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THE PINK GUITAR
THE ICONIC SOUND
THE REINVENTION OF ROCK MUSIC
Interview by Daniel Kushner, 06/27/2007
Photography by Patrick Chen
DK: First off, you just got back from the Monochrome tour in Australia – how did that go?
PH: It was great. The band performed really well and the response was overwhelming. People down there are such fans of music and they were really enthusiastic. It had been 10 years since Helmet had been down there, so people were actually thanking me. The first night in Byron Bay it was just mayhem. We were jetlagged and got wasted on scotch when we got up there - it must have been about 110 degrees on stage, and people just started shaking my hand going “thank you, thank you”. I couldn’t have been happier - it was amazing. I mean, after 10 years you don’t know if people are going to turn up but they’re are so loyal down there. The Sydney and Melbourne shows sold out so they added a second show in each city. That was really gratifying too – to rock out there 10 years later.
DK: What was your set like there, did you stick to the Monochrome album?
PH: We played everything. We draw from Strap It On, Meantime, Betty, Aftertaste, Size Matters and Monochrome. And we’re playing about half a dozen songs off of each – except Strap It On. We only played two off of that.
DK: It seems like there’s a really good chemistry with the new line-up with Kyle, Jon and Jimmy. Can you talk about what might be coming next from you guys?
PH: I just finished writing a song for the movie Tatooa called Revenge Destroys Everything, which is the tagline from the movie – something I’ve never done before. So we just finished recording that. And we have a new booking agency, TKO, which I’m really excited about. I’ve met with them a couple of times and we’re talking about a Fall tour. I don’t want to be out for months on end though. I’ve got a lot of things going on here so I’d like to be on the road in bits and pieces, not shoving a van through snowdrifts somewhere. We’ll join the geriatrics summer tour circuit. You know, state fairs and stuff. Get out there with Ario Speedwagon and Little River Band.
DK: The new Money Shot Video is up online now and it rocks. Is that airing now?
PH: Thanks! It’s airing. We won a Tele Award in Britain. Out of 13,000 videos Money Shot came in second. And we were on UVTV as a Featured Video and number 29 on Much Music in Canada. Normally I don’t follow this stuff but in this day and age, when everything is hands-on, you sort of have to pay attention to these things. And it’s fun! The guy that did the video, Brian Metcaff, is a brilliant guy. I’m hoping to do some more work with him soon.
DK: I’d love to know a bit about your writing process. What does that look like for you?
PH: It usually starts out with a few weeks of moving a big pile of gravel. At that point it’s kind of tedious and I feel like nothing’s good. I’ll try to record ideas that I think are “ok” at least. Then I start to develop something and hopefully something comes out of all that hard work. You need to sort of free yourself up. I often write in chunks, like for an album, unless I’m writing instrumental music, which is a total different thing. But when you’re writing lyrics your synapse has to be firing in a completely different way. I start off and just sit down with a guitar, a keyboard, a computer or whatever. I listen to a lot of stuff too - whatever it takes. It’s sort of a process of emptying everything out. Day to day life takes its toll and we’re always running from here to there trying to accomplish things. So you really have to get focused and get your head clear. And I don’t just sit down and spit ‘em out. Helmet songs are very arrangement intensive. All the drums have to be worked out – the fills and hits and everything because there’s a lot of unison stuff. It’s not like we go in and jam on the song and the arrangement just reveals itself. I have to come in with a completed arrangement. I always have a notebook by the bed, and one in the car, and one in my pocket. I just got a new stack of those little red ones from Staples. And I have these little Pilot pens that fit in your pocket.
DK: And what are you doing with the pen and the notebook, is this for lyrics?
PH: Yeah, for lyrics, or if I hear something comes on the radio that I want to remember. I just heard Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence and had to get that. And John Corigliono’s Three Hallucinations for Orchestra for the movie Altered States – AMAZING piece. So the notebook’s always there for stuff like that; to write lyric ideas; to write rhythmic figures. I don’t have staff paper there so I’ll sketch out the dotted quarter rhythm and write the notes above it. It’s just good to write this stuff down so I can come back later and work on it.
DK: Do you always write in the language of Helmet?
PH: You mean as far as using that guitar vocabulary?
DK: Yeah
PH: No. I’m writing all sorts of things – like recently a lot of orchestra sketches for movies. I start with melody, and I have a bunch of orchestral samples that I use so I have the arrangements of instruments on the keyboard. And all that stuff starts with melody. The other way I’ll write is using the guitar for a sort of sonic sculpting that I’ve been developing over the years. Like the various movies that I work on with Elliot Goldenthal – the newest one is Across the Universe, which comes out this year I think. It’s a musical based on Beatles songs. I also worked on his opera with him for S.W.A.T., and In Dreams, Titus, Final Fantasy, The Good Thief. On all these different movies it would be like his brilliant orchestral stuff with my guitar sort of messing things up. I’ve really developed a collection of sounds that I can draw from. I have a designated pedalboard now so I can start improvising and record something then orchestrate around it. So that’s another way that I write.
DK: Moving back in time, when Meantime came out it changed the landscape of rock music. What were the factors that made that album so groundbreaking?
PH: I think a large part of it was the guitar vocabulary. If you look at what heavy music was at the time - power chords were power chords and solos reigned supreme. I started writing things that simplified - parts without too many notes. From my perspective, a good theme or motif or riff is better than stringing a bunch of parts together. I always thought Beethoven’s 5th Symphony is the best heavy metal riff ever - it’s just two notes at first. One thing a lot of rock musicians didn’t do was to develop musical ideas that show patience. A band that’s really good at developing musical ideas in that way is the Melvins. I was so blown away by them when I first saw them play. I was also always interested in the way something polyrhythmic made me feel and move. It flows in a way that’s less obvious but equally gratifying [as straight time riffs]. I was always on the subway hearing these rhythms. New York is such a rhythmic city with industrial sounds - the subway, the streets, the horns. All these things just feed you creatively. In retrospect those sounds and that environment had such a huge influence on what Helmet was becoming at the time.
The other thing is we were unapologetic about it. We didn’t try to cater to any audience whatsoever. We didn’t fit in with the East Village crowd because we weren’t doing jangly, noisy guitars that were out of tune. We weren’t in the hardcore world either. We had to find our own audience, and I think a lot of younger musicians really appreciated that. They realized they didn’t have to fill some niche, but instead they could be themselves. We never thought about fashion or image. It was just “drop the needle and listed to the record“. What you heard was what you got. We sounded like us, and that was an accomplishment. For better or worse.
I remember the record company saying, “What’s with the snare man, it’s too tight“. But that was Stanier’s sound - he had his drum corp thing and it sounds amazing. Stanier had this great ability to understand groove and time without even thinking about it. But he also lived for his fills - 90% of the time we spent in rehearsal was on drum fills (laughs). And thank goodness because those are some of my favorite drum fills. Stanier made it all work in the context of Helmet and he made it his own. Every [Helmet] drummer since has had to be aware of Jon’s legacy - and has been very respectful of the fact that I hold him in high esteem as a musician.
Henry was a multifaceted musician - he played guitar and drums really well, and he happened to pick up a bass and audition for our band. So he’s a musician first. His approach to the instrument was more animalistic than “muso“. He’s not a musician that could express himself in words, but intuitively he was a very deep musician. He’s got that magic thing that you want in a musician. Being the bass player is a tough spot - you’re the unheralded guy in the band or whatever - but he was incredible. If you solo the bass tracks, he had this country western feel. His tracks swing in a completely different way, and when you put that on top of what I was playing with Jon it created this huge divot - it was really effective. I feel fortunate to have been in a band with those guys. I learned a lot from them, and hopefully they learned from me.
DK: You created an iconic sound with Helmet, and that’s something that so many musicians strive for. What advice would you give to those who are trying to find their own voice?
PH: To be unapologetic. But that doesn’t mean to be a jerk about it. I had a musician friend in college say “I’m not listening to any music whatsoever because I don’t want to be influenced by anybody - I want my own sound“. I think that’s the wrong way to go about it. You need to constantly fuel the fire and absorb music. You need to have an open dialog with music and be an active participant. It doesn’t mean you have to have music on in the background all the time as noise, but dedicate some time to listen to music - and really listen. I haven’t plugged my TV in for 6 years and that’s fine, but to develop your own vocabulary as a musician it helps to listen. Part of it is learning the fundamentals and rudiments, but make sure it’s about music and not “style“. Don’t be closed-minded to jazz or classical or rock or reggae or any other genre of music. I could only afford to buy the $3.99 records once a month when I was in college, so I lived with Myles Smiles for a month before I could listen to something else. It’s great to learn things off of records, but in general be a student of music always. As a guitar player, find voicings all over the neck. My teacher made me do it. I’d call him in his office: “A Cm6th chord is an Am7th flat5 - it’s the same chord!“. And he’d be like: “That’s great Hamilton, now find roots on the 4th, 5th and 6th strings all the way up to the 12th fret in all 12 keys“, and I would just be like “Ok“.
DK: That’s why I play drums.
PH: Yeah sure, well, drummers aren’t really musicians dude. They’re a necessary evil (laughs).
DK: You also play jazz and you have for many years. What role does jazz play in your own life?
PH: Jazz is sort of the heart and soul of my musical being in a weird way. Even though I’m a rock musician and I grew up on Led Zeppelin (and I play because of them), I got into jazz really early on. My parents listened to jazz and I had a guitar teacher in Oregon who wanted to teach me jazz. George Benson was my first exposure and I never heard anyone play guitar like that. Studying and listening to jazz freed me up to realize that improvising is ok and good. And jazz taught me feel because it’s all about the groove. It also opened my ears up to harmonies that are quite a bit more complex then what you hear in rock music generally. Jazz also made me feel part of something. Even though there were guys who would give me a hard time because I wasn’t very good, some of the older cats saw how much heart I had - trying my damndest to play that complicated music. A lot of them were encouraging and took me under their wing. I was this kid on cloud 9, hanging with the local Oregon jazz greats, listening to Coltrane records together. There was just a lot of love in that world because jazz musicians make music for love of music, not money, since there is no money in jazz. And I don’t count Kenny G and whatever as jazz. I’m talking about the real cats that are carrying on the tradition. It’s a great community, and it’s one of the greatest art forms.
DK: You’re also producing records now. How would you describe your approach?
PH: My job as a producer is not to try to sell millions of records. My job is to make the music better. I try to find what’s good in the music - what’s unique in the music. I also try to find what’s clichéd and bad about the music - to see how it can be improved. I try to trim away the fat and get rid of stuff that’s not interesting. I’ve realized you have to choose your battles though. I’m very persistent and tenacious in the studio, but at the end of the day it’s their record and you can’t try to write their songs for them.
Editor’s note, 05/27/2008:
We were lucky enough to witness Page in action, producing Totimoshi’s newest release, "Milagrosa". This is a must-hear album. We also covered this awesome experience in the MONOlog here.
Links:
www.helmetmusic.com
www.myspace.com/helmetrocks
THE ICONIC SOUND
THE REINVENTION OF ROCK MUSIC
Interview by Daniel Kushner, 06/27/2007
Photography by Patrick Chen
DK: First off, you just got back from the Monochrome tour in Australia – how did that go?
PH: It was great. The band performed really well and the response was overwhelming. People down there are such fans of music and they were really enthusiastic. It had been 10 years since Helmet had been down there, so people were actually thanking me. The first night in Byron Bay it was just mayhem. We were jetlagged and got wasted on scotch when we got up there - it must have been about 110 degrees on stage, and people just started shaking my hand going “thank you, thank you”. I couldn’t have been happier - it was amazing. I mean, after 10 years you don’t know if people are going to turn up but they’re are so loyal down there. The Sydney and Melbourne shows sold out so they added a second show in each city. That was really gratifying too – to rock out there 10 years later.
DK: What was your set like there, did you stick to the Monochrome album?
PH: We played everything. We draw from Strap It On, Meantime, Betty, Aftertaste, Size Matters and Monochrome. And we’re playing about half a dozen songs off of each – except Strap It On. We only played two off of that.
DK: It seems like there’s a really good chemistry with the new line-up with Kyle, Jon and Jimmy. Can you talk about what might be coming next from you guys?
PH: I just finished writing a song for the movie Tatooa called Revenge Destroys Everything, which is the tagline from the movie – something I’ve never done before. So we just finished recording that. And we have a new booking agency, TKO, which I’m really excited about. I’ve met with them a couple of times and we’re talking about a Fall tour. I don’t want to be out for months on end though. I’ve got a lot of things going on here so I’d like to be on the road in bits and pieces, not shoving a van through snowdrifts somewhere. We’ll join the geriatrics summer tour circuit. You know, state fairs and stuff. Get out there with Ario Speedwagon and Little River Band.
DK: The new Money Shot Video is up online now and it rocks. Is that airing now?
PH: Thanks! It’s airing. We won a Tele Award in Britain. Out of 13,000 videos Money Shot came in second. And we were on UVTV as a Featured Video and number 29 on Much Music in Canada. Normally I don’t follow this stuff but in this day and age, when everything is hands-on, you sort of have to pay attention to these things. And it’s fun! The guy that did the video, Brian Metcaff, is a brilliant guy. I’m hoping to do some more work with him soon.
DK: I’d love to know a bit about your writing process. What does that look like for you?
PH: It usually starts out with a few weeks of moving a big pile of gravel. At that point it’s kind of tedious and I feel like nothing’s good. I’ll try to record ideas that I think are “ok” at least. Then I start to develop something and hopefully something comes out of all that hard work. You need to sort of free yourself up. I often write in chunks, like for an album, unless I’m writing instrumental music, which is a total different thing. But when you’re writing lyrics your synapse has to be firing in a completely different way. I start off and just sit down with a guitar, a keyboard, a computer or whatever. I listen to a lot of stuff too - whatever it takes. It’s sort of a process of emptying everything out. Day to day life takes its toll and we’re always running from here to there trying to accomplish things. So you really have to get focused and get your head clear. And I don’t just sit down and spit ‘em out. Helmet songs are very arrangement intensive. All the drums have to be worked out – the fills and hits and everything because there’s a lot of unison stuff. It’s not like we go in and jam on the song and the arrangement just reveals itself. I have to come in with a completed arrangement. I always have a notebook by the bed, and one in the car, and one in my pocket. I just got a new stack of those little red ones from Staples. And I have these little Pilot pens that fit in your pocket.
DK: And what are you doing with the pen and the notebook, is this for lyrics?
PH: Yeah, for lyrics, or if I hear something comes on the radio that I want to remember. I just heard Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence and had to get that. And John Corigliono’s Three Hallucinations for Orchestra for the movie Altered States – AMAZING piece. So the notebook’s always there for stuff like that; to write lyric ideas; to write rhythmic figures. I don’t have staff paper there so I’ll sketch out the dotted quarter rhythm and write the notes above it. It’s just good to write this stuff down so I can come back later and work on it.
DK: Do you always write in the language of Helmet?
PH: You mean as far as using that guitar vocabulary?
DK: Yeah
PH: No. I’m writing all sorts of things – like recently a lot of orchestra sketches for movies. I start with melody, and I have a bunch of orchestral samples that I use so I have the arrangements of instruments on the keyboard. And all that stuff starts with melody. The other way I’ll write is using the guitar for a sort of sonic sculpting that I’ve been developing over the years. Like the various movies that I work on with Elliot Goldenthal – the newest one is Across the Universe, which comes out this year I think. It’s a musical based on Beatles songs. I also worked on his opera with him for S.W.A.T., and In Dreams, Titus, Final Fantasy, The Good Thief. On all these different movies it would be like his brilliant orchestral stuff with my guitar sort of messing things up. I’ve really developed a collection of sounds that I can draw from. I have a designated pedalboard now so I can start improvising and record something then orchestrate around it. So that’s another way that I write.
DK: Moving back in time, when Meantime came out it changed the landscape of rock music. What were the factors that made that album so groundbreaking?
PH: I think a large part of it was the guitar vocabulary. If you look at what heavy music was at the time - power chords were power chords and solos reigned supreme. I started writing things that simplified - parts without too many notes. From my perspective, a good theme or motif or riff is better than stringing a bunch of parts together. I always thought Beethoven’s 5th Symphony is the best heavy metal riff ever - it’s just two notes at first. One thing a lot of rock musicians didn’t do was to develop musical ideas that show patience. A band that’s really good at developing musical ideas in that way is the Melvins. I was so blown away by them when I first saw them play. I was also always interested in the way something polyrhythmic made me feel and move. It flows in a way that’s less obvious but equally gratifying [as straight time riffs]. I was always on the subway hearing these rhythms. New York is such a rhythmic city with industrial sounds - the subway, the streets, the horns. All these things just feed you creatively. In retrospect those sounds and that environment had such a huge influence on what Helmet was becoming at the time.
The other thing is we were unapologetic about it. We didn’t try to cater to any audience whatsoever. We didn’t fit in with the East Village crowd because we weren’t doing jangly, noisy guitars that were out of tune. We weren’t in the hardcore world either. We had to find our own audience, and I think a lot of younger musicians really appreciated that. They realized they didn’t have to fill some niche, but instead they could be themselves. We never thought about fashion or image. It was just “drop the needle and listed to the record“. What you heard was what you got. We sounded like us, and that was an accomplishment. For better or worse.
I remember the record company saying, “What’s with the snare man, it’s too tight“. But that was Stanier’s sound - he had his drum corp thing and it sounds amazing. Stanier had this great ability to understand groove and time without even thinking about it. But he also lived for his fills - 90% of the time we spent in rehearsal was on drum fills (laughs). And thank goodness because those are some of my favorite drum fills. Stanier made it all work in the context of Helmet and he made it his own. Every [Helmet] drummer since has had to be aware of Jon’s legacy - and has been very respectful of the fact that I hold him in high esteem as a musician.
Henry was a multifaceted musician - he played guitar and drums really well, and he happened to pick up a bass and audition for our band. So he’s a musician first. His approach to the instrument was more animalistic than “muso“. He’s not a musician that could express himself in words, but intuitively he was a very deep musician. He’s got that magic thing that you want in a musician. Being the bass player is a tough spot - you’re the unheralded guy in the band or whatever - but he was incredible. If you solo the bass tracks, he had this country western feel. His tracks swing in a completely different way, and when you put that on top of what I was playing with Jon it created this huge divot - it was really effective. I feel fortunate to have been in a band with those guys. I learned a lot from them, and hopefully they learned from me.
DK: You created an iconic sound with Helmet, and that’s something that so many musicians strive for. What advice would you give to those who are trying to find their own voice?
PH: To be unapologetic. But that doesn’t mean to be a jerk about it. I had a musician friend in college say “I’m not listening to any music whatsoever because I don’t want to be influenced by anybody - I want my own sound“. I think that’s the wrong way to go about it. You need to constantly fuel the fire and absorb music. You need to have an open dialog with music and be an active participant. It doesn’t mean you have to have music on in the background all the time as noise, but dedicate some time to listen to music - and really listen. I haven’t plugged my TV in for 6 years and that’s fine, but to develop your own vocabulary as a musician it helps to listen. Part of it is learning the fundamentals and rudiments, but make sure it’s about music and not “style“. Don’t be closed-minded to jazz or classical or rock or reggae or any other genre of music. I could only afford to buy the $3.99 records once a month when I was in college, so I lived with Myles Smiles for a month before I could listen to something else. It’s great to learn things off of records, but in general be a student of music always. As a guitar player, find voicings all over the neck. My teacher made me do it. I’d call him in his office: “A Cm6th chord is an Am7th flat5 - it’s the same chord!“. And he’d be like: “That’s great Hamilton, now find roots on the 4th, 5th and 6th strings all the way up to the 12th fret in all 12 keys“, and I would just be like “Ok“.
DK: That’s why I play drums.
PH: Yeah sure, well, drummers aren’t really musicians dude. They’re a necessary evil (laughs).
DK: You also play jazz and you have for many years. What role does jazz play in your own life?
PH: Jazz is sort of the heart and soul of my musical being in a weird way. Even though I’m a rock musician and I grew up on Led Zeppelin (and I play because of them), I got into jazz really early on. My parents listened to jazz and I had a guitar teacher in Oregon who wanted to teach me jazz. George Benson was my first exposure and I never heard anyone play guitar like that. Studying and listening to jazz freed me up to realize that improvising is ok and good. And jazz taught me feel because it’s all about the groove. It also opened my ears up to harmonies that are quite a bit more complex then what you hear in rock music generally. Jazz also made me feel part of something. Even though there were guys who would give me a hard time because I wasn’t very good, some of the older cats saw how much heart I had - trying my damndest to play that complicated music. A lot of them were encouraging and took me under their wing. I was this kid on cloud 9, hanging with the local Oregon jazz greats, listening to Coltrane records together. There was just a lot of love in that world because jazz musicians make music for love of music, not money, since there is no money in jazz. And I don’t count Kenny G and whatever as jazz. I’m talking about the real cats that are carrying on the tradition. It’s a great community, and it’s one of the greatest art forms.
DK: You’re also producing records now. How would you describe your approach?
PH: My job as a producer is not to try to sell millions of records. My job is to make the music better. I try to find what’s good in the music - what’s unique in the music. I also try to find what’s clichéd and bad about the music - to see how it can be improved. I try to trim away the fat and get rid of stuff that’s not interesting. I’ve realized you have to choose your battles though. I’m very persistent and tenacious in the studio, but at the end of the day it’s their record and you can’t try to write their songs for them.
Editor’s note, 05/27/2008:
We were lucky enough to witness Page in action, producing Totimoshi’s newest release, "Milagrosa". This is a must-hear album. We also covered this awesome experience in the MONOlog here.
Links:
www.helmetmusic.com
www.myspace.com/helmetrocks
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