Episode 1671 - Peter Conheim

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Lock the gates!

All right, let's do this.

How are you, what the fuckers?

What the fuck, buddies?

What the fuck, Nicks?

What's going on?

How's it going?

Where are we at?

You okay?

So look, I got some pretty big news I'd like to share with you, especially for people who want to commemorate the history of this show.

Box Brown, who is a graphic novelist, comic artist,

he's a New York Times best-selling author and illustrator, and we've known him for years.

I mean, we go back.

with Box to the Break Room Live days.

He did a couple posters for me over the years.

But he's gotten known for doing these biographical novels.

There's one about Andre the Giant, there's one about Andy Kaufman, there's one about Child Stars.

He did a whole book about Tetris, the game.

But anyway, great illustrator, graphic novelist, comic artist.

And he came to us a little while ago before we knew the show was ending and asked if he could do a graphic novel about the history of WTF.

Now we thought, well, that's a fucking great idea.

So we started working with him on it.

And now I am excited to announce it is a reality.

What the fuck is a podcast?

A graphic novel history of the show by Box Brown with contributions by me and Brendan will be published by Z2.

And you can pre-order limited edition versions of the book, as well as tons of signed memorabilia and a unique one-of-a-kind WTF experience on Kickstarter.

Yeah, that's all happening.

I got a lot of signing to do, how to go through the vaults, how to dig up some stuff.

While the book is already funded, we wanted to give WTF fans the opportunity to get involved early and have a shot at getting some real WTF artifacts.

Yeah, bona fide.

You can sign up now to get first access to the Kickstarter, which it launches on September 4th.

Just go to z2comics.com/slash WTF.

That's Z, the the number2comics.com slash wtf

and over the next couple of days i will be signing sort of rare edition posters uh t-shirts that have been out of print forever one t-shirt that we couldn't even sell for legal reasons a lot of hard copies of some of my first few cds

uh hard to come by got some dvds of thinky pain got some buttons that have been out of circulation, some never in circulation because of legal problems.

They're around, some other swag, but a variety of posters, and a giant mosaic piece of art of the WTF logo.

And I might toss in a fairly

rare bit of movie memorabilia.

So a lot of cool stuff.

Yeah, and going through that stuff and also talking about

the old albums with Brendan, the work, the bulk of work.

Man, time is just flying by.

Guy came up to me yesterday.

I was over at the comedy store in between sets.

And he's like, yeah, I did a scene on Glow with you.

And I'm like, wow, that's pretty cool.

And he said,

yeah, it was like 10 years ago, I think.

I'm like, no,

that can't be true.

That's crazy, 10 years.

And the first season of Glow, I think, think, was 2016.

So it is almost 10 years.

It's fucking screaming by now.

It's just, I don't have no sense of it.

And my days are full.

You know, outside of going through the full spectrum of emotions, you know, I got things to do.

And it's just screaming by.

There's no pausing.

And I think, as I've said before, COVID, I think, just fucked up our sense of time.

Every day seems like a week.

And I don't know, man.

Just screaming by.

I got to slow it down.

I got slow something down maybe i slowed the head down it would seem like the rest is slowing down no yeah no huh what

so today on the show i talked to peter conheim peter conheim

who is peter conheim well that's a fine question

because

peter conheim is a film and audio archivist.

He's a musician, multimedia artist.

He was a member of the band Negative Land for a long time.

And he's a guy that I kind of got to know years ago through him reaching out.

He was a fan of the show and then he sent me a bunch of the Negative Land stuff and things that are adjacent to Negative Land, which was sort of an art.

How do you say it?

It was a very specific time

in the late 80s, early 90s.

It was sort of, I don't want to call it art rock, but it was art audio.

There was a lot of music to it.

There was words to it.

There was a lot of comedy in it.

Most of them are satirical records.

They're kind of fascinating.

They actually still hold up pretty well.

And they're kind of off the grid a little bit.

A lot of people don't know about them, and I didn't either, but I knew of other artists during that time.

It was a time where I guess my brain was kind of being blown.

I mean, I guess the first Negative Land album comes out in 1980, and they do a bulk of work, you know, 81, 83, 87, 89, 93, and onward.

They still go now.

But I don't know how you would categorize it, except that there was a lot of art going on in the early 80s that was provocative.

Culture jamming was a thing.

There was a sort of anti-consumerism, anti-commercialism art going on.

And, you know, Jell-O Biafra was ranting and raving.

Alternative Tentacles Tentacles Records was going on.

There was just this proliferation of performance art and performance art adjacent stuff that was very curious to me.

And I remember it having an impact on me walking around New York, certainly in the later 80s, you know, World War III Illustrated, Adbusters magazine, all the performance artists that sort of came through the Lower East Side.

It was like it was a vital time of energy that had purpose.

A lot of the anti-consumerism stuff really resonated with me.

And now like a lot of that

energy is just gone because everybody is fucking sold out.

Nobody is critical of consumerism.

Everybody is their own brand who have no problems with pushing other brands through their brand.

That's the whole game now.

So there's no real integrity on the level of what determines

what real art is, art with purpose, art with socially active purpose.

It just, it doesn't, I don't believe it does exist to a certain point, but only in clips driven by influencers of one kind or another,

kind of delivered in the context of whatever platform expectations there are in order for them to get their grift going.

I guess the reason I'm framing all this is that There was a type of art going on, and Negative Land certainly falls within that, where

it wasn't about being commercial.

It was about making a stand or being abstract

or absurdist

in relation to and in response to mediocrity, consumer culture, status quo of whatever.

It was almost like an explosion of fuck you, we're here, and you can go fuck yourself and this is why.

Or look at me, I don't fit into your paradigm, I'm free.

And that kind of art just doesn't, maybe it exists, but it doesn't have the thrust it used to, especially if it's just a clip or a reel of a guy doing a thing.

You know, you'll pick up some traction, but there was sort of a community around this stuff, and I think it blew a lot of minds.

I know I'm one of those guys that needed this type of, you had to go find it.

You know, somebody had to turn you on to it.

I've told this story before, but I had a guy I knew who worked at a record store, was in a band called Jungle Red that only played twice a year.

It was a lot of sound layering and noise, and there were two of them, Steve and Greg.

And I remember going to a party

near the university.

It must have been in the early 80s, like before I graduated high school, 80, 81.

And they were in surgical scrubs, and they had borrowed some beat-up old guitar of my brothers that they wanted to tape a baby doll arm to.

And it was just this cacophony of noise.

And Greg was on piano playing dissonant things and Steve was on guitar playing dissonant things.

And a lot of the audience was sort of the local kind of

out there,

not hipsters, but artists and weirdos.

And there was one guy walking around and you could...

You could pay him a dollar to stick a pin through his nipple.

It was that kind of party, right?

Who hasn't been to that kind of party?

But I just remember that a lot of the audience was sort of like the kind of hipster artsy gay contingent of Albuquerque.

And LaRue, Steve LaRue, the leader of Jungle Red, had brought his entire collection of antique Fiestaware

ceramics.

And during the performance, during the cacophony of noise, he was breaking one piece at a time with a hammer.

And just the layers of that sound, the drone of the piano and the feedback of the guitar, and just a large group of gay men who were just like, No, oh God, no.

It was a layered performance.

I'm not saying it had intent, but it did.

There was intention there, but it wasn't a commentary

on anything other than we are fucking out there, and this place where we are exists if you want to make the journey.

If not with us, fucking take it into your own hands and find some some artistic space where you can scream your fucking head off and fucking just say fuck you to the world so you can feel a sense of freedom.

It was just a period of time where people in small artistic communities, you know, felt like what they were saying made a difference.

And that evolved or came out of or ran alongside of early punk rock and just people pushing the envelope in a visceral way, usually with their own operation, not well produced necessarily, or if it was produced, it was produced within the little world that they were in.

And there was nothing about it that was meant for consumer culture.

So its very existence was a reflection and a pushback on that.

And I'm old enough to remember that stuff having a profound impact on my head.

and on what was possible.

I can't say that I'm living that life or that it's what I do per se, but it certainly informed a lot of who I am.

And as I was speaking of the last time, about instead of looking at it as nostalgia, you know, look at it as the building blocks of your sense of self.

So, look, I'll be introducing a screening of McCabe and Mrs.

Miller at the Arrow Theater this Saturday, August 23rd.

Also, I'll be back at Largo with the band on Wednesday, September 10th.

For links, you can go to

wtfpod.com/slash tour.

Wait, I'll also be at Largo.

Oh, that's sold out.

Sorry.

I'm there on the 28th, but I believe it's sold out.

That's crazy.

I don't usually sell out that quick there.

I guess they're expecting something.

Look, folks, one thing I've learned about myself is I have a very reactive brain.

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So, Peter Conheim, who we'll talk to in a moment, is the archival producer on the new Netflix documentary, Devo.

And also, we're going to throw this in.

This is the song Content from Negative Land's album, The World Will Decide, which features samples of me, Mark Maron, from this very show.

Here we go.

Participate.

Content.

Never forget the fact that we are all just content.

That anything you put out there, you are content.

We are all just potential content for someone else's needs.

I think people are happy to participate.

They're just hundreds of people rolling their dice, throwing their hat into the content, providing ring.

Content.

Forever.

Make it mandatory content you don't have to pay people to participate your content

my content you're forced to participate content

is eternal

can I before I forget I just I because I know this show and I know how this works and I know Brendan is gonna listen to everything and I know he's gonna do his work Brendan I'm talking to you now.

Yeah.

I want to tell you,

there has never been, in my my estimation, a better dialogue editor than Brendan McDonald.

I'm just going to say this right now.

When I first started listening to the show 14 years ago, it was around the time of,

oh, God,

you know, Andy Kaufman's

Zamuda, thank you.

200-something.

I thought, wow, it's amazing how this show is not even edited.

Like these conversations just flow and I don't hear any edits because I've been doing audio editing a great deal of my life.

And I live for the perfect splice I live for the crossfade I live for the to hide the glitch and it took me a long time to realize that these shows were edited because he's because you're so fucking good Brandon oh yeah man he's the best that's and and tell the people just how much time that can take oh I mean yeah hours hours like I mean to do two shows a week for all this time you're obviously your efforts, but Brendan's efforts as the editor, oh God.

Crazy.

Now, you get into a rhythm when you start doing audio editing or any kind of editing, of course, you know, and you find your flow.

Yeah.

You know your tricks.

Yeah.

But I just, I'm in awe of you, Brendan.

Would you marry me while you're married?

Yeah.

He's all settled with that.

Yeah.

But yeah, you have been on the periphery of this show for a long time.

And I would say, you know,

that

your engagement with me has been, you know, sort of, I'm very reluctant to make new friends.

And,

you know, your persistence was, it became sort of like, what does this guy want?

Yeah, yeah.

And then like, he's sending me all these records.

And then the resentment happened.

And I'm like, I'm not even going to listen to these records.

I am the result of your parasocial relationship with your fans.

I am the tragic.

I'm the tragic.

And yet, look, look what happened.

No, but I think ultimately, you know, that for me in sort of, you know, getting to know you a little bit, and then also we have an Albuquerque connection in that you ran the Guild Theater, but I think I was gone by then.

Yeah.

2000.

Oh, yeah, you were long gone.

2003 to 8.

But, you know, when

in sort of engaging with the Negative Land stuff and...

realizing the circle of artists that you were involved with.

And I think you know from listening to this show that there is a period of my life where a lot of that type of stuff was introduced to me, but I didn't have no context for it.

And I still really don't.

Because Negative Land and all that work, these are really comedy records, a lot of them.

Oh, sure, of course.

And they're comedy records in the tradition of probably Fire Sign.

Absolutely.

In some way.

Oh, FireSign Theater is a huge influence on Negative Lands, radio art specifically.

But I got to preface this by saying I've been out of Negative Land now.

I eventually did quit.

I was in it for 20 years, 20 long years.

So I've moved on, but I'm happy, happy to talk about

what happened in that period.

Well, I think it's important for me because I always gravitated to that.

You know, there was a period where I was reading research

and research laboratories in San Francisco and what was going on there.

You know, like, you know, Biafra's on a negative land record.

There's this crew of people that were doing something a little more elevated than punk rock with political intent and social disruption intent.

You know, Adbusters magazine was like very big for me for a while.

And stuff stuff like, I just, someone just sent me this, like these stickers.

They just say, don't trust the algorithm.

Yeah, right.

And this was.

Very much in the same mindset.

That's right.

There was a radical idea to doing this and to planting these messages.

And while re-listening and listening to some of the negative land stuff for the first time over the last few days, that, you know, I started to realize that

The idea of culture jamming, which was a real thing, whereas is like, you're going to create, you know, media that's going to infect the broader media almost as a virus to reveal the truth of its impact and domination on our consciousness.

Right?

Well said, sure.

And that there were artists that would do this stuff.

And when it was a smaller media landscape,

it sometimes was possible.

That's a huge distinction, I think.

But what I realized this morning is that culture jamming, the impact now, because when you listen to it into the way that you layer sort of rhythm in almost a hypnotic way found footage, audio footage, and things that you're saying and bits and pieces of writing.

And even on the last record, me.

Yes, that's right.

That's right.

You are on that record.

Yes.

On the cut content.

That's right.

We made a...

Yeah.

Yeah.

That the impact is, I think, as powerful, but because we are all active parts, either passively or not, but actually not passively, of the media, right?

Certainly.

Because of engagement and the way life works now, is that the impact of culture jamming, it happens inside you.

Yeah, and it's also completely 100% mainstreamed.

And it is culture.

Culture jamming is culture, is advertising, is everything now.

But to reveal the truth of what you're trying to do, dismantle, you know, media's power and control on every level, like I had an internal experience with it that I was listening to what was going on on the last record.

And I realized that, you know, our our brains are so integrated into it now that the revelation is not going to come outside you yeah it's going to be uh an indictment of your engagement interesting right i think that's true i think that's true so so it still works yeah you know but but i'm sure the audience for it is limited

well i think the audience is limited because

i'm not just circling back to the idea that it's kind of like predominant culture now is that the tools to make cut up audio cut up video?

We are so into a whole nother, obviously, we don't even have to use the term AI, but I mean, we are in a whole other landscape where it's an accepted part of the discourse to be commenting on something and chopping it up into pieces one way or the other.

Like, that's just, that is the way we, that's what social media essentially is at a certain level, right?

But that's a corporate space.

So,

you know, on the basis of this, and this may be an intellectual point, that

you're creating stuff to specifically

to honor the construct or the context of the social media platform, right?

So the free thinking part of it or the external art part of it is no longer operative.

Right, right.

And because it's like that song that you sampled me on, that it's all content.

Right.

And that if you want to make content that has traction, you have to honor the algorithm's appetite.

So the freedom of thinking and the freedom of expression is tragically limited to that context.

Yeah.

No matter what you think.

Yeah.

Right.

Okay, that's fair.

Yeah.

So so when you listen to Negative Land in the early stuff and the albums that you were involved with, that, you know, this is stuff

done on an independent label that you guys ran.

Yeah.

And then, you know, it was.

So not always.

That's a whole part of the.

trajectory is that we were on SST public label.

Yeah, that got a little dicey.

It got a little dicey.

Yeah.

But my point is, is that this is real independent art, right?

So this is this.

That was always the idea.

And it was always, and it was free.

And it was, you could take it and do with it what you wanted was a big part of it.

You know, no copyright.

No.

Right.

Please come to our shows and record us.

Please use this material to make your own object.

Right.

And then we, and then we went all the way with that idea after one of the early members and critical members, Don Joyce, when he died, I suggested we take his ashes and we include them in the next album, which was all about chopping up culture.

And he became the album.

And so a thousand copies went out with his ashes.

I don't know if I gave you one of those, but his original.

Which album was that?

That's called The Chopping Channel.

And

we gave him.

Did he sign off on that?

He was dead.

I know, but you didn't discuss it before.

No, this idea came up not long after he died.

And his whole idea of making this art in the first place was that it was essentially free, that it was open source before we were really calling it that.

Yeah.

And so I think he would have really appreciated it because not only did we put him into the context of the record physically as his being, but you actually got tape fragments from his actual work with each album.

So he was literally giving himself and the art away at the same time as part of the project, which in itself, this album, this ridiculous concept, was that you could just have a shopping channel that sells like, you know, absolutely nothing.

And I don't mean products.

I mean like, you know, the world.

Like literally ludicrous, absolutely dire ideas.

Yeah.

And it sort of like all came full circle for me when we did that because he, you know, sure, he didn't sign off on it,

but nobody ever, nobody from his internal circle, which was very small, pushed back on that idea.

You know, where does it start for you?

Where did you come from?

I grew up in Berkeley.

Yeah.

And so you're a little younger than me.

I was 57 last week.

Right.

So we missed the 60s in earnest.

Right.

And we just dealt with the crashing wave of it and picked our pieces.

Right.

I grew up with the Grateful Dead playing at the Greek theater and

watching people

come from Concord at Pleasant Hill and literally change out of their Izod shirts to their tie-dyes on the street.

That was my Concord out by Walnut Creek.

Correct.

Yes, yes.

Which is, you know, people think that the Trump phenomenon is excluded from the Bay Area.

Oh, no, no.

You just need to go through that tunnel and you are in.

Yeah, I grew up in Berkeley and people

was like, were your parents in academics?

No.

No, it's really interesting.

They were very clerical type people.

My father worked in like business administration of some low-level sort.

He was always angry.

My mother was a school teacher and a real estate agent simultaneously, total workaholics.

And I was an only child.

Right.

So they pretty much just let me go.

You know,

I've spent some time hearing about some of the things that, you know, your folks,

the way they encouraged you in a way, because for all the shit that you've talked about,

they cut us loose.

They cut you loose, but they also,

I mean, your mother was a painter.

So

whereas in my family, my mother sang in the San Francisco Symphony Chorus for like decades until she no longer could.

Art was a kind of an afterthought, you know?

And so they just didn't know what to do with me.

And I would just sit there and do

tape edits on quarter-inch tape.

When you wanna do it.

How old?

Six, seven.

So you became fascinated with that shit.

Totally.

I mean, at one point, you know how like the stereo Beatles records of the time, like help and whatever, they're mixed in this horrible way where the, where the vocals are on one side, guitars on the other side.

And once I figured that out at like age seven or something, and I thought, well, shit, why don't I just strip out John's vocal of you got to hide your love away, slow the tape machine down, and then do a ridiculous cartoon Martian voice singing the song and like, oh, that was easy.

It worked.

I thought of it and it worked like that.

It was like funny.

No effort.

So that's the kind of crap I was doing in my room.

Yeah.

And then I started to do incredibly badly academically at school.

Yeah.

Around junior high, things started to slip.

Yeah.

So like my father's bright idea, this is good.

Yeah.

His bright idea was to get me to do my homework since he knew that I was into electronics and stereos and all this shit.

And I had it all built into a closet in my bedroom, a rack, basically, right, of all my goodies.

Sure, yeah.

Which he helped me put in.

Because he was generous and an asshole at the same time.

He was like an incredibly dark, depressed asshole who was generous.

He's excited you were excited about something.

Maybe.

I don't think I ever actually, okay, let's say yes.

Okay.

And his idea of getting me to do my homework was to install a timer.

so that at 8 p.m., I had my own phone line in there too.

Like I paid for my landline, all that.

A switch would be thrown at 8 that I could not get into, and it would cut off the power to the closet and the telephone.

I would have complete blackout at eight.

Early adapter to parental controls.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And it was utterly, utterly fruitless endeavor because, of course, all it did was just make me mad.

And I'm not going to say, oh, it's time to do my homework right now.

Great.

This means I can just do some work.

He radicalized you against authority.

That's the beginning of it.

Yes.

So this is when you're in high school?

Yeah, junior high.

And eighth grade.

Are you doing something that you, with all this equipment that you show other people?

We used to make, I had a gang of people that started doing audio sort of like radio plays.

So it's a full sort of like audio nerd community that you're.

Yeah, I wouldn't call it a community, but

it's a little lint ball.

No, but it's like a, you know, the weird thing about nerdism is that, you know, the, the, the, uh, the sort of obsessive focus on a specific thing that, you know, hopefully to live a life of a full-fledged nerd keeps growing with you.

Yeah, right.

And you can figure out how to use it

is specific.

Well, here's the, this is an interesting difference, I think, between you and me, knowing you from the podcast and all you've talked about about your childhood.

I mean, I'm correct in saying that you

you were kind of a seeker, right?

I mean, you kind of

tried things on.

You moved through high school kind of like, you know, you'd have a phase, you'd have a leather jacket phase.

Yeah, a self-seeker, right?

Self-seeker.

Yeah, but not like a spiritual seeker.

But I wanted to be part of.

So that's a big difference between us and our upbrings is that I knew pretty much what I liked, and I knew there weren't very many people that were into the same shit.

And I had no connections with a lot of people in school.

And so I just concentrated on that stuff and just did it all through high school.

And that turned into making films, which were then super, then they became video with the same gang of people that I was doing the audio with.

In high school.

In high school.

Yeah.

And then I dropped out of high school.

Yeah.

I left in 11th grade.

Well, that's good because, you know, then

you have full control and fully actualized ability to express yourself in the way that you were totally confident in.

Whereas I am too, but it's just charm-based.

But we all need, we need, yes.

But we need those like Gus Blaisdells, like you had in Albuquerque.

Yeah, well, that was, yeah, for sure.

Well, who was your guy?

I had a friend that I worked at my first video.

Did you know Gus?

Did we talk about him?

We talked about him, but he was, I think his store is closed by the time I was there.

There was a bookstore right across from the Guild that I don't think.

Jerry's.

Yeah, no, it's Jerry's.

Yeah, he was a friend of Gus's.

And we met when you and I went to see that movie at the Guild that time when I was there, we met Nikki, his daughter.

His daughter, right?

It was all kind of full circle.

But yeah, you

but Jerry was the guy that had the place across from the guild.

Who was your gus?

So I worked in a video store from 14 to, well, I worked him for like 13 years.

But my first gig, there was a guy named

Zoltan Dare.

He's a couple years older than me, than me, just the right age, like the older brother I never had.

And he got me into all kinds of frenzy shit, the biggest one being Can.

When I first heard Can,

that just, I didn't understand how that music was being made.

And I've, I've actually been playing now with Malcolm, the singer of Cann, for 22 years.

Because when I got turned onto it early on, you know, I had a cassette of the greatest hits when I was in New York in the 90s.

I couldn't lock in because I was trying to lock into Cann and Throbbing Gristle.

That was pretty different.

No, I know, but

there were these sort of fringe things that, you know, certain people were like, this is the shit.

And I'm sure that reading the research books, because,

you know,

what's their name from Throbbing Gristle?

Oh, Genesis PR.

Yeah,

the late.

Yeah.

And I was sort of fascinated like, what is this world?

I mean, if it weren't for research, those books, I don't know that I'd know about it.

And if it weren't for Steve LaRue.

That's the record store guy, right?

Yeah, who you didn't know, no, but you right, but you've you've made a big deal out of like how he got you into the residence and Fred Fritz,

yeah, and Eno, and and uh, yeah, and he was in this experimental band.

He, I, he went on to kill himself not long ago, wow, and but he was that guy, he's not unlike you, yeah, in the world that he traversed or what he was trying to do, yeah.

And uh, you know, that's gonna be a lonely place, obviously.

Yes, so this guy, Zardos, what's his name?

Zardaz would have been good, Zoltan.

He was Hungarian, Zardaz, yeah.

Yeah, right.

The Zoltan.

The penis is evil.

Yes, right.

Or the, was it the gun?

Yeah, that's right.

The gun is good.

The penis is evil.

Was it Sean Conner?

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Loinklaw.

But

yeah, Zoltan.

So you were at that point

at the video store for that long.

So that sort of informs the whole film nerd thing.

Totally.

Because I always, I thought I would be a film maker.

Yeah.

And then I kind of gave that up.

I thought I might be a film critic.

Yeah.

I kind of gave that up.

But it all revolved around, sure, the social connections I made at that video.

I mean, a lot of video store people have this.

Tarantino's got this backstory, the guy that made clerks, right?

Kevin Smith.

Kevin Smith, yeah.

You know, it's like a social place, but you're, it allowed you to be extreme deep nerd on the subjects you like.

Well, do you remember

Steve's place, The Naked Eye on Lower Hay?

Oh, of course.

Yeah.

I, you know, when I was living in San Francisco, I was there all the time talking to those little, those nerds and Steve.

yeah but that was a good video story makeup was great leather tongue great there are a bunch of them there you know what i actually got from i think i don't think it was naked i think was leather tongue yeah they used to rent the chuck berry p video sure i remember that well that was that time dude where where this is all that kind of you know there was a point in the alt world where you know found footage and morbid fascination drove this sort of underground video barter world absolutely you know the one of what's his name from Pennsylvania blowing his head up, Bud Dwyer.

I couldn't handle that.

That was a big one.

That disturbs me to this day.

Because, like, you know, my good friend is Bulware, and he ran the nose for years.

Sure.

And this was all on the periphery of what you were doing, but a generation a little later, probably.

Yeah, yeah.

We were a generation after.

Because Bulware was doing the nose in the early 90s.

So maybe it's the same.

No, it is the same time.

Yeah.

It is the same time.

I came into Negative Land in 95 or 6, and the Nose, I think, had stopped.

That's right.

It's right.

Yeah, we're contemporaries.

But so, how do you get from the video store to having a, you know, an aesthetic

that lends itself to joining up with Negative Land?

What is the process?

Well, the thing about Negative Land was that it's still on is that on KFFA.

Is it a collective?

Yeah, it's a collective, and it's down to only really one slash two of the people that started in 78, 79.

There was a radio, still is, a radio show on KPFA.

It's called Over the Edge.

It's every Thursday at midnight.

And my friend who kind of came into the band late, John Lidecker, his performance name is Wobbly.

He took over after Don died.

Don died pretty suddenly.

I mean, he'd been sick, but he did a broadcast pretty much all the way up until he was hospitalized.

Well, that show has been on since 1981 or late 80.

So a lot of us who grew up in the Bay Area who were radio weirdos and just like liked flipping through the channels, if you were up late, you would come across this completely fucked up collage show, which was like what the Fire Sign Theater was doing in the 60s, only,

I would argue, denser and further out because of the level of tape manipulation and crazy shit.

And probably rhythm.

Well, I guess that eventually became.

Percussion.

It became that.

Sometimes the band, we would go in and actually play on the show.

It actually bring instruments and play.

Most of the time when we did the show as a group, and I assume it still happens, is that you're not really, you don't necessarily bring in a lot of instruments.

You're bringing in tape sources and, you know, whatever.

But anyway, I listened to Over the Edge like a lot of my weirdest friends around 1984.

Yeah.

And the same guy, Zoltan, was like, oh, I love that show.

And one thing led another, find the record.

And, you know, it's, I only got drafted into it just because we were kind of all running in the same weird circles.

You know, I worked at a record store.

One of the guys was...

who used to be in negative line no longer is.

He was there.

We're all connected, you know, and just they needed someone else, you know, and just, yeah, the video store pretty much just, I think, primed me to be a film preservationist and restorationist, which is my general gig.

It's my more regular gig.

No,

I know, and I know that's what you do now, and that's a sort of insulated but important little world.

Very insulated.

Yeah, I know.

But the truth is, is like, you know, you can't diminish 20 years

of active engagement in satirical music.

No.

No.

It was a very, very important part of my life.

And we had some great tours.

We had, yes.

But I just think it's like,

it's interesting to me, you know, you know, as I get older and you think about, you know, what is the remaining audience for these things that were important to us when we were younger.

And it's just old guys.

Oh.

And but the weird thing is, is in listening to like, you weren't, you weren't involved, you were involved in True False because I'm on that.

Kind of, sort of.

That's a controversy.

That was that, that, that was edited after I split.

But a lot of my material's in there, yeah, sure.

Yeah, but the ones you were involved with, you know, these are full records and also monopause, which seems to be more musical.

That's correct.

But the negative land ones is that you guys tackled a theme

and through found footage and just your own poetics, you know, kind of took it down

and expanded it and put the listener in the position of having a hallucinatory experience through through audio that would reveal their part in it.

And we made the audience sit blindfolded for one tour because it was a radio show.

So we handed out hundreds of blindfolds and we would look out into the audience and the whole idea was, there's nothing to see here.

This is a radio show.

So go inside your head.

And people actually did.

It was totally insane.

For two hours, they would sit there with the pinata blindfold over their eyes.

But that is the nature of audio in general, the power of it.

I mean, it's why Brendan and I stayed, you know, audio.

But in the times during...

Thank fucking God, by the way.

Can I just say

because I don't look good?

You know, I'm the one that has, I guess, had to tell you this.

No,

it's the YouTube podcast phenomenon has bummed me out to such an extent because this is a diversion, but you want to listen to something not necessarily

as an active participant on a fucking screen.

You want to have it in your world.

But the distraction of having to look at people who are sitting on a mic like this is, I don't get it.

It's the goofiest.

Well, and the fact that that's become the dominant sort of entertainment structure, to me, like you know, in being the old guy yelling at the burning sky, the you know, that you're just lowering the bar because people will adapt.

And I think that again, coming back to negative land, is that you know, most of those records through their themes, whether they're religion or data or politics or media in general, commercial consumerism, is that you know, it puts you as the listener you know in the hot seat yes and if you let it happen you can you know reassess in a very real way your part in it and also how these things that dominate our consciousness uh you know fuck with our heads yeah and sometimes we were actually specifically kind of didactic about that we try not to be didactic but there were times where we where we did like there was a in dyspepsia which was one of the first records i worked on which is all about the cola wars and the bullshit yeah that's just a meditation on like advertising and bad ideas but inside it actually has a thing that says, boycotts work and here's how you, you know, we actually advocated, which is sort of stepping over a weird line.

Whereas I think for the most part, the best work doesn't actually advocate in that directly.

Well, that's the shift from being an anarchist to an ideologue.

Yeah, okay.

Sure.

Yeah.

You know, there's a point where, you know, it's same with sometimes what I do.

It's like you get to this point where you're putting out enough of your expression

to sort of create the art and make the point through the art.

And then one day you're like, fuck this.

You know, here's where you call.

Here's where you write.

This is where the thing is here.

Here's where you march.

That's right.

That's right.

That's right.

Yeah, it's an interesting step because

in the world of marginalized artists, that is the first step of selling out.

Yeah.

You know, and it's kind of odd.

Like to me, because I'm kind of geared towards that, you know, even that stuff where, you know, Alternative Tentacles was doing some stuff.

I guess Are You Serious with Mondo

2000 was on that title.

That was a really weird period, actually.

On the tip of that when he kind of took over culture in San Francisco at the beginning of the tech thing

where everybody was idealistic and freaks.

And also,

I remember the, you know,

John, was it John Ghiorno and Laurie Anderson and William Burroughs?

They made that record.

The three different pieces.

It's all of a piece, of a type type of art.

And Laurie Anderson, I think, plays big in it.

But the fact is, is that it has legs and it is not dated.

And that some of it precedes

things that were used in hip-hop.

Totally.

Or at least were happening simultaneously for different reasons.

Because ultimately, Negative Land and the ideology of it was we're against pop culture, period.

Right.

You know, but then it gets absorbed.

And if you could walk me through,

it seems like the U2 incident, which you were part of, no?

I came in right as that was, as the ashes were settling.

Right, but that wasn't on that.

But that seemed to have a true kind of human and legal impact on the nature of sampling, right?

You know, not that case didn't so much.

It was more, that case, for those who don't know, Negative Land did a 12-inch EP that was called U2.

It was a brazen, like, you know, thumb nose.

Yeah.

If I had been in the band at that time, which was again, just like right around the corner, I probably would have been one of the people that would be putting the brakes on it.

And

let's not poke the bear to this extent.

I would have wanted to have poked the bear less obviously.

And when I say obvious, the record was designed to be manipulative.

It had the words, the letters U2 in enormous letters on the cover and negative land in small letters.

It was made.

And the world was waiting for the next U2 record after Joshua Tree or whichever it was.

And so this was like a deliberate like, we're going to see how this goes.

And of course, it failed, right?

I mean, it failed.

Because you got sued.

Because we got, well, we didn't get sued.

The record was stopped, but then there was a countersuit from the label at the time, SST, who blamed Negative Land for, you know, not holding up their end of the bargain to handle the legal responsibility.

And it just became this disgusting kerfuffle.

My feeling as the dust settled on that one was

the record itself is, I think, is great.

The record is funny.

I mean if anybody has not heard it, it's widely available, but it's known for having this terrific KC KSM outtake that I'm assuming you're familiar with where he's cussing.

He's cussing and it's edited in such a way.

Don so brilliantly edited it so that it kind of sounds like he's going after you too, but he really isn't.

I mean, you know, it's just this little sleight of hand, but it's great.

And the thing is that it was such a provocation that like the provocation itself became the controversy.

The provocation itself overshadowed the fact that it was this pretty layered, great piece of cutup art.

Yeah.

You know, and that's where I think the, it kind of fails.

That's where I think the legacy is sort of a shame.

It's overshadowed.

It's overshadowed the work itself.

And there's a lot of, you know, you can read all about this.

There's a lot of details.

But once that happened, we were really gun-shy about the dyspepsy record.

And we did not put the letters P-E-P-S-I on the front of the record originally because we were so afraid.

Yeah.

And nothing happened.

Right.

So it's like, and

in the end, we, oh, geez, did I say that?

I mean, someone bootlegged the YouTube record and it was re-released and it's been out for 20 years.

Yeah.

So nobody gives a fuck.

It was like, it was bad.

It was, it was a provocation that poked the right bear.

Did it serve its purpose in that way?

Sure.

But was that way as good as the art itself?

I don't think so.

I think records better than that.

But how does, like, and sort of fold in the Ralph Records crew into, because like, you know, as a producer or as an

being part of, you know, a lot of different records, you know, Tuxedo Moon and the Residence

and I guess Steve Reich as well.

No, I don't think Reich had.

Frith had records on

Tuxedo Moon.

MX80 Sound, Tuxedo Moon, Frith, Chrome.

Everybody had their, a lot of people from San Francisco and around had records on Ralph Records.

Because like they're, they're all still a mystery to me.

And I know they're probably, I don't even know who's alive from the original crew and they're kind of out there but like you know I was always sort of fascinated with it but again for me it happened in a pure space.

I had no context for it.

I was just sort of like where's this fucked up stuff coming from?

You know Fred Frith is like some I like I can't picture these guys.

You've never seen Frith play?

No.

Oh, he's a master.

Yeah.

He's a fantastic guitar player.

Yeah yeah.

Maybe I have seen video, but specifically the guys who were wearing costumes.

The residents themselves.

Yeah.

What was the manifesto of that crew?

Well, I'm actually really glad you brought them up because they are hugely, they loom large over me, but also, I think, anyone who grew up in the 70s and 80s in the Bay Area and was interested in making art.

Yeah.

And I think about them a lot because of their anonymous.

stance.

The eyeballs.

Well, I talked to Cindy Sarah Sherman about that.

Okay.

All right.

And she's like a big residence person.

Yeah.

Of course.

The thing is,

they gave permission, I think, I'll just speak personally.

Yeah.

They gave me permission at a really young age to be anonymous, to not, to actually be able to do whatever the fuck you want to get away with without putting your name out there.

And the negative land records generally didn't have our names on them for a long time.

And that was partly in tribute to that.

It was an endless band argument, you know, and the credits would come up.

But the residents were like, I mean, they were fucked up hippies from the South,

from Louisiana.

They moved to San Francisco in the summer of love or right after, like 69, to be, to make art.

And they had money.

I mean, it's not, I don't know how well known that.

I think it's in the documentary.

I think it's in the documentary.

Is that they had one of the people in the band had a, if not a trust fund, he had some kind of, you know, line.

Yeah.

So they were able to basically get into record making, filmmaking, actual 60 millimeter filmmaking, massive set building, theater design

in a warehouse that they could just run wild in.

I mean, it was fantastic.

So, this was the early 70s.

Okay, so it was like because the original model for that in terms of the

freaks was the acid test.

So, so then, you know, you realize that you can, you know, build your zone and trip out.

Yeah,

there's inevitable crossover.

Yeah.

Because, of course, the residents are like hallucinatory.

Yeah.

You know, of course.

Of course.

Absolutely.

And they were doing copious amounts of everything.

I'm sure everybody was and is to a degree.

But yeah, the residents just, they, they, I mean, without giving away too much, um, the, the two main members of what's called the Cryptic Corporation, which is their spokespersons.

Yeah.

They've always been their public face.

Right.

Hardy Fox and Homer Flynn.

Yeah.

Their actual fucking names, which is just the best.

Yeah.

You know,

Hardy died.

So it's now pretty much just Homer, you know, steering the Cryptic Corporation and speaking on behalf of the band.

And the idea was, you know, just art for art's sake, go fuck yourself?

Well, I wasn't there.

So, I mean, what am I...

No, but I mean, how do you take it in?

Okay.

Well, one of their first projects was to actually send a tape of really some of their most fucked up music ever, like unlistenably fucked up shit, to Warner Brothers.

And that eventually came out as like recently, actually, relatively, as the Warner Brothers Brothers album is what it was known as.

It's like they sent it to them as a demo.

Yeah.

You know, and it came, the legend is that it was returned from Warner's address to resident.

Yeah.

So that's how they got their name.

So yeah, what else is that than a fuck you?

I mean, if you listen to any of that shit, I mean, there's a cut on there that's something like, you know, Jimi Hendrix's penis caught fire and elevated my head.

I mean, it's like that.

I'm paraphrased, but it's, there isn't in no world would this ever, even even in like a Zappa B-part world of that,

there's no way that record would have come out.

So that's a fuck you, sure.

What else?

What else is there?

But in the Zappa beef heart world, it was like, you know, we demand you to pay attention to our music because it's better.

Yes.

And in the rest of the world, it's like, we want you to listen to our noise because we think you suck.

Okay.

Or we thought, I don't know if we think you suck.

I think I push against that.

I think

chew, gum, chew, chew, gum, chew, gum, gum, chew, gum, chew, chew, gum.

Oh, that one went deep for you.

Yeah, I could tell.

Absolutely.

And the whole, the Discomo record?

Yeah, of course,

which is just a fake disco 12-inch of their Eskimo record.

Yeah.

Yeah, well,

I thought that's what the Eskimo record was called.

No, Discomo is the 12-inch disco remix

of Eskimo.

Which is extremely pointless.

Yes.

Eskimo is great.

And then there was the James Brown, George Gershwin.

Yep.

Was that what the two, or is it George and James?

George and James.

Yeah, then they did Elvis.

And I'm like, what the fuck is this?

What is this now?

You know, there was just this constant sort of like, what are they trying to do?

Right.

I mean, if you've watched any of their films, have you seen their films?

Their short films?

I think I've seen a video.

That's what I mean.

When I say a video, they were made on film.

I kind of use the terms interchangeably.

I restored all of their films some years ago, and now you can see them in really nice quality on.

Their films are absolutely unlike anything else from like 1974.

I mean,

so it's really hard to qualify this and say like, oh, this is just

a nose thumb because the sets that they built for these things, the detail, it's like they wanted to inhabit a world.

The records inhabit a similar world.

Sure, it's parody on a level because Eskimo, they're talking fake Eskimo dialect.

We, what, coke, oh, yeah.

You know, it's just like ridiculous.

But those films are

true works of art that

are really, they're really considered.

Yes.

They're seriously considered Devo same thing you know whose work I do I do restoration same deal like they were a hundred percent committed to the visual vision and the music vision yeah and they did care what people thought you know certainly Devo did residents I don't think had those kind of aspirations but what about Snakefinger oh he was in their crew I mean he was yeah he just he fit right in the thing that I think is really interesting that I think most of the kids today they don't they don't really know you know is that is that when is that when

the residents had their Ralph Records label, there was so little competition for fucked up shit like that in 77, 89, 80, even up to like 82.

Yeah.

There were so few record labels.

There were so few independent labels, period.

Yeah.

That if you were the residents or Snakefinger MX80, whatever, you made a record on Ralph, you might sell 100,000 records.

That number is absurd now.

125,000 copies.

Now, to

Warner Brothers, who might sell 10 million Elvis records in a year or whatever the number is, that's, of course, nothing.

But as an independent, like, imagine the amount of people that you could have reached then and did.

And then, I mean, this is a

well-trodden territory, but around Nirvana, like 1992, when Nirvana hit,

it all broke open and suddenly independent labels had to compete on a mass scale and there were so many releases.

But prior to that, if you made a record and it got someone's attention, there's a good chance it would actually get listened to yeah and Devo kind of mainstreamed this for sure because they got signed to Warner Brothers in 78 Yeah, and then they had a hit, you know, in with Whip It in 80.

Yeah, so and how long they've been around?

I mean, I talked to Mark and they've been around 73.

Yeah, 73, but they started not on like the resident, absolutely, yeah, absolutely, and it's curiously enough, they both covered satisfaction.

Oh, really?

Yes, they both have almost simultaneous fucked up versions of it.

And you have a long friendship with Mark, you know, and you guys work together yeah but you don't work on the music per se no i haven't well i i've restored and remastered thousands of hours of the music yeah we actually made a record uh called art devo a couple years ago yeah i would have brought you one but i'm out which is all like the most fucked up stuff the most

off-the-wall creations from the basement yeah for from 73 to 77.

yeah mostly from ohio a little bit of la but mostly from ohio oh great yeah i mean all these people i feel like swim in the same water Yeah.

And how I think it ties back to Negative Land is interesting because I think most people don't really make this connection about Negative Land.

But Negative Land, this is again before my time, but I can say this with authority, were pretty serious Krautrock nerds.

So a lot of the rhythms and a lot of the can stuff.

Yeah, a lot of the repetition,

a lot of the music that exists in the bottom of those Negative Land records is deeply Krautrock inspired.

I mean, the name Negative Land is stolen from a Krautrock band.

So it's all

Noy.

Oh, yeah.

They have a song called Negative Land.

Right.

So it's Noy, Kraftwerk, Can.

Can, yeah, sure.

Sure, to a degree.

I'm in Duel.

Oh, there's so many.

I mean.

Yeah.

Well, it's finite, but the big ones,

you know, I got into that later in life.

So that's where the rhythms come from.

Absolutely.

I mean, it's all from the same sort of

tribal rhythm, hypnotic rhythms, yes.

And then, like, Terry Riley, to those of us who are really obsessed with him, do you ever listen to him?

Yes.

Yes.

So like Terry Riley's early 70s stuff in a similar way, where he's like using tape to accentuate rhythms,

keyboard lines, you know, saxophone lines.

He's making loops and using the tape machine as an instrument very much became a negative land thing.

That was Don's instrument was playing cart.

You're a radio guy.

You remember the carts?

So Don would play with, we would go on tour and he would have like,

I don't know, I can't remember the number, but let's say at least 100, 150 individual carts of individual samples that were labeled that were specific to the narrative.

And he would just jockey those carts the whole show.

It was made for a great show.

Like you could watch the guy, like, you know, it's a different type of DJing.

Absolutely, it is.

Yeah.

100% DJing.

And he kept using those pretty much until he died.

Is this pre, does this predate two turntables and a microphone?

No.

No.

No, no, no.

You mean in like technologically?

No, no,

in the way hip-hop works,

using, you know, samples and turntables.

Yeah, it's right along the same.

It's along the same.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, it's interesting, too, about the cut-up method in general.

Not as

Geison and Burroughs conceived of it, but in terms of film and music pieces.

So I assume that some of the archivists

kind of matured in

finding these old clips and realizing they were lost to time.

And that served you because no one knew what the fuck it was from.

Adam has spent a lot of its public domain, which is too.

Right.

And then and I think that, you know, in documentary, I think

the one practitioner of this that that is really fully realized as an artist is that Adam Curtis.

Oh, yeah.

And creating, and also I think David Shields did it a bit with his doc on the football player, that where you, you know, you don't have a narrator.

You just have found pieces and you put them together for montage effect.

Well, did you see John and Yoko one-to-one?

No.

Dude,

it's the best of its kind documentary I've seen in years.

Really?

100% archival footage with one key exception that I won't give away.

The music's beautiful.

The story's beautiful.

It just focuses on that period of time when they were in their Greenwich Village apartment before the Dakota.

And then it kind of like bookends it with the Dakota.

But it's a must because all it does is use historical footage as a narrative.

It's genius.

It's genius.

Oh, I've got to watch it.

Yeah.

But the montage effect of found, you know, when you use found footage and montage,

you are able to transcend time and space to create a narrative without a narrator, and it's great.

Yeah, and you could argue Burroughs did that too, though.

Sure.

Burroughs took it to a different extreme.

His idea was that, you know, if you take the paragraph and cut it up and then rearrange it, that you're actually time traveling somehow.

Right.

Yeah, he had the sort of the Oregon box level of discussion.

But some of it's unreadable.

But

you like it because of the poetry of it.

It is provocative.

But so how do you decide now?

I mean, you know, outside of working with Mothers Ba and kind of like curating or at least having in your house enough copies of negative land records to send me.

Believe me, we all have the boxes of records.

I thought this would sell.

I just heard you had all your comedy CDs with the freaks on the cover.

Yeah, they're on the stairs.

Yeah, I got to go find those.

But when do you walk into film archiving as

a curator and as

a mission?

I used to work at Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

It was a total clerical kind of thing, film shipping.

Like your dad.

Your dad?

Like my dad.

Thank you.

Wow, never made that connection.

This is why I came on this show

and they would let me write program notes sometimes occasionally i would squeeze my way into like some curatorial ideas with the curators that i knew yeah that led to me owning the guild cinema in albuquerque for a few years and sort of so you're part of the community of curators yeah yeah there's i mean there's a bunch of us in the bay area who have done shows at different venues well we did mccabe and mrs miller in a print that you loved and like part of me because i'm not in that world of nerds i'm like this fucking movie's fucked up yeah i know It keeps changing colors.

What is going on?

Yeah, well,

that was a trial by fire, that one.

But no, we all kind of, a lot of us have curated at different theaters.

And I always wanted to do preservation work.

I was always obsessed with

not just the quality of something, like the way that Chad Cassam described of like, I know this can be made better.

Like he had a whole thing on your interview where he said that.

Like, there has got to be a better master to be derived from this.

Right.

And that, that's driven me for the last like 25 years of doing this kind of work, roughly.

And it's, it, it started officially with the film that you and Lynn came and saw right before

summer night, yeah.

Right.

Which was a totally obscure little movie from Ohio that nobody had seen that we just happened to have delivered to us at the guild for a thing.

And I fell in love with it and I said, I'm going to restore this.

And that's, it took a, it was actually restored before me.

Um, you know, long story.

That's kind of what started it.

And I just never really wanted to stop doing that.

So,

you know, in the same way that I have a parasocial relationship with you.

Yeah.

When

Devo needed some tapes transferred and we started communicating and I went down to their archive and I'm like, who the fuck is dealing with all this stuff?

And Mark's like, well, nobody.

And I'm like, well, me.

And so I just, residents, same thing.

The residence documentary came out.

I think it's called The I Scream, I think.

Yeah.

Within the last 10 years.

And I watched it and I thought, my God, their films and videos in this documentary look so wretched.

Like, these are the worst fucking copies of these.

Yeah.

I know where the originals are because I used to work at the archive where they're stored.

And I just reached out to Homer Flynn and said, I want to do this.

He said, great, go have fun.

Sometimes it gets funded from individuals.

Sometimes I've had grants, you know, like whatever.

Yeah.

But it's, that's what drove it.

And I just haven't stopped.

And it, but it's interesting that the drive, you know, still

in the spirit of

sort of not nostalgia,

but honoring analog and honoring the past and honoring the integrity of what these original pieces have, that it's not this sort of move to digitize.

I mean, that's what everyone's sort of like, got to digitize.

Yeah, I have lots to say about that.

I mean, you have to work in the digital domain because that's what's available.

And it's better.

It makes it easier, yeah.

It's better.

I mean,

I am far from, I like to refer to some people in my sphere, I guess you could say, as format fetishists.

Yeah.

I mean, here's my favorite example of this.

I'm not going to name the director.

If you're going to do the research, you could figure it out.

A famous director managed to get Warner Brothers to put out 2001 Space Odyssey on 70 millimeter about, I don't know, five, six, seven years ago, before pandemic.

And he made a big deal out of, and this is, you know, this is what he basically was after.

He's like, this is an unrestored version of the film.

Yeah.

He used words like that.

He's like, this is how it was seen in 1968.

Yeah.

Not so.

Yeah.

I mean, that was not true.

And as somebody who works in the business a little bit on the fringes, I knew what he was going to do.

And when he did it, it looked fine.

But all it was, all it was, was a.

a new print done as good as possible from a mediocre source.

It was not, Kubrick would would have been rolling over in his grave.

And I actually talked to Kubrick's longtime assistant.

You've probably seen the film Film Worker.

Did you see this documentary?

You've got his guy, Leon Vitale.

Yeah, yeah.

So I talked to Leon about this, and he was mortified because in his mind, this is exactly, this is not honoring the vision, but it's honoring someone's idea of like, oh, well, this has never had a digital step.

Therefore, it's the way it's supposed to be.

There's all kinds of arguments you can make in those areas, and you can get really into the weeds.

But in this particular case, they used a compromised thing to start with,

pretending that that's like how it was.

It's not how it was.

It's like using

CDs as a source for vinyl reissues.

100%.

Sometimes, as somebody who does these masters, sometimes you have to do that.

Sometimes the tape is lost.

Sure.

That's what preservation work is all about.

They knew that the money that it would have taken to do a full restoration from the camera negative, the original of 2001, was they didn't want, Warners didn't want to spend that money.

So instead, they just made these perfectly fine prints.

People had a great show.

Great fine.

I don't begrudge them that.

But the whole idea that like somehow that it's unrestored or not restored is a plus, it has no relation to the art.

It has no relation to how it was made.

It's just the state that it happens to be in now when they go to print it.

So the idea is when you restore, you know that compromises are going to have to be made

for damage,

for missing pieces,

and that's part of the puzzle.

And opinions.

Opinions, because if the people that made the work are dead, which is a lot of the time with the stuff that I work on,

you're taking liberties.

You are making decisions.

You're grading the color a certain way.

You try to use the best reference that you have.

Like an unfaded, perfect reference print.

You try to time to that, for instance.

But you can't, see,

partly I got into this because of like, I have this, I have this weird like innate sense of justice.

It's this weird sense of justice where it's like, I want the truth to be told, but I'm not like, I'm not

on the spectrum about it.

Yeah.

Like I'm not focusing on one part and saying, this is exactly the way it has to be.

Yeah.

That's not right.

Like I'm not going to do that.

Yeah.

But

you, when you play this game of doing like a restoration from a compromised element and you want to make it as good as possible, a lot of the times you have the chance to make something way better, way better than it was originally.

We're doing that with all the Devo films right now.

Most of them look like they've never looked because the technology wasn't there.

The reason why we chose to do that.

It's a correction.

It's a correction because Devo would are still around and they're like, well, of course if we had the technology, we would have done it that way.

It doesn't mean the old version gets thrown in the garbage can.

Right, right.

But it just becomes a relic.

It becomes a relic.

It's not necessarily their intent anymore.

And they had like they're using Devo as an example, they had so many compromises because their budgets were so low.

And now it's like, well, these tools are on the desktop.

I can make this so much better.

Let's do that.

And everyone gets excited and that's fine.

It's like a whole nother way of restoring something because you're not really restoring.

You're reconstructing and you're changing.

It's and you're there with the artists to make decisions.

You hope so.

Right.

But when you're not, but like when you have Spring Night, Summer Night, which is an odd movie.

Yeah.

And it must have been an obsession.

Oh, deep.

And, you know, why that happened, I don't know in terms of your obsession, because it's not an easy movie, really.

No, but it's a pretty beautiful little movie.

I mean, it's like narratively, it's kind of a beautiful movie.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, it's just like, I mean, it's made for nothing.

It's made for like $8,000 or something.

It's like the one about the homeless prostitute woman,

the actress,

she was married to Kazan.

Kazan's wife.

Wanda.

Yeah, Wanda.

Wanda.

Well, my colleague Ross Lippmann, who worked on Spring Night, restored Wanda.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Totally Simwear Zone.

Totally Simwar Zone.

But that's like 60 millimeter, super low budget.

This was 35 millimeter, beautifully photographed.

Yeah, we knew where the negative was.

The directors were still alive when we did that.

One of them still is.

How do you feel about the restoration?

Oh, they lost their minds.

No, they lost their minds.

It was worth the whole journey.

It was worth the whole journey.

I mean, that film has such a great story because they were supposed to show at...

the New York Film Festival in 1968 with Spring Night, Summer Night.

This was going to be their big coming out party.

Sure.

And they'd labored for five years or whatever it was on this film.

At the last minute, the New York Film Festival says, you know, we just got this other film by John Cassavetti's called Faces.

We really can't have two kind of like small-time black and white independent films.

So you guys are going to get bumped.

Wow.

So Faces goes on to massive acclaim, no knock on that great movie.

And Spring Night disappeared.

And then Spring Night was recut by like...

effectively like a porno distributor.

They made them insert sex scenes and it was a disaster.

And then it was gone.

So when I came along to put it in its rightful place.

What was the seed of the obsession though?

Because it just read that story?

No, no, it just so happened to be programmed into a teeny little touring film festival that the guild got.

It was a random event.

It was a random event.

And I watched it on an airplane on a terrible DVD.

I remember.

I was like flying back from Germany and I watched the movie.

I was really moved to the travel DVD player?

It was the, you know, the the old Max house.

Oh, that's right.

That's right.

The computer again.

You're right.

And I was watching on that.

And I was by myself on the plane.

There was like a stranger sitting next to me, the coach, you know, and I started to cry.

And I turned to the guy and I'm like, I've just seen this beautiful film.

And he's like, oh, that's nice.

You know, like, there was no, but I knew, like, I got to restore this.

You have a life-changing event with a stranger who's just trying to be polite.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I'm sorry.

It makes you so sad.

But

bye.

Yeah, the German accent always

is so good for sympathy.

Yeah, exactly.

And it was like an absolutely stereotypical situation.

Oh, that's very nice.

Even got the guy's card, you know, like trying to be his friend.

Yeah, are you familiar with Khan?

Right.

Yeah, so that's how that happened.

And so what was the process was the print you saw was without the

print was the correct version.

Oh, interesting.

There was one existing print of the correct version, which the director held.

Yeah.

The negative had been physically re-spliced into the softcore version.

And so we had this whole business of how to put it back together when you physically, I mean, this is again, getting into the weeds, but when you've got a film negative, once it's glued and spliced, you can't really take it apart and recut it without losing frames.

Right.

You inevitably lose a frame at every single cut.

So we had to do it in the computer.

2016, 17, this was still pretty expensive.

And so we had to raise the money to do it.

And once we did it, and that's an interesting case because we actually gilded the lily on that one too.

There was a weird shot missing from the print, which was their version that was in the net, the cut version, but it was a really good shot that nobody could remember why it was there.

And they decided, no, let's put that in.

So like that, that's, that's an example of like, that's not how it was in 1968 by about 10 seconds or five seconds, but, you know.

But this is a completely engaging and exciting process.

It's like bringing Frankenstein to life.

It is.

And it's a total fucking nightmare when you're one person because you literally just watch stuff frame by frame for weeks.

Yeah.

You know, just cleaning dust, cleaning dirt.

Well, in terms of the few,

that one was done with a team.

But generally today, I'm working mostly by myself.

And like this one, Victims of Sin,

that Criterion put out.

Right.

Because you've done a handful of these movies, but like, what was the, you know, how did it get from wherever you started to Criterion?

They were interested in Mexican films from this era from the producer, who's a friend of mine.

Her family produced these wonderful.

Actually, it started in the early sound era, early 30s.

Oh, really?

30s to the 80s.

They had a studio called Calderón, and this was a film that people had loved.

It was unavailable.

I think she pitched it to them, but in any case, Criterion's doing a couple of

her family's films.

And she asked you, because of your relationship to what did you have to do to it?

We, again, started back from the original negative.

It had because she had them.

Yes, it was nitrate.

That one had been completely fucking hammered.

Like, it had been dragged behind a truck.

It was in such terrible.

So

it took ages to clean that thing up.

And it looks gorgeous now.

But yeah, that's a one-victims of sins are wonderful.

Like melodrama,

Paris Prado,

Cuban

musical noir, baby in a garbage can, you know, has everything.

Yeah, you know, so what are you working on now?

Mostly the Devo things.

Okay.

The Devo stuff is slowly coming out on their YouTube channel, and then eventually we'll put out a Blu-ray.

So they made about 16 or 17 videos and films during the height.

So I'm just going through them one by one.

It's nice talking to you about it because of your passion for it, where, because I get cynical in that, like, who's going to watch this shit?

Right.

Who are you doing this for?

Yeah, right.

Five people?

Right.

Is that satisfying?

But the truth is, it's important

in a time where

our authoritarian momentum is consciously trying to erase the past.

There's that.

But they're not going to pick on spring night, summer night.

But nonetheless, in people's minds, the curiosity

will go away eventually.

But I want to pick up on something I heard you say a couple weeks ago.

Yeah.

Real recently.

You mentioned your killer interview with Rodrigo Prieto.

Yeah, with DP.

The best.

That was so good.

Changed my life.

Right?

Now, see, that's an example of someone who is a craftsperson who got into the weeds on technical details and explained why they were so important.

So there's something that I heard you say recently on a show.

I can't remember who you were.

Actually, you might have been talking to doing your New York production.

Was I talking about

my

production designer and the Kentsugi thing?

No.

And the impact of poetry.

Oh, possibly.

Yeah, with the wall behind you.

The thing that you said about Prieto was

you were commenting on how he had told you the way he got very specific with certain lenses, maybe even filming.

For natives and for white people.

Right.

But your reaction was like, well, nobody notices that.

Yeah.

So, yeah, right.

I think most people don't notice that.

But one of the things that I think is super interesting about preservation and it goes to mixing, mastering, all forms of this

live concert mixing.

The things that you don't necessarily perceive are sometimes the key to an emotional experience.

If you go to a show.

The poetry.

Well, yeah, but you don't even, it's like visceral.

You don't even get it.

You don't even know, right?

So like if you go to a live show and the sound guy

really just loves his like gated snare that goes ginks ginks

and it's like it's taking you out of the music, but nobody says that.

Yeah.

If you have it mixed right, you may very well have people in the audience who feel something different.

So I kind of feel like that's what Pareto was getting to.

It's like, it's not like people are going to see and like, oh, look at

the really tight tints.

They feel it.

Colorized black and white pictures in France at the turn of the century.

Sure.

Tinting is, I love, I love color tinting.

It's beautiful.

But I just think there's something there.

I think there's like a lot of intangibles to this kind of work, whether it's picture or sound, that people don't perceive

on a surface level.

But

it's rooted in something

deliberate that doesn't need explanation because

the magic of it is been sort of revived.

Yeah, or it adds up to an emotional response.

Sure.

Like it just gives you

something.

You don't know why.

It's good because, and I think this goes along with what I said before, is that the depth of the work is important.

You can churn out garbage and people will adapt to it and just return it to the garbage.

But when something has a depth of process and intention that the power of it is transcendent for those who are willing to engage with it.

Yeah, I think that's well said.

Good.

Well said.

So before we end this up,

correct me on what I understood from Chad Cassim about mastering.

Oh, he he, I believe what that came to was

He did a reissue of a miles record, and he was talking about how he went back to the original separate tracks and he did a remix right very different than a remaster okay and I think that got somehow that got that got skimmed over because

and it's important because there you go with making radical potential changes in in audio again I'm not saying this is a bad thing right I do tons of remixing yeah you know that's I'm all for it it's just it's a it's an interesting distinction that people don't necessarily make and remastering is taking the existing mix.

The existing mix.

Right.

Now,

you can dick with it quite a bit, as he told you.

You can EQ it, you can take noises out of it.

But you're not making the drums come up high.

Not really.

Yeah.

Although it's gotten very fucking fuzzy now.

Because of the tools of it.

Because of the tools.

Yeah.

And now there are mastering labs where it's like I get a mix and I, not me, but an engineer will kick up the drums.

Sure.

I've had to deconstruct.

I mean, I went to a friend's house who actually had, you'll love this, I think, he had the

half-inch or one-inch master multi-track of the Who's

Can't Explain.

Okay.

And he broke.

Just the song?

The song.

Yeah.

The session tape.

Yeah.

And we sat there and we listened to each individual track.

And then he's like, but you see here how

Entwistle's bass is mixed in with Keith Moon.

Watch this.

And he like,

and he stripped it away digitally.

And so all of a sudden, you're just hearing the bass.

I just, you know, not a dry seat in the house.

it was so exciting.

So, that's like these tools exist to do fun stuff.

Well, it's like those remixes that George Martin's kid did, like Abby Rhodes.

Absolutely.

And, like, listening to that, you're like, what the fuck?

Yeah, go for it.

Why'd they take that out?

Yeah.

Yeah.

But, but, like, why not?

I mean, you, if the original is there.

No, no, what, no, what I'm saying is that like, it's, it's an interesting entertainment to, to, to, to see these decisions made way in post to elevate certain elements of it.

But, you know, outside of technology, and I had this problem with bootlegs too.

It's like the decision was made by the artist to do it this way.

Right.

And you have to honor that, and that's what you know.

Right.

It's interesting, right?

Right.

But you know, it's not what the artist intended.

Which is what you always want to come back to.

Sure.

Inevitably, that's what you want to come back to.

Good talking to you, pal.

I enjoyed it.

Good.

Thank you, Mark.

There you go.

That was a, I enjoyed that conversation.

Again, Peter worked on the new Devo documentary on Netflix, which is streaming now.

Hang out for a minute.

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