I had received for my 15th birthday $5, and - although I had never made a long-distance call before - I thought that maybe for $5 I could make a call to that mysterious place Greenwich Village, to call Varese. And my mother said okay. And he wasn't there. He was in Brussels getting the "Poem Electronique" ready for the World's Fair. But I did speak with his wife. And I've spoken to her a couple of times on the phone.

Did you learn anything that was important to you, other than just to make the call?

Well, what are you really going to learn? What's a composer's wife going to tell you? She was a nice lady. She was kind to take the call. They lived on Sullivan Street in the Village. It was a nice place. It had a red lacquer door. When we moved to New York in '67, we had this miserable fucking apartment on Thompson street, but it was a block away from Varese's house. He was already dead by that time, but I used to walk by there and see that little red door and just try to imagine what it would be like to be trapped in that apartment not writing music for 25 years.

You mentioned once that you were sometimes influenced by sidemen. How much do people really influence you?

If you find out that there is a person who can play a certain instrument, and do things on that instrument that are unique, you're always tempted to write something specifically for that individual.

Like with Vinnie Colaiuta?

He's a perfect example. He's a truly unique individual.

In his rhythmic ability to hear more than a one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four?

Yeah. And to play it with style and attitude. Attitude is a prime commodity in music today, but this is one of the guys who invented attitude.

Where did the title Barking Pumpkin come from?

That's an easy one. Gail used to smoke. She quit. But she used to smoke Marlboros, and she coughed all the time. And so I had always referred to her as my pumpkin, and so at that point she was a barking pumpkin.

Since you said you haven't played guitar in so long, my impression of you over the last many years is of an extraordinarily serious composer locked away late at night typing away on a Synclavier. Do you know any other composers who have done as much continuous work as you on a Synclavier?

I don't know too many composers who can afford them. There's a guy named Herb Pilhoffer in Minneapolis who has a setup twice as big as mine, mainly because he's doing these commercial things and some film scoring. I've never met him, but my assistant [Todd Yvega] used to work for him and told me about his setup. There may be some Synclavier setups in some universities with some students using them. But as far as composers of any kind of repute that have this system or anything like it, I don't think so. Because it's not just a stand-alone system. You can't just buy one and then do it, because in order to reproduce it and capture what it does, you virtually need to plug it into a recording studio.

You mentioned once that your Synclavier was unable to stop and play from any given point. Is that still a problem, or did they fix it?

That particular thing was making it play from any given point from the music-printing page. And they are no longer supporting their music-printing software. I think they fired everybody who wrote their music-printing software. The company is basically going the direction of selling the system to the world of film and television. They use the sound-effects inserting device. And although it wasn't originally touted as a musical instrument and a composer's tool, I think that their bread is being buttered by the entertainment industry now.

So you won't get this issue taken care of.

Not unless I go out and hire the guy who wrote the music software and tell him to come in and fix this. We're using [Coda] Finale software. It's about $600, runs on a Mac, is MIDI-interfaceable, and graphically it mops the floor with the Synclavier's music printing. It's probably the most complicated piece of musical software I've ever seen. I mean, I own it, but I still can't work it. Ali Askin, the copyist for the Ensemble, wanted to use it in order to prepare the scores for Frankfurt, so I let him go out and buy a copy. He learned to work it in about a week. How, I'll never know, because there are three incredibly dense, tiny-print manuals on this thing that are absolutely baffling.

The idea was that if I got a copy of the software, too, then I could do a MIDI dump by using this new feature on the Synclavier. I can take my sequences, transfer them via the MIDI port into Finale, and then send him floppies of the Synclavier stuff so he can manipulate the pictorial data in Germany. I had to buy the software just to set up this communication link with him. We installed it, but I've never even attempted to use it. The first thing I did was have my assistant, Todd Yvega, who is a real computer whiz, try to figure out how the damn thing worked. And when I saw him pulling his hair out, I said, "This is not for me. I'll get too frustrated." Let me give credit where credit is due. Todd is really Mr. Synclavier.

The other guy whom I regard as a major talent in and a major asset in preparing the work that I'm doing now is the new recording engineer, Spence Chrislu, because Bob Stone is no longer here. And this other guy who makes sure that everything works is Dave "The Tree Hugger" Dondorf. So between Dave, Spence, Todd, and myself, when we all get together and all the equipment is working, we can rule the world! The days on which everybody's here and all the equipment is working are so few and far between, I think the world is still very safe.

When computer technology reaches a point where people can start using their finger or a pen to write things, would you switch back from typing in notes into writing in notes again, only now on computer screens?

Well, I have to go back to dots on paper because it seems that since I cannot operate Finale, and there are some strategic limitations to the Synclavier software, in order to prepare the composition for the Ensemble Modern, the easiest way to make some of this stuff happen is to just go back to dots. For this, I had to get special glasses made, because the normal ones that I use were the focal length between my head and the CRT, and are therefore useless. It's the hunched-over-monk work position on a table, so I had to get these mondo-magnifiers.

I've been reading about a rising interest in country music at the same time that there's a rising interest in rap. Are there racist components at work here, or is this all media hype?

Anything that appears in multiple locations on fronts of magazines which are basically owned or affiliated with record companies and broadcasters, I think you can count on smelling a rat.

You mentioned once in an interview that one of the sad things for young people is that they no longer have venues in which to hear improvisation.

Yeah. And since most of the best improvisation was never photographed or videotaped, if they're raised in a world where the interest of a musical nature is tied only to the question of, "Is there a video of it?" kids will never get a chance to hear what it was. If it is no longer fashionable to listen to music, if your peer group only watches music, and if you're old-fashioned and you listen to music, then you could lose status by being a mere listener. The trend today is to be a music-viewer-slash-dance-participant.

Are we seeing an era in which even the phenomenon of listening to music will give way to some other fad like the Duncan yo-yo men and ballroom dancers and vaudevillian jugglers?

That even sounds like a kind demise.

You think it will be more brutal?

Since music exists now at the whim of corporate sponsorship, the temptation to create musical divisions at corporations who prey upon these consumers is going to be very strong. In other words, the trend I see is towards a Coca-Cola concert division, a Pepsi-Cola concert division, a Nike concert division, a you-name-it concert division, where the type of music required to help sell their product is nurtured in a test tube and then foisted onto the consumer world with the whole control, cooperation, and financial backing of the manufacturer who stands to benefit from it.

Do you see the same scary depressing future for metropolitan orchestras as well? They already play Beethoven's Fifth every season.

What could be more scary than their existence right now: What's more scary than being in that orchestra where you never do anything other than that? Except die.

How many orchestras do you know that are able to even expand their repertoire? Kent Nagano was the first conductor that I ever heard of trying to do something semi-strange.

Well, Kent is also a unique individual. This is a chance-taking, weirdo, outside guy. He's not a normal orchestral conductor. He's being very successful, more successful in Europe than here, because that's where the action is. Take for example this project that I'm doing. There's no way it could ever be done in the United States. No group would ever come to me and offer me the amount of money that would enable me to work on it for a year.

How is your next album coming along?

I finally finished disc one of the Civilization: Phaze III album, which is something that I've been promising for years and years. Most likely, it's going to he a double CD. But the thing that's unique. about this album is, it combines the people inside the piano that were on Lumpy Gravy, except that on Lumpy Gravy there was just this smidgen of what was actually recorded with them. I've had these tapes since 1967 and have extensively edited all this semi-random conversation together into little scenes that form the bridges between the Synclavier pieces that are the bulk of the album. And it's pretty astonishing.

How long were they in that piano?

Twenty years.

And then you let them out?

Well you can't make them stay, and you don't want them in there unless they're being entertaining. And so it started to become a trendy thing to do at this particular studio. Like the receptionist out there would go, "They're in there in the piano again, ha ha ha." And the next thing you know, she's one of the people in the piano. So the cast of characters that wandered in and out of the piano covered everybody from Motorhead and [bass guitarist] Roy Estrada to the sister of the guy who owned the recording studio to Monica the Albanian receptionist to bunches of other people whose names I can't even remember. They just happened to be there, and I said, "Do you want to go in the piano?" And they said, "Yes."

Sounds like a microcosm of America once again. Did you listen to all of the hours of this stuff?

Absolutely. And I've been listening to it since 1967. This is a process of creating stylized poetry using digital editing techniques. You know how hard it is to edit any material that's ambient using a razor blade? You can't make it sound right. But thanks to the Sonic Solutions, you can do these cross-fade edits where the resonance of the piano does not cut off and the people who were not even in the piano on the same day would talk to each other or answer each other back in some strange conversation. Without Sonic Solutions, I couldn't have put this thing together. It was truly a project that had to wait for technology to catch up and make it possible. So not only do we have these smooth transitions from different days and different groups of people inside this piano, but they also blend seamlessly into the Synclavier pieces. So the piano overhang, which would be the result of voices setting the strings in motion, will be overhanging the start of the Synclavier piece, and the last chord of a piece will be ringing off into the piano as they come in talking again.

Were the Synclavier sections composed after listening to all this older material, or had you been sketching them out all along?

You've got to understand what the Synclavier process is like, as opposed to writing for any other medium. Imagine being a sculptor, okay? And imagine making your own mountain and then going to the mountain periodically and hauling your own hunks of marble back to the shop so that you can whack away on them. Sculpture is a subtractive medium, and you start off with more than you wind up with. So the analogy here is that the raw material that I'm working with is whatever is in my imagination versus what samples are at my disposal. And building the mountain is building your collection of samples. After you've recorded the individual instrument, or jackhammer, or whatever it's going to be - you can't deploy it into a composition unless it's been captured. You know, it needs a start mark and an end mark put on it, and all this really drudgerous bookkeeping kind of stuff, which Todd does for me. So I've got far more samples on tape now than I even have access to in the Synclavier, just because it takes months to prepare the raw material. And as the new samples come on-line, they are deployed into compositions which Have been worked on over periods of years. In other words, the day I start a certain composition, I have one set of samples, and it makes the composition sound a certain way. But as new sounds come along, and they're plugged into the composition, the notes may be the same, but the whole sound of the piece changes.

And so you're often rewriting material you wrote long ago. At least the notes on paper now have a different timbre.

It's not just that. I mean, when you get to hear other possibilities, you're influenced by the very process. For example, when I first bought the Synclavier, it wasn't even a sampling machine, and I started writing things for it that just used the FM synthesis. The main charm with a Synclavier at that time was the power of its sequencer and the fact that you could have multi-tracks and things colliding with each other. So some of the pieces that were started even in the pre-sampling days on the Synclavier have gone through permutations over the years and still haven't been released yet. About a month ago, we finished something that I've been working on for 10 years; it's 24 minutes long. It sounds like an orchestra piece, but it's an orchestra like you never heard before. You couldn't get an orchestra like this. Not only do you have all the normal orchestral-sounding instruments - the piano, percussion, and the rest of that stuff - but it has every known kind of synthesizer noise built into it, plus vocal sound effects and car sounds and all this stuff organized into basically a diatonic composition. I've been working on this thing for years and years and years, and every time a new sample comes along, it would go into this thing. That's going to be the centerpiece of the second disc. Timbre is determined by your samples, which is determined by your ability to purchase the samples or make them from scratch.

But the only real limitation on the machine is an "S" with two lines through it. Everything that it can do costs way too much money, since there are so few of them around, the price per pound of what it does is still way up there. In order to stay in business, the company had to make a decision to move it away from being a composer's tool to more of a sound-effects film- business type tool. And so they've stopped supporting the music software. They've had a lot of software updates for all the editing aspects of it, but none for maybe three years on the music-printing software. They fired the guy who wrote the printing software, so that's kind of frozen in time. The software contract is $2,500 a year, just to stay current with what they're doing. It's mostly to expedite "housekeeping," et cetera.

The one thing that I am kind of proud of is that I never took any foundation grant money to do any of this stuff. It was all financed from record sales. But as the record sales go down, so does the amount of money that I can turn around and reinvest into the hardware - which has a price that's steadily rising - and it squeezes me into a weird kind of position, because it keeps me constantly in debt to the bank to pay off loans in advance to buy the equipment that's in that room. So the more "specialized" the music that you can make, the smaller the audience gets. So it's like going down a black hole, where it'll eventually reach a singularity, and - poof - there it is. Gail does all the business. She takes care of all the stuff for the bank. She arranges for all the loans to get the equipment. The house is her project; that's her composition.

How do you catalog your samples? Is it broken down by car-bumpers-falling-off noises versus... .

That would be under "Industrial." It's completely broken down. Not only that, but I think we've got tons of thousands of samples by now, and you memorize their names. There's an eight-digit computer name for each of these things. I can sit there and watch the thing, and I can see the name of the sample, and I know what it sounds like. I know every one of those little bastards. I know how far it will travel on the keyboard all by itself. I know this stuff inside and out. To be able to write music for that kind of sound universe offers some major opportunities if you have the time to do all the typing to manipulate it properly. And there's never enough time at one sitting to finish something, because the more you get into it, the more you understand it could sound a lot better if it only had this nuance or that nuance. And every nuance you want to add takes hours, which then go into days which go into weeks, and on and on.

And every one of those nuances needs to be defined - amplitude for each note, whether the note has vibrato or whether it's going to bend to the next note, all that stuff. All that has to be typed in as data. And it has to be transferred to tape, then it has to be mixed.

How do you ever know when something is done?

When I get so fucking sick of it, I go, "It's done!"

Does this ever feel like torture to you?

Oh, yeah. There are some intermediate stages that are definitely not fun.

But it's a habit you can't kick?

Yeah, that probably would be accurate. I don't think I would even want to.

As your skills increase, do you notice your music changing?

I don't know how to answer that. That's pretty subjective.

What do you feel are your greatest weaknesses?

I just can't do normal stuff.

Like?

Arithmetic.

You're talking about life skills.

Yeah, and their equivalent in music. I can't do counterpoint. I can't write traditional harmony, which would mean I would be virtually unemployable. Without me employing myself, I wouldn't have a job.

I've listened to some of your orchestral stuff and thought, "Gee, I notice he's getting rid of these sort of things I learned about in college."

I never had to get rid of them!

What are your greatest strengths?

Probably the greatest strength that I have is a sense of humor.

Your humor seems to show a real concern for the plight of human beings in a declining culture.

Well, I don't think in terms of things like "the plight of human beings," because they certainly haven't cared about my fucking plight, so why should I care about theirs? However, I think that the label of "misanthrope" is probably not right for me, and "misogynist" is not right either. The thing that interests me is the behavior. That's always been a fascinating thing to me. Whether an interest in behavior constitutes a "concern for a plight," that's subjective. But I think that it's even scientifically worthwhile to make some notes about behavior as observed. And this can lead you to speculation as to why such behavior occurs.

You once said you never got a good studio solo. Do you even try studio solos anymore?

No. I'll make one exception. I think that maybe "Sleep Dirt," for all its imperfections, is a pretty nice little solo. I've done a few guitar samples, but I probably should do more, because one of the things that would be a stimulating addition to the sample library would be a set of my guitar notes that would allow the machine to play all the shit I can't do with my fingers, and still make it kind of sound like my guitar. I'll get around to that one day.

Whatever happened to your Jimi Hendrix Miami guitar?

I gave it to Dweezil.

Is it playable?

Oh, yeah. He had it refurbished. Fender spiffed the thing back up.

Is there any type of music you hate?

There are certain things that I'm not fond of, but hate takes a lot of energy. I'm not really fond of commercial cowboy music or contemporary country - the "Slick Willie" type of shit. And lounge music I don't enjoy.

At one time weren't you a lounge musician?

Oh yeah, I had to do that, and at the end of it I put my guitar in the case and stuck it behind the sofa and didn't touch it I guess for a year. It was nauseating.

Do you see the world of sound as just this palette to draw from, or were there things about lounge music that actually made you run screaming out of the room?

When you're adopting or adapting a style in order to tell a story, everything's fair game. You have to have the right setting to the lyric. If it's a lounge setting, then there it goes. If it's a slick country setting, then there it goes. The important thing at that point is to tell the story. But I don't think of the world of musical style as the world of sound. That's another topic altogether. That's another planet. The world of sound is back to the jack hammers and women in labor.

You quoted Stockhausen's "lazy dogmas of impossibility."

Yeah. He had presented the score of the woodwind quintet of "Zeitmasse" to some musicians who looked at all these mondo tuplets and proclaimed the piece unplayable. Then he responded that they were creating "the lazy dogmas of impossibility." And one of the most accurate performances of "Zeitmasse" that I know of was a cassette that somebody gave me of a group from San Francisco that had played at a chamber music concert. The guy who conducts the San Francisco Chamber Symphony invited me up there to conduct Varese in '83. He gave me a cassette of a performance that he had conducted of "Zeitmasse," and it was really good. The first Columbia recording was full of mistakes.

But I'll tell you something This Ensemble Modern could play that shit with their eyes closed. In this incarnation of the group, there's an American guy living in Italy who is playing the tuba, a Swiss character a couple of Canadians, and an Australian, but, of course , being based in Frankfurt, it's mostly German musicians. The total instrumentation for my piece was about 25. They had to add some outside musicians because they don't normally have a mandolin player. The Ensemble Modern [normally about. 14 members] has been augmented by an extra percussionist, so we have three percussion, a guitar, mandolin, two harps (one doubling piano), piano doubling celesta, five woodwinds, five strings, and seven brass. The group has been around for about 10 years, and they own themselves. They have an elected three-musician board of directors which handles the aesthetic decisions on what they're going to play and when they're going to play it. In order to be in the group, you have to be voted in every year. If you fuck up, you're out.

No tenure.

No tenure. And there's a waiting list of people who would like to be in this group. They do about 100 concerts a year all over the world, and it's a full-time job. These guys don't go out and do jingle dates, and none of them are making a lot of money from doing this. They all seem to be living pretty close to the economic borderline. About half of them go to work on bikes - rain, sleet, or snow.

Total commitment.

And can they play! It's unbelievable.

Are they young, old, or mixed?

Mostly young.

How did you hear of this group?

I was contacted by a guy named Henning Lohner, who had a documentary about me that's never been on the air in the U.S., but it's been on in Europe. It's all about the serious-type stuff. Henning knew a guy named Dr. Dieter Rexroth, who runs the Frankfurt Festival and was the director of the Hindemith Institute in Frankfurt. Dr. Rexroth although he doesn't speak English, is a big fan of my stuff, and Henning suggested to him that they invite me to do something in this festival. So they sent me an economic proposal that was insufficient and I thanked them and said no. What they wanted was impossible. So about four months go by and I get another call, and they say they really want me to be involved in this festival, and would I meet with these guys from the Ensemble Modern, then they sent me some CDs that the group had made for some German label. And the thing that astonished mc was that it was just a great album. They had recorded the music of Kurt Weill. The selections were all obscure, unique things, some of them with vocals, and the recording was great, the performance was great.

At any rate, finally we came to an agreement, and I definitely had the idea that these people really wanted to do this. I didn't realize the decision was not just coming from the director of the festival; the musicians voted to invest their time and energy in this project. The musicians themselves desired to do this. And so you know under those circumstances that, whatever you write, they're going to play the fuck out of it. So the next thing that happened was, I said let's construct the piece while you're here; why don't you come to Los Angeles for two weeks, and I'll rehearse with the group just like I would rehearse with a rock and roll band. And that's what happened: We did rehearsals, we recorded some improvisations, we did mass samples with the whole group and individual samples - things that never came out of notation in any textbook, things that you could never write down on paper.

How long did they stay?

For the entire two weeks. Now here's the other thing: During all this time none of them got paid anything!

Sounds like your type of guys.

There was nothing they wouldn't try. If we were after a particular musical result, they were all for it. The classic example was they are so Sound-texture-oriented that they would try anything, even abuse their instruments. The French horn players were sitting there scraping the bells of their horns across the floor, and those things are very expensive. If I had the finest Hollywood musicians, at no price could I have gotten those sounds.

And they certainly wouldn't have been that committed.

Thc other great noise was - there are two people in this group who play didgeridus. One of them is the woman from Australia who is also the oboe player. And one afternoon, I imagined this awful sound that could be created if one were to take a didgeridu and play it into a partially filled coffee pot. And I asked her whether she would do it. She said yes, and let me say, it is truly nauseating. I was laughing so much I had to leave the room.

That sounds like a great group - fun to work with.

They're so serious. The kind of laughs that they have are German laughs. You know what I mean? It's like there's a different kind of humor involved here. There's a different perspective on things. You can laugh, but not too much. Anyway, you know what happens if you take a little straw and blow it into a half-empty Coke bottle? Imagine a straw with a diameter of about an inch-and-a-half or two inches. It already has a wooden resonance to it. You know the noise that comes out of a didgeridu, that kind of circular-breathing-type low droning noise? If you plunged anything that would make that noise into a liquid, you get the tone and the bubbles at the same time. It's pretty nauseating, but fascinating.

How much do you feature it in the new piece? Is it just a little punctuation that comes and goes, or is it the whole theme?

She's going to have a solo.

Does she know that yet?

Oh, sure. They all - since they were using up their vacation time to do this project - she had to leave the day before the last day, and so I had to make sure I got all of her individual samples out of the way. I said goodbye to her and thanked her very much. And the next night, we were having our final jam session of the season. And she showed up again. She canceled her flight, because she was having so much fun. And at the end of the thing, she said, "In all my musical life, I have never had as much fun as these two weeks working on this stuff." And I was stunned, because it was really such hard work and so many hours.

You allowed them to be so creative, and you asked them to draw upon all their skills and to expand their own borders in ways that they probably don't get a chance to do.

Well, for one thing, I wanted to find out whether they could improvise. Most of the musicians in that part of the musical world don't. And for the first time in their lives, these people got a chance to play a solo and they went from sheer terror to ecstasy.

You gave them all these opportunities. You have a reputation for being a mentor of the young and/or fosterer of unknown people's careers. How did that happen?

I think that it probably has something to do with fractals. The more I think about fractals, the more the whole idea of fractals relates closely to what I do.

How so?

Well, if you're trying to divine order out of chaos, that's a little bit presumptuous, but then on the other hand so is the concept of chaos. So I would say that the fractal theory falls in the cracks between those two attitudes. And rhythmically, if you're dividing the universe into twos and threes, which is basically what happens with all polyrhythmic subdivisions, you are to some degree missing the boat - the fractal boat. If you can think of rhythm as an extension of the fractal universe instead of even subdivisions of twos and threes grouped into elevens and thirteens or whatever, if you can think of microsecond relationships as being valid components of polyrhythms, then you're getting closer to the way I view things. And if you can, transferring that into the anthropological domain, how I wind up being, in your words, a mentor to these kinds of people, it just seems that the odds are in my favor, that if I keep doing what I'm doing, we will meet.

You made the comment that listeners accept polyrhythms in your music and African drum music with much greater ease than they do dissonance. Why is it that harmony seems to linger around so much?

Rap music may bring an end to that. Think about it. What is so preciously consonant about spoken words? It used to be, in order to have something acceptable as broadcast material or even listenable material, it had to be saturated with consonance. And although rap music is not dealing with harmonic combinations of major and minor seconds, it is certainly dealing in dissonance.

That's true. You've done a lot with spoken material, too, such as that thing with Steve Vai tracking your voice.

Oh, on "Dangerous Kitchen"? Yeah, where he wrote down the - well, I'd have to call it a scat because there's no other word for it. It's on that and "Jazz Discharge Party Hats." He transcribed it and then learned it on the guitar and then played it on the record. But I think that the other, better example of spoken material would be something like "Dumb All Over."

Why is it okay to hear really strange rhythms but not to hear really strange harmonies?

Well, arguing the other position, people do assimilate really strange harmonies when they are accompanied by the appropriate image.

Do you mean like in horror-movie music when the maniacal slasher is about to come?

Exactly.

It's got to be visually triggered.

Well, the society has been so saturated with visual data, and the audio that goes along with those pictures stays in your tissue, kind of like dioxin. And you hear the slasher music, you know what slasher texture is, you know slasher harmony [laughs]. And if you hear anything that sounds like slasher harmony and there's no slasher, you're still going to feel the slasher.

Then the question becomes, have the visual media people created the proper image to go with the sound?

Well, if I were going to do a slasher movie, I could be a lot scarier than the shit that they stick in there. I thought that the pinnacle, the thing that everybody has gone for since it was established as a slasher norm, was the squeak squeak squeak from Psycho. Most film scoring for tense moments runs the gamut from squeak squeak squeak to the filter opening up on the Minimoog on the low note. Not too much in between there.

How do you think Schubert would feel knowing that the Unfinished Symphony is the Smurfs' theme?

Well, how do you think that the people in America would feel if they knew where the Smurfs came from? They were an advertising device for British Petroleum. When we went to Holland for the first time with the band with Mark and Howard in '70 or '71, the whole place was riddled with fuckin' Smurfs advertising BP. And the joke in the band was, "Smurf mee" because on the billboards that's what they said. "Smurf me" spelled "m-e-e." I don't know what it means. But to go from that to what we now have as a family of Smurfs with their own personalities. According to Ahmet, who saw this spectacle on television, he witnessed an interview with a guy who was one of the Smurf voices, taking himself so seriously that it beggared description. I mean, he did about a five-minute routine on this guy.

There's our cultural hero. And again it gets me back thinking of guitar heroes, and why they are gunslingers. In your touring days with rock bands, did you see guys out there playing air guitar?

Sure.

What is that and how come girls don't do it?

Well, because their tits get in the way, for one thing - same reason why you don't see that many girl guitar players unless they're handling it at a low altitude. But I think it's probably because girls are too smart to play air guitar. If ever there was something that the women's liberation movement could use to prove the inferiority of the male species, it's the extremely low number of women who play air guitar.

We haven't talked about your business. As I understand it, you and Gail handle everything.

In the house, we have three offices. We've got one upstairs in the bedroom where I do all the liner notes and that kind of word-processing stuff. Gail has an office, and then there's another office just as you come in the gate that we use for all the phone transactions and that kind of stuff. We have a lab, we have a studio, we have an editing facility, three vaults for tape and film. That's all right here where we live. There's two other buildings in the San Fernando Valley. One of them is Joe's Garage, which is a rehearsal facility. And then there's our warehouse, where all the equipment and stuff comes out of. Gail runs all that.

Why did you decide to handle all these things yourselves?

Well, I would say there's a certain hose-job factor in there, but in reality it's just good business sense.

What's in that huge vault downstairs?

Since the early '70s, I've collected every interview, every performance clip, everything that was done around the world that I could get a copy of. Then there's all the rest of the footage from Baby Snakes, the accounts of every documentary that was done in Europe and everyplace else, and then there's videotape - every format from two-inch to digital video and all stops in between. Plus all the masters, all the road tapes, and all of the 1/4" tapes from Cucamonga. The audio tapes go back to '55.

So early on you were very careful about keeping things and keeping them in order.

Well, being a pack rat is something. but keeping it in order is another thing.

In other words, it's a hellacious chore for someone.

Well, the vault is very well organized. .And I know where stuff is, but nobody else does. In order to put it in a condition where anybody could go in there and find anything anytime they needed it, it would take about a year and a bar-code generator. Even a student intern wouldn't know what the fuck to do with it, because many of the road tapes have never even been listened to. They are still gaffered shut just the way they came off the road. And in order to log it, you've got to listen to it. And what intern is even going to know what he's hearing? And the mental notes that I have about what's on those tapes is not only what the tunes are, but where the good versions are. And your only other option to leaving the stuff scattered like that is to go through the arduous process of making logs of everything, clip the good takes out, collate them, and start yet another library.

Does it frustrate you that it s impossible to do all of these things as fast as you would want to?

Yes. Let me put it to you another way. If I could, I'd keep my studio running 24 hours a day. For some of those things that need to be done on the studio level, I don't need to be in the control room with the engineer. I could just give instructions, and because the board is automated, once you've done a mix, if anything needs to be changed in the mix, all he's got to do is go back and tweak a couple of faders and rerun it, and no time is lost. But this engineer that I'm working with, Spence, is a mutant, because not only does he understand old analog technology - he's still a vinyl guy at home, and he's one of these guys that likes tube amplifiers and all this kind of stuff - but he knows how to operate all of the digital recording equipment. He understands the Sonic Solutions, and he can even operate that aspect of the Synclavier that interfaces with the recording machines. In other words, I could leave him alone. I could say, "Call up this sequence, do this, this, this, and this," and he knows how to run all these things.

Now there's not too many recording engineers that I know of that have a hands-on experience with all this gear and do it right. And he's got real good ears for balancing things. I would need three guys like that in order to run three eight-hour shifts in there. And I feel lucky that I can get him four days a week, ten hours a day. But you know at the end of the day when he's got to go back to his wife, I'm sitting there going, "Oh well, we almost got that one done." It drives you crazy a little bit, but then on the other hand, if I were to just hire a bunch of guys to move the faders up and down, I wouldn't get "the good result." And besides, all these people have very unique personalities. Todd is truly a unique and mysterious character. Same with Dondorf, same with Chrislu. And fortunately they all get along with each other. And it's very amusing to be in the same room with these three guys trying to have a conversation with each other. I really enjoy it.

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