KEXP Q&A: Richard Lloyd and Jessica Dobson

As a founding member of seminal post-punk group Television, Richard Lloyd continues to influence generations of future guitarists, including Seattle's own Jessica Dobson of Deep Sea Diver. On the eve of Lloyd's Wednesday night show at the Columbia City Theatre, we gathered the two guitar gods for a chat. What followed was an intimate, uncensored conversation about everything from Lloyd's childhood beginnings to songwriting and more.

Interview by Jessica Dobson
Transcription by Mami Matsumura

Jessica: I’m a big fan and I’m very excited to talk with you. I did quite bit a reading over the past few weeks, and watching interviews with you. One of things I found really interesting is that you used to bring your guitar to school instead of school books. I was wondering, would you say it was more rebellion, or infatuation with music, or a bit of both?

Richard: It was really a little bit a both. I mean, first of all, by then I figured out that if a teacher needed you to have school books, they're inadequate. Especially if they gave you a textbook they hadn't written. Number two: I love taking tests. So, if you have me for 45 minutes, you need to be able to convey the essence of what I need to pass the damn test. And, thirdly of all, it was a real strong conviction that the guitar was my way, so I'm going to follow it. The physics teacher came up to me and said, "Where's your books?" I said, "In the case." I took the case, put it on the table, opened the case, there's a guitar. He said, "I don't see any books in there." I said, "That's the only book I'm studying. You've got me for 45 minutes, and you just wasted three of them."

So, you were strong-willed from the beginning. When did you actually start playing the guitar?

I wanted to play the guitar the first time I ever saw one. I can't remember when that was. I had a hankering to play guitar, but nobody had one. I had a little baby toy piano I used to play and bang on. But nobody in my family knew how to play the piano, so I ended up banging it to death. At the same time, I was sneaking my stepfather's ukulele out, and playing it as if it were a guitar.

One day, I had a sleepover at my cousin's house. They were going to form a rockabilly band, and we passed the guitar around. I was a rank beginner, and they showed me three chords, and I started learning to play these three chords. Eventually, they just gave me the guitar, it was just me. They were like, "We're going to bed. You gotta stop playing." So, I took the guitar in the bathroom, playing these three chords, and the next thing you know, there's a knock on the door. It's one of the cousins saying, "I have to use the bathroom, it's the morning. What the hell have you been doing?" I said, "Playing the three chords you taught me." They said, "You've been doing that all night?" I said, "You mean it's the morning?"

But I didn't own a guitar, so that was that. I continued to steal my ukulele, and studied drums with a private teacher who was very good. Big band, jazz drums, weird time signatures, and all kinds of crap like that.

That's interesting 'cause it leads into my next question. Your guitar playing is very unique, and hard to pinpoint in terms of influence. I hear you playing out-of-meter, out-of-time-signature almost, in the runs that you do. It's very much your own style. Did learning jazz drums have anything to do with that?

Maybe, I don't know. Probably listening to Ravi Shankar's The Sounds of India was more important. He actually explains the ragas on the record. He says, "This record is this key, and the ascending scale is..." [Richard starts singing.] "And a descending scale of..." [Richard sings again.] "And a rhythmic structure of ten beats that goes like this...One, two. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One." The time signatures were just like the ones I'd been learning in jazz. Dozen eighth, eleven fourths, Dave Brubeck kind-of stuff. He also taught me how to develop a drum solo. I know when a drummer is good or not. I write my own drum parts to songs often.

Do you actually play them, too?

No, I hired somebody who can play. I can't play it rock steady for six minutes, but I've written everything out. Not on paper, but I'll get up, sit on the drum stool, and demonstrate.

I wrote a few drum parts for the last record and it was really pleasing. I wanted to play them myself on the recording. I think everybody wants to be a drummer, but it sounds like you definitely have more of the chops to do so, or at least to communicate it.

Guitar is actually technically a percussive instrument. You're hitting the strings, you're not bowing them. If you had to ask me what my style in lead improvisational is, it's a combination of different scales that fit — pentatonic and major, that fit — as well as changes in speeds and structure, especially structure. I play very shard-like, like you break a mirror and it's full of shards. I'll make lightening-quick changes in direction, that some people have taken to be Coltrane-ish. But really, if you examined them, slowed them down, they're all melodic. It's all about the melody.

That's fascinating. Thank you for sharing that. You put it better than I could have proposed to you. [ Laughs ] What’s one of the seminal moments in your life that made an impression on your music from the beginning that you still think exists in your songwriting now?

Having that 28-key piano, musically. I invented my own two-note and three-note passages, then I went to my parents and said, "I can play one note, but two notes always sound good together. But three notes sometimes is good and sometimes is not so good. Can anybody show me how to make three notes sound good?" And they said, "No, Richard, we don't know how to play piano." Of course, we were very poor, so there was no possibility of getting piano lessons. I asked, but no.

I like the guitar better than the keyboard, because you get to bend strings. On a guitar, it's impossible to tune the notes properly, so you always have what's called "beating" which produces feedback. Actually learning that dissonance is much easier on a guitar to play a tritone, or the devil's interval. "Purple Haze" starts with the devil's interval, which is very, very interesting to me, because the devil's interval is the reason why music moves. There's no other reason why it should move because the 1, 4, and the 5 are all in the same key. Anyways, now we're getting technical...

We're getting into theory. There will be a small amount of people understanding what the devil's chord is.

Well, if it weren't for the devil, the universe wouldn't exist. If God is perfect, perfect sucks, because perfect is finished. Done. That's why Navajos will always make a mistake in their rug making. They'll never finish a complete, perfect rug, because then life as we know it would be over. It's sort-of that theme. The Devil is the one that keeps things interesting, otherwise you're having a party and only inviting dull people that know their place. [ Laughs ] With the devil's interval, you've got somebody who's so startlingly different that things have to move around.

I think it was Nick Cave who said that when he's writing lyrics, he'll have this song, and it's a complete thought, and then he pictures a clown in the room... I'm butchering what he said, but he always tries to throw in that imperfection, or something that's jarring —

Oh, I don't have to try. If I have a song, and I have, let's say, a title, and a couple of lines, I will play the song and sing them, and for the rest of the song I will sing literal gibberish, 'til it's a foreign language, and translate it. I come up with very interesting things that way. I'm a very limited songwriter in some critics' viewpoint. I'm not writing about world-shaking events. I sing gibberish, and then the gibberish slowly settles down into actual words that are better than anything I could actually do.

I've tried that approach a couple of times. I've heard that David Byrne of the Talking Heads — I don't know how long he's been doing this, but, he was interviewed and talking about that, where he sings gibberish until those words start having meaning. And I think that's such a helpful tool to have.

There's no set pattern to it. There's certainly no Eno "cut-the-words-up-throw-them-in-the-air" and the way they come down, you glue them back together. I think David Byrne learned that from Eno, but I don't follow that method. [Eno] came in and tried to produce a demo for [Television], and he was like, "Why don't we put the guitar on the ceiling? We'll throw them up in the air, and the way they come down is the way you'll sing them." And everybody was like, No. You don't understand, Brian. We want to sound like ourselves. We don't want to sound like a construct.

I think that's one of the most fascinating parts of the making of Marquee Moon is that you did that with Eno first.

We didn't let him do anything. We rejected all his ideas. All we wanted to do was practice and make recordings the way we sounded.

Unfortunately, [bassist] Richard Hell was still in the band. When you record, you're playing your part, you're listening to other people's parts, but the whole thing is so exciting, you don't pay attention to the fact that, placed under a microscope, which is the studio, all of the sudden, you realize the bass stinks. It's late, it's always late. Then you try to move it forward through mechanical means, and that doesn't work, and then eventually you say, "Look, the guy's gotta go." Cause otherwise we're a circus act, instead of a musical act. So, eventually Richard Hell left, and Fred Smith replaced him. I was very upset, because I was very attached to the first Television line-up. Tom said, "Please, just give him ten minutes. He'll come up, and we'll have a rehearsal. We'll just jam. We won't try to play a song." And within like two minutes, I knew, this was the guy, because [drummer] Billy Ficca is all over the place. And Tom and I were trying to find something, trying to dig deep to find gold. So you need something that's stable to hold the whole thing together. That's what happened with Fred Smith. And that's immediately what helped me let go of Richard Hell, conceptually, in Television.

Bass players are often underestimated in the rock world. And you're right about the studio being like being under a microscope. I learned that very early. Someone actually told me to go home and practice. I was 18, maybe the first or second time in the studio. I was playing this guitar part, and they wanted me to play behind the beat, but I was kind-of rushing it. I was told to go home and practice to a metronome. It was one of the most embarrassing things, because no one had ever challenged me in that way before. That taught me so much going forward. And influenced all the instruments I played. It's a scary thing to go into the studio, especially if it's your first time.

I remember being in a recording session once, where I contributed a guitar rhythm part, and they stripped everything else off, the bass and drums, and replaced it to my clock, because I had a better internal clock. It's not a proud thing, it's a factual thing. You can count on me. I think being a drummer did that. Sometimes I used to fight with Billy. By some 64th note, he's off. He recovers, but he swears he's right. I love Billy and I love his drumming, but that's his one flaw. He'll take chances on the drums that he can't quite complete. Not usually in recordings, but live. It drives me crazy. Tom and I would shrug our shoulders and keep going 'til he caught the wind.

So much has been chronicled about that time period, and it's lasting impression. You're someone who played such a significant role in establishing that scene. Have you ever found yourself longing to experience something similar to that?

I made a wish when I was 15 or so, and it was that I would become a world-renowned lead guitar player, and that I would have a actual, noticeable impact on the history of rock and roll. And both of those things happened. I mean, of course, in congress with others, but nonetheless, it happened exactly as I wished for. So, having my wish come true, what good would it do me to wish it again? It already came true. I used to say, If I died yesterday, it wouldn't make any difference to me. What I set out to accomplish, I've accomplished.

Now I've turned to a new age, and I have new aims and new accomplishments to accomplish, and that's all fine and good. And I'll only be here 'til they need me somewhere else. I'm not here on my own accord, you know. Nobody is. Everybody's on this planet at a different level. Not everyone is going to be — I'll say, "doomed" — to have their destiny to be playing rock and roll. Not only that, but to have a historical imprint on rock and roll. How many get to say that? Not many. I'm in a very, very tight little club. And that's that.

There's a picture of us in 2004 where Marquee Moon got voted by a magazine in England as the number one debut album of all time. And there's a picture of the band. I'm directly standing in front of Jimmy Page and James Brown, who are sitting down. Next to me is Tom Verlaine, and standing behind us on a table is the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Standing to my left is Sting, Roger Daltrey, Roger McGuinn, and then Lemmy, and [Mick Jones] from The Clash. Seated are [Hank] Marvin, Jimmy Page, James Brown, Arthur Lee, and Marianne Faithful. That's rock royalty.

What are you up to these days?

I've been doing a lot of painting. I have a number of new songs. Unfortunately, after being in the same place for twelve years, I lost my studio space, so all my recording gear is up here in my apartment, but not hooked up. I need to hook up enough equipment to make an acoustic record, but with a little bit of rock guitar. I haven't recorded anything, but I've been writing. And coming to the Northwest where I haven't played in a very long time. I'll be doing stuff from my entire catalog. When we get back to New York, there will be brand new songs no one has ever heard.

Richard Lloyd plays Wednesday, September 9th at the Columbia City Theatre, with Gibraltar. Deep Sea Diver play Thursday, November 5th at Neumos, with Sisters and Bleachbear.