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Bill Kopp:<\/strong> Though released only a year apart, these two albums are very different. Lyrically, Young and Rich<\/em> leans a bit more in the direction of comedy and satire, with 50s pastiches, disco and so forth. To my ears it’s almost a slice-of-life, \u201cTubes look at America\u201d concept album. Did you approach these albums with any sort of overarching concept, as you did on Remote Control<\/em> and (to some extent) on Completion Backward Principle<\/em>?<\/span><\/p>\n Bill Spooner:<\/strong> No concept. Just a collection. The only concept album, truly, was Remote Control<\/em>. Everything else was just a bunch of songs, and we tried to find something that united them into an album. That used to be important; I don’t think anybody cares about that any more. Maybe Neil Young<\/strong> does.<\/p>\n BK:<\/strong> A friend was in the car with me while the Young and Rich<\/em> CD was playing. He commented that it sounded like Frank Zappa<\/strong>. What sort of artists of that era do you think informed and influenced your work?<\/span><\/p>\n BS:<\/strong> In the Young and Rich<\/em> era? As far as I was concerned, I was pretty much wrapped up in my own world. We used to rehearse seven hours a day, six days a week. Basically, I didn’t really have time to listen to what else was going on. I liked Stevie Wonder<\/strong> back then, and I liked Zappa to a certain degree; the earlier stuff, at least. But [Captain<\/strong>] Beefheart<\/strong>…I guess he was a pretty big influence.<\/p>\n BK:<\/strong> Of course! You covered one of his tracks, and he’s on one of your songs…<\/span><\/p>\n BS:<\/strong> On Now<\/em>, yeah. He kinda comes under the heading of, \u201cYou never want to meet your idols.\u201d And Zappa heads that list. But Beefheart was just crazy. I respect him as an artist, but he was a real crazy mother, I tell ya.<\/p>\n BK:<\/strong> I saw a documentary on the making of Trout Mask Replica<\/em>, and they interviewed some of the guys in The Magic Band<\/strong>. That made him seem as if he was a sociopath.<\/span><\/p>\n BS:<\/strong> He was pretty crazy. He wasn’t like violent<\/em> crazy, but you really couldn’t predict what was going to come out of his mouth. And it was very hard to work with him. Because he’d find the most absurd reasons to not do what he was supposed to be doing. I could tell you some stories, but I don’t want to get into that.<\/p>\n But the answer is, we were really just trying to refine our \u201cthing.\u201d By the time of the second album [Young and Rich<\/em>], we were touring a lot. A third of the songs \u2013 or maybe forty percent \u2013 were older songs that were rejected from the first album, but [producer] Ken Scott<\/strong> liked ’em. So…<\/p>\n That’s what you sometimes do: you let the producer pick the songs. If there’s something you feel really strong about it, you agitate for that particular song. But in general, I think Ken Scott picked most of the songs for that album.<\/p>\n And he was a great producer. Very even-keeled. So was Al Kooper<\/strong>; I liked ’em both.<\/p>\n BK:<\/strong> Really? Because on the What Do You Want From Live<\/em> album, on the song \u201cI Was a Punk Before You Were a Punk,\u201d the lyric goes, \u201cthe producer we got was a jerk.\u201d I more or less assumed that was autobiographical…<\/span><\/p>\n BS:<\/strong> No, no, no. I just used that line because it rhymed with \u201cwork.\u201d Limited rhyme schemes, y’know. Ya gotta go with what fits.<\/p>\n No, he wasn’t a jerk. They both had idiosyncrasies, but they were both very good producers, I think. In different ways. Al Kooper was like the musician-producer, and Ken Scott was like an engineer-producer. He could hear a squeak that nobody else could; he’d stop everything in the middle of a session: \u201cWhat’s that squeaking sound?\u201d And we wouldn’t hear any squeaking sound. Finally, we’d find that it was someone’s stool that they were sitting on, twenty feet away from a microphone. But he could hear it. He had great ears, and he was a really good engineer.<\/p>\n BK:<\/strong> I saw The Tubes three or four times in the early 80s, and then once in the mid 1980s with David Killingsworth<\/strong> taking Fee Waybill<\/strong>‘s place as lead singer…<\/span><\/p>\n BS:<\/strong> [deadpanning] That must have been a thrill.<\/p>\n BK:<\/strong> I’ve always been impressed by the playing and arranging on Tubes albums. Some people would argue that the visuals, the show, they lyrics etc. overshadowed that to some degree; I don’t think the causal listener often stopped to notice just how great the band was musically. Do you think that the band got its proper critical due musically?<\/span><\/p>\n BS:<\/strong> Well, you have a good point there. But I think that because we started with such a dramatic flair, as time went on we realized that we were always going to be in the red. We’d book tours \u2013 150 dates of sold-out shows \u2013 and still lose money. Because of all the people we’d drag around, and all the props and extra trucks full of shit.<\/p>\n So finally we dumped the show, or at least pared it way down. And then it was a case of, \u201cYou can’t keep ’em home after they’ve seen ‘Paree,’\u201d y’know? We didn’t get the same reaction. We’re obviously the same musicians, so it was a combination of the two things that made it popular.<\/p>\n You’ve got to remember: it was the 70s, and we were at the cutting edge of outrageous stage behavior. Which would be nothing, today.<\/p>\n BK:<\/strong> It would be considered relatively tame now.<\/span><\/p>\n BS:<\/strong> It would be R-rated today. But back in those days, we used to bank on that, too. I remember \u2013 you’ve probably heard this story \u2013 in Minneapolis, some women’s group or some citizens’ group were protesting our show coming to town. [According to them,] we debased women, and we had actual sex onstage…that kind of crap. <\/p>\n So what we did was get our three girl dancers, and dress them up in old-lady costumes, grey wigs and baggy dresses, and they showed up with signs that read, \u201cNo Titties in the Twin Cities.\u201d So we protested our own show. And that made the local news. As a result of all that, we got the mayor, the governor of Minnesota, and the whole city council…they all came to the show. Because they had to see what was so terrible. And they loved it.<\/p>\n BK:<\/strong> Of all the Tubes’ albums, which would you say is your favorite?<\/span><\/p>\n BS:<\/strong> I really like a lot of the Love Bomb<\/em> album. I don’t like all of any of the albums, but I like a lot of that one. The first one had a lot of great stuff on it, great orchestral arrangements by Dominic Frontiere<\/strong>. I thought it was pretty impressive for a first album. But I couldn’t pick a favorite; it’s like your kids, y’know? Even if you do have a favorite, you can’t tell anyone.<\/p>\n BK:<\/strong> The liner notes for this twofer reissue completely ignore the existence of Remote Control<\/em>; they suggest Now<\/em> was the last studio album you did for A&M.<\/span><\/p>\n BS: <\/strong>Who wrote the liner notes?<\/p>\n BK:<\/strong> Gene Sculatti<\/strong>. Overall it’s good stuff. But he makes some errors.<\/span><\/p>\n BS:<\/strong> Yeah, I think I saw something like that on Wikipedia or something…<\/p>\n BK:<\/strong><\/span> Maybe that’s where he found it.<\/span> Can you tell me: the unreleased \u201cBlack Album\u201d \u2013 also known as <\/span>Suffer for Sound<\/em><\/span> \u2013 was that done while you were still under contract for A&M? Where does that fall in the Tubes chronology?<\/span><\/p>\n BS:<\/strong> There was supposed to be a renegotiation period…I guess it’s illegal to negotiate with a label when you’re already on one. So we had heard rumors from our manager \u2013 Rikki Faar<\/strong>, who’s not the most scrupulous guy in the world \u2013 that if we got off A&M, we could get a much bigger deal with Capitol. But I think the point of that project was to make a collection of demos. When we actually made an album, we spent a lot of time getting everything thought out perfectly; we didn’t spend that much time on [the \u201cblack album\u201d]. Stuff was a little out of tune here and there…<\/p>\n We figured it was kinda dark, too. It was kind of a…there are a couple of songs on there I like, but the majority of them are throwaways. I’m sure the point was to get off of A&M, because we didn’t think they’d put it out. And they didn’t.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/musoscribe.com\/images\/tubes_rgm.jpg\")
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