it. But in order to put it side to side with my material, which is different - I want to do that but I also want to be able to justify it. And the title for me was a way of linking all of those songs in with my own songs.

NZ: So would Pastures of Plenty be a way of finding where other people are making those connections?

AM: Yeah. Yeah. It’s very cool to have people in the Pasture series come and interpret for themselves the roots of American music. Because they’re always representing their own roots. And that’s what I wanted to do with that series, is bring people’s influences to the front. To put the focus on it. There’s been very little on that series that didn’t feel appropriate to the title. But there’s been a couple of things - 70s rock - which stretched the limits maybe beyond where they were meaningful.

But one of my favorite things in this series was when Faith Solloway did those Rodgers and Hart tunes at the last Pastures at Passim. Because that’s exactly what I’d like to do more and more of on the series, is have people with different backgrounds. I mean, Faith has this whole musical theater background, and of course those are completely valid roots of American music. That music has influenced all sorts of popular American music. The only reason really that I haven’t stretched out to other genres is just because of my own personal connections. I would love to get jazz musicians involved, and blues musicians from different backgrounds - from not the Northeast, to come interpret the stuff from their perspective.

NZ: Might you stretch out to something more in the jazz field yourself?

AM: Well, I’m pretty aware of my own limitations as a musician. Even among folk musicians, I’m a harmonically simplistic guy. And folk music is harmonically simplistic music, compared to jazz, which is another world.

It’s really important for musicians at different levels to be helping each other out. Ellis [Paul] has been really helpful to me. And all of these guys who sang on the album, Mark’s been really helpful. And just being on the album was really generous.

NZ: Does that help you get into areas where maybe they’ve been but you haven’t?

AM: Unfortunately, when I leave this area, and people don’t know my name… I’m starting to build up, after now being on my third or fourth tour of the DC, Philly, New York area, I’m starting to build some name recognition those areas. But it’s very hard, because you go to a new area, you really are unheard of. When people don’t know you, it’s a sort of unfortunate thing, people have their own ways of filtering what they’re going to listen to and what they’re not. I’m talking about club owners and radio stations. They don’t know your name. And having names that they do recognize is important, as a way of getting attention. Because all of us who are trying to get our CDs into club owners and stuff are facing a stack of a hundred CDs at any given club. The trick is to get club owners to open those CDs and listen to them. And then you’re on your own. Even if you feel very good about the music that you’re sending them, you have to figure out how to get them to open it. That’s the business part of what we’re doing.

NZ: Do you think the O Brother Where Art Thou phenomenon helped anything?

AM: Well, I really hope so. I think a lot of people in the folk world are talking about the O Brother Where Art Thou phenomenon. There’s things that, feel like they’re starting to brew. There really does feel like there’s something of a roots revival happening in Boston, and maybe on a larger scale in the country. And that's exciting.

You’ve got to capitalize on this stuff when it comes in, because it’s all bullshit. It’s all trends that have nothing to do with you. And you get lucky to be able to ride the crest of the trend. So many of the people, the musicians that my generation look to in the 60s and the 70s, they were incredibly lucky to be where they were when it happened. That whole generation of 60s and early 70s performers were musician/singer/songwriters at the right time in the right place. And all of a sudden these major labels came swooping down out of the hills to sign anybody with an acoustic guitar. It’s very different now, how that business works. But these trends never go away. They’re always the same. You can see, recently, there’s been a very strong trend toward female singer/songwriters that’s been a really predominate trend. It’s a role reversal which is probably due its time. But it’s been harder for male singer/songwriters the last several years to get any of the same kind of attention that female sing/songwriters have been getting.

NZ: You just have to wait until the trend comes to you, see what you can make of it, then keep going like you were before.

AM: Anybody who’s succeeded in music to any extent has said the same thing, which is you just have to stick to it and let everybody else quit. And eventually you’ll be at the right place at the right time. Hopefully, that time is soon. We’ll see.

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