Steve Kimock w/ Bernie Worrell, Wally Ingram and Reed Mathis at Port City Music Hall in Portland, Maine
XVSK
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| Steve Kimock on stage with XVSK. |
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| Port City Music Hall - Arts District Portland, ME |
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| XVSK = (Trevor) Exter vs (John) Kimock |
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CO: How are things going in The Red Barn, that’s
your practice space?
SK: Yeah, I have a big Red Barn, built a nice room in it, and it’s like super comfortable, got a organ in there, gotta piano in there, got some drums, I got a bunch of guitars, and I play. And I sketch and I get ready to do things, It’s a beautiful, uh, it’s a beautiful space man. Although surprisingly, I still get a lot of good creative work done, um – moving around…., ya know what I mean? Like it’s nice to have an area that’s big enough to get a bunch of guys in to do some actual work. But I’ll still occasionally have a lap guitar, and like <snicker>get in the bathroom and shut the door, or go upstairs in the kids room when nobody is around…. Just different environments, just to hear it in a different space.
CO: Do you
have any new instruments? I heard you had a new gold-top guitar… I’m wondering
if that’s inspired you in any new adventures or grooves with….
SK: Well… ya
know… (long pause) sigh… The new…
You can pretty much kinda know that there’s always some kinda new
instrument around… along with the old instruments… The old instruments, ya know
– probably be the ones you’re going to see the most, the most duty on stage
because I’m used to them and how they work.
SK: Umm..The Gold-top.., that Gold-Top Les Paul – My cousin Kenny’s old guitar! , would be an exception to the rule, it would be the very first electric guitar I ever saw. (Laughs). I was like” Oh my god that’s an electric guitar”, when I first saw it.
SK: Umm..The Gold-top.., that Gold-Top Les Paul – My cousin Kenny’s old guitar! , would be an exception to the rule, it would be the very first electric guitar I ever saw. (Laughs). I was like” Oh my god that’s an electric guitar”, when I first saw it.
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| May 12, 2012 Portland, Maine |
SK: That was my
cousin Kenny’s guitar, that was the guitar he brought back with him, I guess
from Germany when he got out of the service. I was… twelve or thirteen, or
something like that- at my grandma’s house. And the, Ya know, the buzz at the family, somebody.. my mom or
one of my aunts or something saying “ AHH Cousin Kenny is back from Europe and
he’s back from Germany and he’s upstairs” in
Grandma’s house.
SK: So I go
up there after school, and Kenny’s not there but that guitar was laying on the
bed, and I was like OMG… what is that? I
had no idea… I didn’t even know…I tried to pick it up, right.. to play it, and
BROKE a STRING. Right?
CO: Uh oh…
SK: Which
was like ahh shit, he’s going to kick my ass.. for real, ya know? “Oh great, my
military policeman big cousin comes back from the Army”, and I break his
guitar… but it didn’t go like that, Ya know and.. but.., he was just glad to be
back in the states… but he taught me a
bunch of stuff… taught it to me on that guitar.
SK: Ya know
and then eventually he sold it, THEN it showed up... on Ebay for some
astronomical amount of money, and he called me up and he says, “ Hey man that’s
my old guitar”, It was like “ Oh yeah you’re right”. So I say here I go…
SK: Ya know,
so – bit the bullet, robbed a couple of 7 Eleven’s, got it back.
CO: Nice.
Steve went
on to say he plays mostly fretless instruments at home....
CO: What
have you been listening to lately, (do you) have any new influences?
SK: Ohh.. I’ve
been, I’ve been listening to … I’ve been listening to more Brazilian music,
I’ve actually been listening to a lot of Brazilian music. There’s a female
singer named Joyce, that if you looked on..if you looked online, if you looked
for Joyce one of the songs is Feminina, you would find a performance from Japan
for her with a trio. Which is what kind of got me started on the Joyce, and now
I’ve got five or six of her records and the stuff that was on Itunes.
SK: And I just love her singing and playing, she’s
a great player, great guitar player, great singer, uh, One of my very best
friends- I played for him all the time, he goes “ I don’t know” he says, “ I
just don’t, I don’t get this Joyce thing” ( much laughter…). So um, ya know
that convinces me that even more so that it is fantastic and that not everyone
gets it.
SK: But
Joyce.., awesome. You know I’ve been listening.. I haven’t had a Hermato Pascoal spell for awhile,
but I listened to Hernato a lot, back even in the pre Zero days. I remember
having a cassette tape in the pickup truck, that this guy had given me of a recording
from Montreux, “He goes, Check these guys out” –this is live, and he plays me
this stuff from Montreux Switzerland , I was… the most amazing music
improvisation and group improvisation , sort of listening compositions, the
whole bit – that I ever heard, Amazing, amazing music. And I just, I wore that
cassette out, and I eventually wore the cassette out, and that was the end of
that, you know I couldn’t find it again because I guess I just wasn’t looking
hard enough.
SK: But now
you can go on youtube and look up Hermato Pascoal, and all that stuff
from Montreux, that I was listening to it, like right after it came out, is
over in video with really good audio, and its killing, it’s just amazing, it’s
so good.
SK: So I had
a renewed Hermato thing, along with my Joyce thing. And I’ve been listening to
some… oh- I’ve got a tip for the musically inclined –if anybody is reading this
is musically inclined. There’s a website called Atlas of Plucked instruments,
and Atlas of Plucked Instruments just kinda gives you a map of the world,
anywhere that you would like to be, southeast Asia, Africa, southern Europe,
whatevers good. And it gives you all the plucked instruments that are indigenous
to those areas. So anything with strings on it that you would hit, as opposed
to bow. And then links, there’s You Tube
links to guys playing these instruments. You can get totally lost into
it… when you see… I mean I think this is what hooked me on the guitar thing,
uh.. probably, ya know originally when I very first got it… ‘cause I didn’t know how to play it… I didn’t
know what it was… it was kinda like oh yeah I’d like to do this, what the hell…
SK: I mean,
like my first guitar was some kind of 30 or 40 dollar flattop with a trapeze
tailpiece and just like a pop sickle stick bridge that kinda moved around. So I
remember getting that first guitar and not knowing how to tune it, not
realizing that the bridge had to go somewhere special to work with the frets,
and just hitting the thing and moving the bridge around and going (mimicking
the effect “wow, woww”), ya know, listening to the pitch change. But I mean
early on I kinda got the hint that there was this whole bunch of string stuff,
that was cool… that wasn’t exactly guitar and when you get to Atlas of Plucked
Instruments (dotcom), and you start paging around through it, you see the
variety of ….of variation, to playing styles, and music and songs and
application of instruments in the world, it’s just incredible, so much
beautiful stuff. So along the way with that, there’s this Vietnamese folk music
called Vong Co, that’s got some craazyy guitar style stuff, the strings
are real slack, the frets are scalloped, the notes are bent (to) this crazy
place , that’s fascinating…. I’ll let anybody who’s interested explore that
space. Yeah that Vong Co..(guitar style of playing).
CO: Great.
SK: It
really is, you should check it out.
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Bernie Worrell (Parliament Funkadelic, Talking Heads) |
CO: I read
in a recent interview that you’d like to go to Brazil or India?
SK:
ohh..That was in response, that was the right answer to like the wrong
question. I believe the question (earlier interview) was “WHO would you like to
play with? ”…ya know, “what person would you like to play with?”.
And (laughs)
obviously, I would like to play with everybody. What I’d like to be able to do
is, if this has any relevance to your question, what I’d like to do is go to
these places and be immersed in these other musical cultures and to be inside
that music with the people, it doesn’t matter who they are, it just matters
that that’s their music, I mentioned I would love to go to Brazil, I would like
to go to India, I’d love to go to Africa, and I just mentioned the Vong Co
thing… I mean it’s <chuckles>probably more likely that I would get to
Vietnam before any of these other places, just for that. Their music.. their
use of the guitar and culture , is worth a closer look…. It kicks my ass, just
coming off the screen, of my dinky ‘lil IPad, or whatever- I see some of this
stuff and it blows me back… ya know, and man how would you like to sit there,
and be there in reality.
CO: I’m
curious, in your opinion, what’s happening with the Jam band scene, and do you
even consider yourself a jam band player?
SK: I have
no idea…. I never considered myself a jam band player in the first place… I remember when the term first started to get
a little traction, I just moved to California, I was living in Fairfax, CA.,
with the Goodman Brothers where I saw it for the first time… It was a music
industry, a big record company response, sort of a derogatory response to those
bands that actually _had an audience_, as they were lamenting, these
manufactured kind of boy band things, putting out a record that sold millions
of copies and then putting ‘em on the road and no one would come to the show.
The idea that these bands that had built
audiences, that built followings, ya know that were actually playing for people
live… They were like, well you know… ”They weren’t choreographed, with four
singers”, and twelve years old kind of thing, um, to just playing around as The
Grateful Dead or something, it wasn’t as directed as the boy band thing was . I
was like well that’s BS.
I can’t
believe that the (jamband) label stuck, it’s not even a musical term. There is
nothing that you can say about it, (laughs)
I mean everybody asks if (I) have a wah-wah or something, I don’t know
(laughs). I don’t see that you can identify a band that you lumped into jamband
thing by identifying a musical element or styles. There are some jambands out
there that are entirely electronic, or they play bluegrass, ya know what’s a
jamband… <Unintelligible, Carl Benson? Dr. Ditch> , Bob Dylan? Ya know,
come on -you can’t lump all that stuff into one musical category, it’s
radically different styles and approaches and you could be completely
accomplished in one of those areas and be completely lost in another. Which
would not be the case if you were a bluegrass player, you could play bluegrass,
if you were a jazz musician you could play jazz. But jamband? It’s a, it’s like
a marketing thing, it’s not even a bin, you know like if there was still a
record store and you went to “jamband” you’d be like, bin? Everything, nothing?
Yeah, I….
for whatever reason, that handle stuck,
I have no idea. It’s not me anyway.
CO: OK..
Going back to your tour, do you have any plans for an extended Midwest or other
parts of the country?
SK: Oh yeah,
We’ll got to all of it ya know come hell or high water.
CO:Great, I
know…
SK: It’s not
going to get to (happen) all on this trip.
CO:Sounds
good. Someone wanted me to ask you if there was something you do at every show
that people may not know about? (laughs)
SK: Is there
anything I do at every show that people may not know about, what does that even
mean?
CO: Uhh, I
don’t know..
SK: Is there
anything I do at every show that people may not know about…
CO: Do you
have any set routine that..
SK:Oh, like
ritual preparation kind of thing?
CO: Eat or
drink a certain…
SK: No, um
(thinking) , there’s nothing really, ya know. I mean I… sometimes I eat,
sometimes I don’t.. ahh, I drink a cup of coffee, sometimes I take some
vitamins, if I’m at altitude or something like that I might take some, might
drink some water for the stamina kinda thing.. oxygen. But nothing to interesting
ya know, I don’t sit in a darkened room ya know with uh …
CO: (laughs)
SK: …with
tortoises with jewels affixed to their backs smoking opium and ya know watching
the light flicker off the shells and listening to them bump on the floor every
so often, although I’d to do that, nothing fancy…
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| Reed Mathis |
CO: Let me
ask you about your current band, Reed Mathis will be the bass player touring
with the band up through Portland?
SK: Yeah,
something like that.
CO: Bernie
Worrell, you’ve known him a long time… he was with Parliament Funkadelic?
SK: He was
with Funkadelic, he was a big deal in the Talking Heads, as well as on some of
the good Pretenders stuff too, so Bernie definitely gets around, he’s one of my
favorite players of all time, ya know, just great melodic sense, and great
humor, great attitude…
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| Wizard of Woo Bernie Worrell on keys |
CO: One
thing we have in common as far as favorite people ... I know you’re a big fan
of Johnny Winter, as I am.
SK: Oh yeah.
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| Johnny Winter in April 2012 Tupelo Londonderry |
CO: I saw him recently and his encore is always
Hwy. 61, the only song he plays slide..with the Gibson Firebird… Do you have
any plans to play slide?
SK: Oh yeah…
CO: and do
you have a certain guitar that you use for slide work?
SK: No, I’m
going to slide on as much as I possibly can, all the time on everything
(laughs).
SK: I’m kinda.. is that the only thing Johnny plays slide on his current show?
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| Steve Kimock Tour 2012 Port City Music Hall |
SK: I’m kinda.. is that the only thing Johnny plays slide on his current show?
He played so
much good bottleneck, back in the day acoustic, and electric. You’ve listened
to Progressive Blues experiment, haven’t you? I think that’s his very first
one, you should go on ITunes and look that one up. Progressive Blues
experiment, there is some awesome, just my favorite record of all time.
SK: He was a
…when you were talking about the Chi Chi club stuff earlier.. back in the day
there, I used to see Johnny Winter at the Stone too… and even then man, they
had a string on him, ya know so the crew could pull him back from the edge of
the stage if he got too far, he was so blind. I’m glad he’s up and moving
around , he’s one of my favorite players of all time.
CO: OK
Steve, thank you very much
SK: It was
fun.
CO:I’ll be
seeing you in Portland
(ed- May 12th Port City Music Hall)
SK: See you
in Portland !
CO: OK, take
care.
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Kimock Upcoming Spring and (NEW) Summer Shows
XVSK.net
XVSK Live Music Archive at Port City Music Hall on 2012-05-12
ATLAS of Plucked Instruments
Interview, Images © 2012 Conall O'Brien All Rights Reserved - obiephotography_at_hotmail.com
Interview, Images © 2012 Conall O'Brien All Rights Reserved - obiephotography_at_hotmail.com
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