Hal's Death by Jefferson Starship #2

Interview with Tim Gorman / JS concert @ San Jose Plaza Park 7/23/92

Files: Flac; interview is from personal master; concert from SBD >
first-gen cassette > WaveLab > CDWave > Flac)

Note: "We Can Be Together" has some drop-out etc. before the patch-in
was corrected. No problems elsewhere that I remember.

00 Interview with Tim Gorman (transcript below) before the concert
01 We Can Be Together
02 Ride the Tiger
03 Crown of Creation
04 Wooden Ships
05 Law Man
06 I'm on Fire
07 Papa's Boogie
08 Ain't No Country Girls
09 Girl with the Hungry Eyes
10 Genesis Hall (the Richard Thompson/Fairport Convention song)
11 I'm Moving
12 Somewhere Over the Rainbow (duet by Tim and Papa John Creach)
13 Dark Ages
14 America
15 Volunteers

[enc: Other Side of this Life -- I only have a snippet so I left it off]

Transcript of interview posted on the Internet:


hal: How did you wind up with the Who?



Tim: During the early 80s I was in a band from England called Lazy Racer;

we were on A & M records, and we were kind of a cult thing over there--not

a very big cult!--we did release two records in the States and the rest of

the world, had a minor following, and the guy that produced our records

was also the producer of the Who and the Rolling Stones; his name was

Glyn Johns--he's made a lot of famous records, Joan Armatrading, and he

was the guy responsible for bringing me to England and sort of got my

career going.



hal: Where are you from originally?



Tim: I'm originally from the Bay area; I was born and raised in

San Francisco.



hal: Did you go to the Fillmore during the days that Paul Kantner

played there?



Tim: I did, actually, yea, but I also used to go see Cream quite

a bit, and Traffic. . . .



hal: The British Invasion bands.



Tim: I sort of cut my teeth on that stuff more than the American

stuff, even though I was a big fan of Little Richard and Fats Domino as

piano players . . . but I also loved Keith Emerson a lot. I grew up

with this kind of binge for English rock. When I got out of school

I went and studied classical piano (from the age of four) and went through

Conservatory all the way through college and got my degree in composition

and theory and didn't really know what to do with a degree and started

doing session work as a way to make a living as a musician, and from that

Glyn Johns heard my playing and my song-writing and recommended me for this

job over in England, brought me over there, and pretty much anything he produced

I got to work on. He would recommend me for Stones sessions, and the Who

were looking for a new keyboard player and Glyn played one of the Lazy

Racer albums for Pete Townshend, and Pete liked my playing, as I heard

it from Glyn, and I was in the Bay area visiting with my parents and

Glyn called saying they wanted me to join the band, there was no audition,

it was like a dream come true!



hal: Was there a different atmosphere playing for British bands

compared to American bands? I know from having lived there that

the British audience is far quicker to boo the band than here.



Tim: There's an attitude difference towards the music; I think that

British musicians are not as relaxed as American bands are in terms of

the style which they play; they tend to play a very punchy style, and

they are quite aggressive about the way they go about it; of course

we all steal from each other, you know, and it seems like that it

goes in waves: you know the European wave brings something to

American and we take from that and send them something back, and they

get into that and send us something back.



hal: Did you ever meet Keith Emerson?



Tim: Yes, I have, I met him once.



hal: Did you find your classical training was a help or an

empediment? You know that rock and roll is rather basic. . . .



Tim: It is basic but it requires quite a bit of technique to play

rock and roll piano well; the tempos can be quite quick sometimes so

your fingers do need to move around pretty good, so classical training

does help in that sense. I've played a lot of jazz, too, not that

you should cross styles that much, but the classical training definitely

helps; and you never know, there's always one of those recording sessions

out there where there's a bullet with your name on it: where someone

puts a piece of music in front of you that looks like fly shit and you have

to sight read it pretty fast! And in those days it comes in kind of

handy. . . .



hal: A friend of mine has detected some Aaron Copland influence in

your playing; what have you learned from Copland?



Tim: Just a great sense of harmony; he had a great harmonic rhythm

to his works, and by that I mean that he would displace a chord, like

playing a fifth in the bass, and by playing a sixth on top, and being

that very open, very APPALACHIAN SPRING type sound. The way I got

into the KBC Band was that when I came back to the States one of the

very first phone calls I got was from Paul Kantner, who was looking

for a keyboard player for the KBC Band, and I don't really know who

recommended me--somehow Paul got a hold of my name--and I've been a

big fan of Paul's music for a long time, I grew up listening to his

compositions and stuff, and so I felt I had really the best of both worlds:

I had worked with Townshend who is an excellent composer and I got

to work with Kantner who I consider on the same level composition-

wise. To me they are both very intense writers; they both have that

great poetic, that great lyrical quality to their music, and their vision

of that idea of how a song should be shaped is usually completely different

from how other people approach rock and roll.



hal: Yea, Paul, from what I've heard on early tapes, has this

"method acting" style of composition: he'll tell a band to

"think Saturday Afternoon" when writing about that. . . .



Tim: A perfect example of that would be the day he

handed me six pieces of computer read-out paper with the

lyrics to "America"--the original lyrics to "America" which

I still have that sheet--this was my first rehearsal with them

too! and so I kind of cut my teeth on that song, and he says,

he just gave me this bunch of paper and he said "well this

is a kind of an American thing that I'm working on and it is in

'B'"--like that, and he never did give me any other kind of

instructions other than that! This was on our second meeting,

we had met originally for lunch just to say "hi" and meet each

other, and the first rehearsal was kind of intense for me, and

we just sort of fell into it, and we got signed to Arista and

the song got recorded, it got cut down by producers, engineers, and

stuff, but we now, every once in a while, we will float into a very

free section and he'll grab some of those old lines from those

original six pages.



hal: Did you write that end, that organ bit of "America" where it

seems that the bass tone just shatters everything?



Tim: Yea, the instruments have come quite a long way; the chords

that I'm using now, which Paul and I both got on the Airplane tour,

we just really love that sound and we have had quite a bit of luck

with them: and they have that real symphonic quality that we are

looking for in this type of set-up, and they also have this ability to

be very spatial, which is another quality of this band. . . .



hal: You wrote the song "Wrecking Crew" for the KBC album; Slick

was telling me that he helped you put it together.



Tim: I've always been this real big fan of the STRAIGHT SHOOTER album

by Bad Company, and liked Ron Nevison's production a lot, and um,

I just played guitar just well enough to write songs, and I

needed Slick to help me arrange guitar parts; I wanted it to sound

Mick Ralphs-like: the original idea was to have the song have

kind of a Bad Company feel to it in terms of chord changes--simple

chords, A, G, D. I wanted the lyric content to be very hard-

edged; there was a building being torn down and I had the first

sampler we had just bought, and I was sampling a pile-driver in

downtown San Francisco where they were erecting a new skyscraper

and I was making a sample with a tape recorder, and the workmen

were yelling stuff about how the wrecking crew would be

here tomorrow, and I just got the idea from these guys!



hal: Is there a new song you are excited about in particular?



Tim: Well there is a new one I'm working on called "Guns and Guitars"

which is a kind of following in the tradition of our serial killer,

you know, type of song . . . I wanted to do something in the studio

to process guitars in a new and different way--perhaps to make them

sound explosive, even bigger than they do now.



hal: Any new keyboard technology that you can't wait to get your

hands on?



Tim: I'm using a Hammond organ in the band, an XB-2, and it has

been completely retooled and cut down--it only weighs thirty pounds--

and it has a complete computer microprocessor in it; it will store

128 sounds, which is great, and we use it for like "Girl with the Hungry

Eyes"; it has midi, so I use it to go to my main rack, so it not

only has the Hammond organ sound it also has the synth sound that

was used on the original recordings.



hal: So where do you see the band heading in the near future?



Tim: I've been on the road with Paul pretty much for a year now;

and we have had small breaks: you have to be out there playing

in front of people. We are not trying to rehash anything, we are

trying to do something new; this is a lineup we are

really proud of.



hal: Well, the rest of the band is tuning up: anything you want

to say to the Net community out there?



Tim: I just want to say thanks for coming to see the band and

for the years of listening to Paul's music; and thank you for

the future as well that you have given the band, because we want

to continue and we do see some recording coming up in the future

and we are excited to play for more and more people all the time!