[Trama]

http://www.timeout.jp/en/tokyo/featu...iew-transcript

 

Note: this is a longer transcript of our Jim O’Rourke interview

I woke up with this awful hangover today...
Me too, me too. I got a bottle of this nihonshu called ‘Taxi Driver’. It's a local thing – usually you can only get it in Golden Gai, but some guy who made it gave me a bottle. So we got home last night and were watching a movie, and I just didn't even notice how strong it was and drank the whole bottle. I woke up this morning and felt like Travis Bickle. It was pretty strong… I only drink nihonshu. Other stuff just gets me drunk way too quick. And I actually like nihonshu a lot: I can drink a whole bottle of it and be fine. I mean, I'll get tipsy, but to get really drunk I need to have a bottle and a half of it. [Laughs.] Unless it's really strong.

I find it's really hit-and-miss for me. Sometimes I'll be fine, other times it really screws me up.
I love it. One of the best things that ever happened in my life was to start drinking that stuff. [Laughs.] I didn't really drink until I moved here. It shuts my brain off: it stops my brain from thinking about work. I'm not against it, but I never took any drugs, so until I moved here I just could never get my brain to shut the hell up. It would be thinking about work no matter what I was doing, and I couldn't go to sleep because of it. Now I can actually stop work for the day.

Do you think you're more mellow as a result of that?
I don't know if I'm more mellow. [Pause.] I just stop thinking about work for a bit. It's new and exciting. [Laughs.]

Sorry to drag the conversation immediately onto the subject of work, but… When I talk to friends who haven't heard of you before, pretty much their first reaction is: well, what does he do for a living? What are you main earners?
For me? Basically, working my ass off for the last twenty years. I make more of a living based on what I did twenty years ago than what I do now. [Laughs.]

Just from royalties?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not like it's huge or anything, but… it's like 200-plus records, blah blah blah. Actually, the luckiest things have been the fact that sometimes when I produce other people's records, I help write the songs, and those records obviously sell a lot more than anything I ever did. One thing might only be 25 cents a month, but if it's 200 of them, it eventually adds up to enough to pay the bills. I tried to move here about 15 years ago, and I failed completely – I didn't understand a word, I was too young, I didn't have any money. But I kind of knew in the back of my head I was determined to do it, and I just saved for ten years – and luckily those were the ten years when I was doing the most high-level work, doing major label bands and stuff like that. Your friends here would know, but it's not that expensive to live here – it really isn't. I lived in New York for six, seven, eight years; it's so easy here compared to there. If you don't have a car, you don't have things like that, it's actually quite affordable to live here, I think.

How far do you have to go from the city center to find an affordable apartment?
It doesn't exist. I didn't live in Manhattan – I lived in a really shitty area that didn't have even a convenience store nearby. The nearest supermarket was a 20 minute walk, and my rent – keep in mind this is 14 years ago – was a thousand bucks a month.

That makes London sound cheap…
London's expensive too, Jesus. I used to live in South Croydon. [Laughs.]

When was that?
Late '80s. I lived on couches, basically, for 15 years. I'd live in London for two months, and then I'd be in Germany for two months, and then I'd be in France and went back to Germany for two months, things like that.

So where was the first place you settled? New York?
Actually, here. In New York, I had the apartment but I was always on the road. If Sonic Youth wasn't on tour, I'd be in another city producing somebody's record in my downtime; the only time I was ever really in New York was if Sonic Youth was recording, because every day we'd go to the studio. So really the first place I've ever lived is here – you know, where I actually have my own place, and I'm usually there every day.

Was there a sense when you came here that you wanted to make a clean break with all the touring?
I didn't want that life any more. I understand why people do it, but if you think about it: okay, say you have a show in London. It takes one day to get there, it takes another day to get back, you're probably going to have to add another day in there, and then the day of the show. So that's four days for one hour. It's just not worth it any more. When you're young, it's exciting: you go places, you meet people and blah blah blah, but I did it for 25 years. Why would I want to keep doing that? Especially for myself – I'm not really interested in playing shows, I'd rather make things in the studio.

Really?
Oh yeah. If I didn't have to ever play a show again, I'd be happy.

Have you felt like that for a while?
I've always felt like that. But, you know, I don't make money off most of the things that I do – that I do. You know, some edition-of-1,000 LP – if you get anything, if you're lucky (usually with that kind of stuff you don't get anything), it's 100 bucks, 200 bucks. You can't make a living off that. [Laughs.] But a long time ago, I made a clean break between what I do and what I do for a living. When I was young, I taught myself to engineer and started working in studios, and eventually, because I could play and arrange and stuff, people were asking me to work on the records more creatively, so I slowly started doing producing and stuff. That's how I paid the bills, so that with my own stuff, if it took me five years to do something, it wouldn't matter. If it didn't make a penny, that didn't matter. I didn't want fear of making a living to have any effect on my own stuff. I've always kept that separate, so that the only way I could make money off my own stuff is if I play a show. And even then, I end up giving money to the other musicians, because I feel guilty for making them play this crap! [Laughs.]

It's nice that you have such a high opinion of your own music…
You know, somebody has to! [Laughs] Now it's worse, because you don't make any money for putting out records – you don't make a penny – and I won't do any of this downloading crap. Not like you make any money from downloads: I don't know where that myth started. Because I know. For my own stuff, I can actually say no – no iTunes, no nothing – but for stuff like Sonic Youth I can't make that decision, so I actually see how much you make from… [Laughs.] It's such a load of bullshit. And you know, you spend a year mixing something, and then it's [turned into an MP3]. And people are like, ‘Yeah, but they want to hear it’ and I'm like, ‘Yeah, but I didn't make it for them.’ I made this stuff for someone who sits down and listens to it on speakers, and if there's other people, great – but I didn't make it for them, that's not what it is.

What was the first Japanese music that really piqued your interest?
The first music would probably be things like [Toru] Takemitsu and stuff like that, because I was like a New Music freak (and dork) at high school. Takemitsu and [Toshi] Ichiyanagi… Takemitsu's stuff I knew first, because his stuff was actually released in the States. I remember, it was a split album between him and Messiaen: I think it was his ‘November Steps’ and Messiaen's ‘Turangalîla-Symphonie’ or something like that. Then some of the free jazz stuff was released – I knew about the Yamashita Trio – but then I was a big fan of Wha Ha Ha.

Wha Ha Ha?
Wha Ha Ha was this band [Akira] Sakata had in '79 or '80, They made two albums and an EP. It's not jazz, it's sort of – what's the best way to describe it? – it's kind of jokey. Semba Kiyohiko was the drummer. It was when all the Japanese jazz guys had gone fusion, but this band, it was more like… Do you know that band Kalahari Surfers? I mean, it was more songs and stuff, but it's all goofy and progressive. I was a big fan of that stuff, and that's how I found out about [Haruomi] Hosono and things like that. I mean, I don't know if it was necessarily just because it was Japanese, although I always liked Japan more than any other country, so I was more interested in finding out. But then I got into Guernica – I really got into the '80s Japanese pop stuff. [With Japanese interviewers] of course, they love it when you like Japanese stuff – and to this day, people think I listen to this stuff every day. You know how it goes…