This Interview was conducted on August 26th by
Krisbee and first appeared on Krisbee's Website.
Steve Espinola: Are you using the suction cup device?
Krisbee: Yeah.
Steve Espinola: Oh, I recommend the little box thing, it really is a great thing, I record all of my musical ideas into my answering machine, if I am walking down the street, I will call my own phone and sing into my answering machine.
Krisbee: How often do you do that?
Steve Espinola: I go through periods of bursts of creativity and long, long lulls. I think some months, I will put on twenty song ideas, and months will go by where I won't do anything like that. I hum them, I will try to sing the melody line, and I then sing the bass line to give a context to what the melody means.
Krisbee: That's funny, because that's sort of what I do... I don't have much musical ability, but I do get a lot of songs in my head, and I can hum them all out, but unfortunately I don't have the talent to transcribe them. I can play an instrument, and like what I hear, but I can't get what is in my head out.
Steve Espinola: That's a learned skill, with ear training... It definitely took me awhile to get to the point where I could do that. So don't give up!
Krisbee: Well, I'm gonna keep trying! What do you tend to do; do you write music and then attach lyrics to it?
Steve Espinola: That's one way.. I tend to write music more often than words first. I've got a lot of songs that I never figured out the lyrics to but the music is all there. On the other hand, it seems that often the songs that get finished begin with at least with one lyric phrase that comes into my head at the same time as the musical phrase... and maybe I will write the rest of the music, and figure out what that one lyric phrase means, and I will write a song based around that. My friend Dan Emery, whose band I was in, he would come up with a lyric idea, or concept he wanted to express, then he would work up music around that, and I wish I could do that, because I get lyric ideas but unless I have a piece of music already there, it often doesn't work out too well.
Krisbee: Was the WFMU broadcast the first time you played on the radio?
Steve Espinola: I played in college once, and I played few times backing Steve Wynn in Europe, but that was really my first time playing my own songs on the radio.
Krisbee: You mentioned how nervous you were.
Steve Espinola: Oh I was extremely nervous, and that's a radio station I adore and have a lot of respect for, so I was pretty terrified. That was the day before, it was 9-10, and I passed through the World Trade Center on the way to that gig. Raul, the cellist, and I hailed a cab, and the driver had two thumbs on one hand, that were parallel, that looked just like the world trade center, and only spoke Portuguese, and he didn't know what the World Trade Center was. Raul pointed to it, because from anywhere in the city you could point to it, so we had to guide him street by street to the World Trade Center. We were going there so we could take the path train into NJ. As we got out, I looked at Raul, and said "Well, at least he knows where the World Trade Center is now".
Krisbee: It's weird how things worked out that way. I used to pass by the World Trade Center at least every week in a helicopter.
Steve Espinola: Why?
Krisbee: I used to be a helicopter photographer for the news, and that was the easiest way to get into Jersey, because of the different traffic patterns. My girlfriend called me telling me that a plane just hit the World Trade Center, and I was looking at it like because I know what it looked like up close, and I was watching how they were shooting it, and I became really detached.
Steve Espinola: Yeah, one couldn't help but become detached from that, because it was kind of impossible to comprehend. It just didn't really seem possible, and my reactions to it seemed a little inappropriate. I found myself giggling manically a lot, just denial of how horrible it was.
Krisbee: Do you have to be heartbroken to write songs?
Steve Espinola: No, gosh I hope not! It would be a terrible fate, a terrible way to have to keep living. A good example of that is a song you said you liked called "Whoop-de-doo", where I was in a perfectly decent mood when I wrote that song. I woke up with it a chunk of it in my head, and I figured it was a country song parody. I wrote the first verse in the shower, and it was like a rhyming exercise. I wrote a few verses on the subway on the way to work. As I was going over the Manhattan bridge and I looked down and thought, "Wow wouldn't it be weird if you owned real estate at the bottom of that water," like you actually had a house there, and that became the drowning verse. It ended up being a bleak song, and it really scared me that I had written that, I found myself thinking that wasn't the whole story, which is why I wrote that last more hopeful verse. My friend Mary Ann Farley, who's a great songwriter, sings that song sometimes and leaves the last verse off, and I think that's a perfectly valid way of doing the song as well.
You don't have to be heartbroken to write heartbroken songs. I have a song about a guy who decapitates his girlfriend, and I have never done that (laughs)!
Krisbee: Well, that could be a reaction to something in a relationship?
Steve Espinola: True, that could be. I honestly don't know where a song like that comes from. Maybe that one was a parody, of what you expectations are going to be as the story progresses... maybe I was just trying to shock people that day, or shock myself by writing a character doing things I could never imagine myself doing.
Krisbee: How did you ever get playing the shortwave radio?
Steve Espinola: When I was a kid, my dad had this wonderful shortwave radio from Lafayette, which is a little hobbyist electronics company, and I lived out on this army base island in the Pacific, Kwajalein. There was no television, until the last six months I was there, and there were only two radio stations, and really most people on the island had a shortwave radio to give them a connection to the outside world. I found if I misused the settings on the radio, I could get it to produce this really weird howl, and depending on what station I tuned in, some of these things sounded really cool! So I played around a lot of it as a kid, and would also put my walkie talkie, tune that frequency in, and put it on the piano, and could really distort the sound of the piano by putting the walkie talkie through this wrong setting on the shortwave radio. Dan Emery was recording a first solo album, which he never released, and recorded Space Renegade with someone tuning and detuning an AM radio. I can't remember, but I think he asked me if I could play that live, and I told him that not only could I play it live, I could make it sound really dramatic, and I pulled out my shortwave radio, and I showed him this thing that I haven't done since I was twelve years old. It was just this magic, serendipitous thing, that I was already working with the one guy who, it turned out, wanted a shortwave radio player...
Krisbee: Did you know that Stockhausen used to have shortwave radios playing in his music?
Steve Espinola: (surprised) No, I didn't.
Steve Espinola: You know, very shortly after the first Dan Emery album came out, there was a Sheryl Crow song that started off with a very similar shortwave radio sound, and it sounded remarkably like one of the Dan Emery songs... I mean, it's not rocket science, I don't know if they happened to come up with that idea on their own. There certainly is a history of obscure recordings getting into the hands of well-known people, and then getting ripped off. One example is, in the songwriting community I'm part of, the anti-folk community, one of the performers, Joie Dead Blonde Girlfriend, put out a record that had a really great cover of this blond gal, with a tattoo on her arm with Joie Dead Blonde Girlfriend written and a star next to it. Joie sent the self-released album to Sony, to try to get a record deal, and a few months later the album from Shakira came out, and it had the exactly same picture! It had Shakira posed like the woman on Joie's album, and had a star in the same place like the girl on Joie's album. It was just blatant rip-off of his design. The Spinkle Genies got a song ripped off by Kid Rock.
Krisbee: I was reading Kimya Dawson's diary, and she wrote about how she went to Texas this last month, and that she took the Greyhound to get there, and stayed in a hostel, and it bothers me that really good talented people are extremely poor, and that they can't concentrate on their art. Like the band The Apples in Stereo have jobs at UPS, I'm mean they're known, they have several albums...
Steve Espinola: They get written up in all the magazines...
Krisbee: ...exactly, and I've seen them play live, big shows at Irving Plaza, and they couldn't afford a crib for a child that two of them had together.
Steve Espinola: Yup, Yup... it's hard, and it's been going on like that for a long time... and you know someone is getting rich, that's all I know. That's been the story for a long time... I'm under the impression that all of those records that Thelonious Monk did for Riverside, he really didn't make a damn bit of money off of that at all. It's actually gotten worse, my understanding is that a lot of the rates of paying musicians for mechanical royalties, at least for major labels, haven't changed to keep with inflation in the last thirty to forty years, you know.... If you were to get a few cents for every record sold back then, you would get the same amount now even though money is worth an entirely different amount now.... It's too bad. The music industry is one of the most corrupt industries in the world. I was listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival on the radio yesterday, and thinking about the fact that they haven't made anything off their songs even though they sold millions.
Krisbee: Ray Davies made that whole Lola album about that... he had a nervous breakdown right before he made that. At one point he was getting so fed up with his lawyers, and realized that he wasn't getting paid anything, and he didn't have enough money, and he ran naked down the street!
Steve Espinola: I know he mentions them on the album.
Krisbee: Right, he mentions who's getting paid, and who's not getting paid... and he's the one always not getting paid.
Steve Espinola: What's your favorite Kinks album?
Krisbee: It used to be Arthur, but now its Village Green Preservation Society.
Steve Espinola: They are both pretty great, but I think I have to give the edge to Village Green. I love all of their records from Kinks Kontroversy to Village Green the best, each one is pretty much flawless. Those four are the ones I most adore.
Krisbee: What bands to you tend to covet?
Steve Espinola: The Kinks is one of my big bands.... I really love them. There's a lot of stuff I listen to, and not just rock bands, I love Duke Ellington, especially from the 1930's, and intermittent stuff from the rest of his career; there's very little from the 30's that I didn't get thrilled by. Biff Rose is one of my big influences, and favorite songwriters. Love, the 60's band.
Krisbee: I've acquired De Capo and Forever Changes and have been listening to it, but I still haven't "gotten" it yet.
Steve Espinola: Well, my favorite album is their first album, Love. But you have to listen it in mono, and it's not just a matter of being a purist, it's that the mono one sounds like a great hard-rock album, and the stereo one sounds like nothing, its just a bad, thin mix; there's no edge to it, and you don't hear the power of it. False Start, which Jimi Hendrix plays on one cut. Those records, especially during my adolescence, when I was real down, and put those records on it would just cheer me, way, way up. I just saw Arthur Lee recently at the Bowery Ballroom, and he was stupendous! One of the best shows I'd ever seen.
Krisbee: Forever Changes is always on the top 100 albums lists, along with Big Star, and I have finally gotten around to getting it. I didn't "get it" with Big Star either, and when I first listened to it I thought, "This isn't that great," but then one day, I "got it", and couldn't stop listening to it. I tend to obsess over certain music, where that's all I will listen to for a week, a month, two months, and I'm stuck and fixated on it.
Steve Espinola: The whole idea of grading records... maybe a record is really a great record for a fall day, and absolutely horrible record for a spring day or a record that's great to dance to, but terrible record to listen to the words to. Forever Changes is one of those that you have to be in the right time, and even that you've got to be the right person. I listened to last summer, with headphones on while in Maine, and the weather was just right, and it seemed like the most brilliant thing I ever heard, and I listened to it four times in a row, after listening to it tens of hundreds of times before then. Suddenly it just seemed much more brilliant then it had been before.
Krisbee: It's interesting; sometimes listening with headphones makes a huge difference. I remember listening to
Loaded, and thinking, "Aww, it's alright," and then I was sitting studying for Social Studies, listening with headphones to it and thought, "Oh my God, this is the best record ever made!"
Steve Espinola: Modern stuff I listen to is music my friends make, it tends to be more interesting then what's widely available. One of my favorite records of the last five or six years is Stereolab's Mars Audiac Quintet... its just.. uh... delicious (laughs).
Krisbee: I have Emperor Tomato Ketchup...
Steve Espinola: It never got me as the one before it.
Krisbee: It didn't get me either, my feeling is that its good and I appreciate it.
Steve Espinola: Well that's a thing I have noticed... a band makes a record that's really fantastic, but the record label doesn't really promote it, so it gets some word of mouth, and the next time around, then the labels promote it, and it gets a lot of reviews and it doesn't matter if it's a weaker album. Fishbone's Truth and Soul I thought was incredible, and the next album came out, and I thought it was a disaster, but that was the one that got promoted and hence written up.
Krisbee: What albums are you surprised that nobody knows about?
Steve Espinola: Biff Rose's albums in general. I always tell people that they have to listen to Roast Beef, which he recorded in a single take. It's fourteen songs played one right after the other, with these wild, violent piano improvisations in between them. Almost nobody knows about them (the albums)... He's still an innovator.. the stuff he's doing now is still frying my brain!
Krisbee: I'm ashamed that I have never heard of him.
Steve Espinola: The height of his fame was 1969 when he was on Johnny Carson 12 times, and he was a big influence on David Bowie, and Bowie covered his song "Fill Your Heart" on Hunky Dory, in fact Hunky Dory is far as I can tell, is Bowie trying to rework Biff Rose's sound to fit his own agenda. His mind works in pretty surreal associative ways, and that's what the mass public wanted at that moment in time. He is just a fantastic piano playing songwriter who refused to play the Hollywood game, or didn't have the fakeness in him to play the commercial Hollywood game. Following his increasingly experimental artistic vision, remaining honest, eventually led to him and commercial record labels going their separate ways. There's an advertisement he did for Jockey Underwear in the early 70's, up on a fan site, and it's hilarious, because about the most positive thing he can bring himself to say about the product is "I've made my peace with Jockey Underwear."
Krisbee: I have always tended to go artists who are heartfelt. Daniel Johnston is big influence on my musical appreciation.
Steve Espinola: He's amazing!
Krisbee: ... and he has no commercial potential.
Steve Espinola: Maybe, but on the other hand, people are going to be buying his records for the next fifty years, so I don't know how that all adds up. Robert Johnston sold a million copies a few years ago, I wouldn't be surprised if Daniel Johnston had a collection of his works sell a million copies, that wouldn't surprise me in the least.
Krisbee: Have you ever seen him live?
Steve Espinola: Yeah a few times. I saw him do one song that I thought was extraordinary. He's amazing, he's got so much of... whatever he's got, some sort of mojo; even when he is fumbling around, you feel that you are in the presence of something extraordinary. The first time I saw him he was extremely nervous, his strings were breaking, he had laryngitis, it was kind of a disaster. He put down his guitar at the last song, and did it acapella, and it was like he was channeling something very different, and very scary, and very powerful, and very beautiful. And that last song was worth several hours of concerts by any number of other people.
Krisbee: How do you find new music for you? People's recommendations? Walking in and grabbing, or reading?
Steve Espinola: I tend to buy whatever they are playing in the store... I don't listen to the radio that much... If I walk into the store and hear something that's kind of special, I will grab that on impulse. I constantly go up when they change a record and ask what they are playing now... drives people nuts.
Krisbee: How do you like living in Brooklyn?
Steve Espinola: I do like it. There's no real oxygen in NYC... if I end up in Maine, and get out of the car, I find my brain will function on an entirely different level. "Wow, there's a drug my brain hasn't been getting, and it's oxygen." (laughs) Except for the oxygen problem, I really adore it. I love all the people around, the ideas, just love the amazing... you just walk down the street and you realize that every single person in the world is secretly... a freak (laughs) That everyone has their own beautiful nuttiness, and that some people are hiding it better than others, but it's there, and you can really see it in New York. I think people show it more than they do in a lot of other places.

==At this point, my tape stopped for a bit and I didn't notice.... we go on talking about a few projects Steve has been working on, Nikola Tesla and Steve's involvement in a project about his life, The difficulty of collaboration but how Steve is working through it, Steve's involvement in the African Scam pen pal. We catch up now with Steve talking about his article that was posted in AU Base about in jokes and the antifolk scene==

Krisbee: You were afraid that it would take away the appreciation, but it actually made me more appreciative of the writing.
Steve Espinola: Oh, that's good. I actually have temporarily taken the article down, because I felt that the article, as it was written, was a little invasive of people's privacy, and I have to rework it just to make it more appropriate, since it will be online and that any number of people can see it.
My main in goal in writing that article was to try to get people who listen to one or two of the artist to get intrigued by other artists they may not have heard of. You can start at any part of the article and zig zag around. There's this wonderful thing that started to happen, where person a would reference person b who references person c, and it went all the way around... that made it really fun to write.
Krisbee: This may be a loaded question.. but what do you think of the few artists' success in the anti-folk community?
Steve Espinola: Who do you consider the successful ones?
Krisbee: I guess ones who records are on a label...
Steve Espinola: You talk to different people, and they have a different perspective on which acts have become successful.
Krisbee: Who do you find has become successful?
Steve Espinola: The person who is vaguely connected to the scene that has become the most successful is Beck, whose work I haven't followed that closely, but strikes me as a very talented guy.
The Moldy Peaches... I'm not quite clear on how commercially successful they are. I read one thing online where they sold 40,000 copies of their album in Europe, but I don't know if that's true. I have no idea how many people are aware of them in the United States... everybody around me knows who they are, but beyond that, I can't tell. Assuming that they are successful, I think they totally deserve it. I was a fan the minute I heard one of their songs. When they broke up, for six months, it seemed so tragic to me, it seemed terrible to not let people hear that stuff. I glad people can hear what they do. I think what they do individually is wonderful, and very different then what they do together, and I hope people get hear that stuff too. To me, that stuff is just as inspiring in a very different way.
Some people give them a reputation as a joke band, and I don't think that is fair at all, I think even in their funny songs, there is an undercurrent of sadness, and life lived, that makes the laughter really earned than if they were just a dumb rock band simply for the sake of making people laugh. I am a huge fan of them. What other groups do you consider successful... your perception would be very interesting to me.
Krisbee: I guess the people that are on Rough Trade, a known label, that people buy records just because it is on Rough Trade.
Steve Espinola: Well, you know I know a lot of people that were on Mercury Records before that got bought by Universal... Just by being on a label is no guarantee that the label will promote you. There's a period that a lot of people from the East Village were on Mercury at the same time, and the label didn't do a good job of promoting them.
I'm really glad Jeff Lewis is on Rough Trade, and he has been touring around and opening for Cornershop, I am a huge a fan of what he does, too. I think the Rough Trade album made some very strange choices of material; it seemed to neglect his more psychedelic songs... Perhaps that was a conscious artistic vision, putting songs with a similar theme together, so he could really surprise people with the next album and go in a different direction with it. I love all of the songs on the Rough Trade album, but I prefer the sequencing of his homemade albums a little better. He is one of my very, very favorites. Is there anyone else on Rough Trade that I don't know about?
Krisbee: That's all I know... but I get my information from what I can read on websites, being detached from the scene. I can only go by what a consumer can, or what's available to download..., which is a shame. I wish people's homemade albums were more easily obtained.
Steve Espinola: That's the wonderful thing about the Internet. It doesn't replace the distribution that would allow people to know about your record without seeking it out, but it certainly makes it easier to find something that you know exists and can't find it. I finally put my last two CDs on my homepage, and I have been getting orders, including yours. That's really inspiring me, that people I don't know are seeking me out, and I think I have the Moldy Peaches to thank for that. In fact, one of my high school friends called me tonight and left a message, a bass player that was in a popular rock band, and I'd lost touch with him. I suspect it was because he saw my name on the back of the Moldy Peaches album; that has given my own projects kind of a jolt. I have got to thank them for that.
Krisbee: I read that you are nervous when you play live?
Steve Espinola: Oh, yeah, to varying degrees. There are times when I get up there I feel I know what I am doing, and there are other times I can go up there and make the nervousness a positive part of the act. I feel I was almost doing that at the radio concert, but it was out of proportion.
Krisbee: My reaction, if I was nervous, I wouldn't be able to go forward and make that a good thing; I would turn inward. You're able to use that, and that was actually very nice to read.
Steve Espinola: Oh yeah... I don't know what I'm doing, and there is an extent where I hope I never get to the point where I just know what I'm doing; there's always a helluva lot to learn.
Krisbee's Interview of
Steve Espinolainterview
Krisbee's Interview of
September 18th 2002:
Steve Espinola: Are you using the suction cup device?
Krisbee: Yeah.
Steve Espinola: Oh, I recommend the little box thing, it really is a great thing, I record all of my musical ideas into my answering machine, if I am walking down the street, I will call my own phone and sing into my answering machine.
Krisbee: How often do you do that?
Steve Espinola: I go through periods of bursts of creativity and long, long lulls. I think some months, I will put on twenty song ideas, and months will go by where I won't do anything like that. I hum them, I will try to sing the melody line, and I then sing the bass line to give a context to what the melody means.
Krisbee: That's funny, because that's sort of what I do... I don't have much musical ability, but I do get a lot of songs in my head, and I can hum them all out, but unfortunately I don't have the talent to transcribe them. I can play an instrument, and like what I hear, but I can't get what is in my head out.
Steve Espinola: That's a learned skill, with ear training... It definitely took me awhile to get to the point where I could do that. So don't give up!
Krisbee: Well, I'm gonna keep trying! What do you tend to do; do you write music and then attach lyrics to it?
Steve Espinola: That's one way.. I tend to write music more often than words first. I've got a lot of songs that I never figured out the lyrics to but the music is all there. On the other hand, it seems that often the songs that get finished begin with at least with one lyric phrase that comes into my head at the same time as the musical phrase... and maybe I will write the rest of the music, and figure out what that one lyric phrase means, and I will write a song based around that. My friend Dan Emery, whose band I was in, he would come up with a lyric idea, or concept he wanted to express, then he would work up music around that, and I wish I could do that, because I get lyric ideas but unless I have a piece of music already there, it often doesn't work out too well.
Krisbee: Was the WFMU broadcast the first time you played on the radio?
Steve Espinola: I played in college once, and I played few times backing Steve Wynn in Europe, but that was really my first time playing my own songs on the radio.
Krisbee: You mentioned how nervous you were.
Steve Espinola: Oh I was extremely nervous, and that's a radio station I adore and have a lot of respect for, so I was pretty terrified. That was the day before, it was 9-10, and I passed through the World Trade Center on the way to that gig. Raul, the cellist, and I hailed a cab, and the driver had two thumbs on one hand, that were parallel, that looked just like the world trade center, and only spoke Portuguese, and he didn't know what the World Trade Center was. Raul pointed to it, because from anywhere in the city you could point to it, so we had to guide him street by street to the World Trade Center. We were going there so we could take the path train into NJ. As we got out, I looked at Raul, and said "Well, at least he knows where the World Trade Center is now".
Krisbee: It's weird how things worked out that way. I used to pass by the World Trade Center at least every week in a helicopter.
Steve Espinola: Why?
Krisbee: I used to be a helicopter photographer for the news, and that was the easiest way to get into Jersey, because of the different traffic patterns. My girlfriend called me telling me that a plane just hit the World Trade Center, and I was looking at it like because I know what it looked like up close, and I was watching how they were shooting it, and I became really detached.
Steve Espinola: Yeah, one couldn't help but become detached from that, because it was kind of impossible to comprehend. It just didn't really seem possible, and my reactions to it seemed a little inappropriate. I found myself giggling manically a lot, just denial of how horrible it was.
Krisbee: Do you have to be heartbroken to write songs?
Steve Espinola: No, gosh I hope not! It would be a terrible fate, a terrible way to have to keep living. A good example of that is a song you said you liked called "Whoop-de-doo", where I was in a perfectly decent mood when I wrote that song. I woke up with it a chunk of it in my head, and I figured it was a country song parody. I wrote the first verse in the shower, and it was like a rhyming exercise. I wrote a few verses on the subway on the way to work. As I was going over the Manhattan bridge and I looked down and thought, "Wow wouldn't it be weird if you owned real estate at the bottom of that water," like you actually had a house there, and that became the drowning verse. It ended up being a bleak song, and it really scared me that I had written that, I found myself thinking that wasn't the whole story, which is why I wrote that last more hopeful verse. My friend Mary Ann Farley, who's a great songwriter, sings that song sometimes and leaves the last verse off, and I think that's a perfectly valid way of doing the song as well.
You don't have to be heartbroken to write heartbroken songs. I have a song about a guy who decapitates his girlfriend, and I have never done that (laughs)!
Krisbee: Well, that could be a reaction to something in a relationship?
Steve Espinola: True, that could be. I honestly don't know where a song like that comes from. Maybe that one was a parody, of what you expectations are going to be as the story progresses... maybe I was just trying to shock people that day, or shock myself by writing a character doing things I could never imagine myself doing.
Krisbee: How did you ever get playing the shortwave radio?
Steve Espinola: When I was a kid, my dad had this wonderful shortwave radio from Lafayette, which is a little hobbyist electronics company, and I lived out on this army base island in the Pacific, Kwajalein. There was no television, until the last six months I was there, and there were only two radio stations, and really most people on the island had a shortwave radio to give them a connection to the outside world. I found if I misused the settings on the radio, I could get it to produce this really weird howl, and depending on what station I tuned in, some of these things sounded really cool! So I played around a lot of it as a kid, and would also put my walkie talkie, tune that frequency in, and put it on the piano, and could really distort the sound of the piano by putting the walkie talkie through this wrong setting on the shortwave radio. Dan Emery was recording a first solo album, which he never released, and recorded Space Renegade with someone tuning and detuning an AM radio. I can't remember, but I think he asked me if I could play that live, and I told him that not only could I play it live, I could make it sound really dramatic, and I pulled out my shortwave radio, and I showed him this thing that I haven't done since I was twelve years old. It was just this magic, serendipitous thing, that I was already working with the one guy who, it turned out, wanted a shortwave radio player...
Krisbee: Did you know that Stockhausen used to have shortwave radios playing in his music?
Steve Espinola: (surprised) No, I didn't.
Steve Espinola: You know, very shortly after the first Dan Emery album came out, there was a Sheryl Crow song that started off with a very similar shortwave radio sound, and it sounded remarkably like one of the Dan Emery songs... I mean, it's not rocket science, I don't know if they happened to come up with that idea on their own. There certainly is a history of obscure recordings getting into the hands of well-known people, and then getting ripped off. One example is, in the songwriting community I'm part of, the anti-folk community, one of the performers, Joie Dead Blonde Girlfriend, put out a record that had a really great cover of this blond gal, with a tattoo on her arm with Joie Dead Blonde Girlfriend written and a star next to it. Joie sent the self-released album to Sony, to try to get a record deal, and a few months later the album from Shakira came out, and it had the exactly same picture! It had Shakira posed like the woman on Joie's album, and had a star in the same place like the girl on Joie's album. It was just blatant rip-off of his design. The Spinkle Genies got a song ripped off by Kid Rock.
Krisbee: I was reading Kimya Dawson's diary, and she wrote about how she went to Texas this last month, and that she took the Greyhound to get there, and stayed in a hostel, and it bothers me that really good talented people are extremely poor, and that they can't concentrate on their art. Like the band The Apples in Stereo have jobs at UPS, I'm mean they're known, they have several albums...
Steve Espinola: They get written up in all the magazines...
Krisbee: ...exactly, and I've seen them play live, big shows at Irving Plaza, and they couldn't afford a crib for a child that two of them had together.
Steve Espinola: Yup, Yup... it's hard, and it's been going on like that for a long time... and you know someone is getting rich, that's all I know. That's been the story for a long time... I'm under the impression that all of those records that Thelonious Monk did for Riverside, he really didn't make a damn bit of money off of that at all. It's actually gotten worse, my understanding is that a lot of the rates of paying musicians for mechanical royalties, at least for major labels, haven't changed to keep with inflation in the last thirty to forty years, you know.... If you were to get a few cents for every record sold back then, you would get the same amount now even though money is worth an entirely different amount now.... It's too bad. The music industry is one of the most corrupt industries in the world. I was listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival on the radio yesterday, and thinking about the fact that they haven't made anything off their songs even though they sold millions.
Krisbee: Ray Davies made that whole Lola album about that... he had a nervous breakdown right before he made that. At one point he was getting so fed up with his lawyers, and realized that he wasn't getting paid anything, and he didn't have enough money, and he ran naked down the street!
Steve Espinola: I know he mentions them on the album.
Krisbee: Right, he mentions who's getting paid, and who's not getting paid... and he's the one always not getting paid.
Steve Espinola: What's your favorite Kinks album?
Krisbee: It used to be Arthur, but now its Village Green Preservation Society.
Steve Espinola: They are both pretty great, but I think I have to give the edge to Village Green. I love all of their records from Kinks Kontroversy to Village Green the best, each one is pretty much flawless. Those four are the ones I most adore.
Krisbee: What bands to you tend to covet?
Steve Espinola: The Kinks is one of my big bands.... I really love them. There's a lot of stuff I listen to, and not just rock bands, I love Duke Ellington, especially from the 1930's, and intermittent stuff from the rest of his career; there's very little from the 30's that I didn't get thrilled by. Biff Rose is one of my big influences, and favorite songwriters. Love, the 60's band.
Krisbee: I've acquired De Capo and Forever Changes and have been listening to it, but I still haven't "gotten" it yet.
Steve Espinola: Well, my favorite album is their first album, Love. But you have to listen it in mono, and it's not just a matter of being a purist, it's that the mono one sounds like a great hard-rock album, and the stereo one sounds like nothing, its just a bad, thin mix; there's no edge to it, and you don't hear the power of it. False Start, which Jimi Hendrix plays on one cut. Those records, especially during my adolescence, when I was real down, and put those records on it would just cheer me, way, way up. I just saw Arthur Lee recently at the Bowery Ballroom, and he was stupendous! One of the best shows I'd ever seen.
Krisbee: Forever Changes is always on the top 100 albums lists, along with Big Star, and I have finally gotten around to getting it. I didn't "get it" with Big Star either, and when I first listened to it I thought, "This isn't that great," but then one day, I "got it", and couldn't stop listening to it. I tend to obsess over certain music, where that's all I will listen to for a week, a month, two months, and I'm stuck and fixated on it.
Steve Espinola: The whole idea of grading records... maybe a record is really a great record for a fall day, and absolutely horrible record for a spring day or a record that's great to dance to, but terrible record to listen to the words to. Forever Changes is one of those that you have to be in the right time, and even that you've got to be the right person. I listened to last summer, with headphones on while in Maine, and the weather was just right, and it seemed like the most brilliant thing I ever heard, and I listened to it four times in a row, after listening to it tens of hundreds of times before then. Suddenly it just seemed much more brilliant then it had been before.
Krisbee: It's interesting; sometimes listening with headphones makes a huge difference. I remember listening to
Loaded, and thinking, "Aww, it's alright," and then I was sitting studying for Social Studies, listening with headphones to it and thought, "Oh my God, this is the best record ever made!"
Steve Espinola: Modern stuff I listen to is music my friends make, it tends to be more interesting then what's widely available. One of my favorite records of the last five or six years is Stereolab's Mars Audiac Quintet... its just.. uh... delicious (laughs).
Krisbee: I have Emperor Tomato Ketchup...