KG Interview with MNN

Used with permission from Christine Holz, co-editor of Music News Network. If you'd like to contact them for a hard copy of the original, you can do so by e-mailing mnncholz@aol.com or check out the MNN web site by clicking here.

..From: Mayumi Shibata
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TOYING WITH KEVIN GILBERT
Music News Network Nov.1994/Jan.1995
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Kevin Gilbert is perhaps best known for his work with the progressive bands Giraffe and Toy Matinee. A few years ago, he received a call from Keith Emerson saying he would like to work with Kevin on a project.
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When we interviewed Kevin he was in the process of finishing work on a solo album to be called Thud. The album should be released next year. In the meantime, Kevin has been playing a few shows in Southern California.
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Other exciting releases to look forward to include the reissues of both Giraffe CDs.
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This interview was conducted prior to the fruition of Giraffe recreating The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway at Progfest '94.
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KG: I have a fear of recording devices. My therapist says that's why I have a career in music. [laughs]
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MNN: We saw T Lavitz last night. Do You know T Lavitz?
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KG: Actually, T Lavitz is one of the two people who have ever come forth and told me he liked my music. I've heard from other people that lots of people like the record, but no one has ever called me up and said, "I really liked you record. Let's work together." T Lavitz and Keith Emerson were the only ones.
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Keith called me up and said, "I really liked this. Can we work together?" I'm not somebody who would call people up. I'm not on that level. I couldn't really call up Trevor Rabin and say, "I think you're really groovy and I want to do a song with you."
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MNN: It could happen.
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KG: I feel if someone wants to work with me, they'll invite me in.
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MNN: Everybody has that same feeling.
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KG: I don't really consider myself a progressive artist. When I was a teenager my best friend was Tom and we used to go to the clubs and see punk bands. I was the odd man out because I didn't have my head shaved then and my buddies did. We were into Dead Kennedys and also the lighter punk bands like the B-52's and new wave bands. Then when I got home, when no one was looking, I'd pull out my early Genesis records and I
didn't tell anybody that I listened to this stuff because in my age group nobody listened to it.
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I got into it when I was like 10. I used to play piano in church. Most of the other people in the group were 10 years older than me. There was this guy, Mike Scully, a great guitar player, kind of a hipppy, and he heard me messing around and he was like, "Wow, You've got to hear this record." So the next week in church he brought me "Fox Trot." Up until that time in my house we had John Denver, Seals and Croft, who I actually still kind of like, classical music and Burt Bacharach. That's what was in the house. I was into the Monkees, I was a big Monkees fan and I had no idea that there was music that would fuse all of these things. I had all these influences; I'd play these Burt Bacharach songs,
then I'd play Monkees songs, and then I got this record.
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We were going on this big family vacation to Hawaii and I had this little portable cassette player and I had "Fox Trot" on this thing and I must have played that record and thousand times. From the first opening chord I was like, "Listen to this! This is my music! This it it!"
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Subsequently, I think progressive rock took a really really bad turn in the late 70's. In 1977 it lost its adventurous spirit and people started trying to cop contemporary styles instead of innovating they were following. A lot of the bands made horrible records.
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There was this renaissance of time in there, 1969-75 or '76 and that music to me was punk for it's time. When punk came along people would say, "Screw fashion, let's innovate. Break the walls down."
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So growing up in that, becoming of age musically in '78-'80 all of this music had this terrible stigma attached to it. So I wouldn't admit to my friends that I was listening to this stuff. I was listening to Gentle Giant and I also really enjoyed the punk movement. That's the music that I really live. So I'd feel like as an artist now in my work I integrate progressive rock influences and then there's this kind of thing that just isn't. There's probably some Seals and Croft in it and some Dead Kennedy's in it. You wouldn't find it on the Toy Matinee record, but on this record I just made. A lot more true to what I am
because it was just me doing it.
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Toy Matinee was a big assembly of people working on that record. I was the lyricist and the melodist and worked on music stuff, but because there's only two of us on the album cover it looks to people like it's the brain child of Patrick Leonard and Kevin Gilbert. It's not. It's six guys and Bill Bottrell, who produced it, was absolutely integral to why it sounds like that and the other guys: Brian MacLeod on drums and Tim Pierce on guitar and Guy Pratt on bass. Those guys contributed enormously to what the record is about. "Jenny Ledge", what people always remember about "Jenny Ledge" is the Elvis record and the bass line.
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MNN: We heard the story of "Jenny Ledge" on the Mark & Brian show. Is it a true story?
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KG: It's absolutely true. I was going to move in with her. She's doing really well. I talked to her just recently. She does Madonna now. In the impersonator show that her husband's in, she does Madonna. She's a Madonna impersonator. In the long run I look at that and go, "She's in the right place. She's doing what makes her happy." I certainly could not have made her happy. She was 26 and I was 19.
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MNN: With only two people on the cover of the Toy Matinee CD, it looks like it's a duo and not a band.
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KG: That's a common misconception. Toy Matinee, the band, existed for about six months in 1989. We were funded by Pat Leonard who wanted to have a band like Giraffe. He saw Giraffe at Universal Amphitheater and came backstage and said, "Man. I've always wanted to be in a band like this. Let's be in a band." Giraffe at the time, the guys up there didn't want to continue it really. They didn't want to move to L.A. and become professional because they all had other jobs. It was kind of falling apart anyway. So anyway I said, "all right. Let's do it."
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I called Brian [MacLeod] the drummer and Pat called Guy Pratt the bass player and we auditioned guitarists and decided on Tim. Then for about six months we hung out like a band and wrote songs together, worked things out, got drunk together and it was the Monkees. We hung out in a beach house and fell in love with the same girls.
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Then as the record got close to being done, Pat decided that he wanted to control it as an entity. He wanted Toy Matinee to be his company. He gave everybody a contract essentially saying, "You work for Pat Leonard, Inc." The three other guys, Brian and Tim and Guy said, "See ya," and split. The fellow who had produced it, who I think wanted
to be a member of the band as well, realized that that was never going to happen and went on to produce other records. So we were left with this really cool record and Pat and me and I didn't want to sign to be owned and controlled by Pat Leonard, Inc. They couldn't put the record out unless I signed the contract because I had written the songs with him
and Warner Bros. needed to have the singer on the contract. So we went through a really major legal spell trying to work out contracts that would allow Pat and me to be Toy Matinee. It would allow him the freedom to make other records with other artists and allow me the freedom to make solo records. Because Pat wasn't going to be around and I didn't want to wait around on my hands I want to make records.
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So the record came out with just the two of us on it. It came out in June 1990 and it sat on the shelf for about four months with nothing going on. There was no promotion because Pat had gone on to work with Roger Waters. Most of the midwest chains like Toy Matinee under religious music for some reason. [laughs] Someone screwed up. It landed
under religious music so no one could find it.
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I don't have copies. I have a 3/4 [tape] somewhere at my old manager's office. I'm trying to get it back. There exists a video bootleg of me that a guy up in San Jose has that there's a bunch of Giraffe and a bunch of Toy Matinee stuff.
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The record came out for like four months, did nothing. I went to Warner Bros. and said, "Look. This is my career sitting here on the shelf. It's not moving anywhere. It this record doesn't well anything I'm going to look like a pariah man in L.A. because I made a record with Pat Leonard for a lot of money because with all these people working on it, it cost a lot of money." So I'm going to walk out of Warner Bros., no deal, one record behind me which nobody bought and this huge dept. which is not good. That's not how I work. Giraffe was the most cost effective band there ever was. We made those two records, both of them, for about $10,000. Both of them made money.
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MNN: There's only 500 of each?
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KG: The second one has 1,000.
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MNN: How did the Toy Matinee tour happen? How did Marc Bonilla become a part of the band?
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KG: Pat was in England, I was here and I convinced the promotion department to give Toy Matinee one more push and that I would go out and shake hands and play an acoustic guitar version of the record, which was not easy let me tell you. Whatever was necessary. So I started doing this and people started responding. Promotion directors that I would talk to said, "Yeah I really like this record but we had been reluctant to play it because we thought it was just on of those L.A. projects." Like some producer gets a bunch of dudes together. "We didn't want to play it because it doesn't really fit our format as an L.A. project. But if it's a band, I'll play it because we think it's a great record."
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So I started telling this story, "Yeah, it was a band. We made it as a band." There's certainly more demands as the single, "Last Plane Out" sort of had to fill pockets of popularity there's certainly more demand for it.
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Marc Bonilla, who I had met doing work with Keith Emerson, we used to jam on Monkees tunes together just for fun. Two guitars, and we sounded good together vocally. So I said, "Why don't you come with me on these promotional radio tours and it'll make it easier to play 'Last Plane Out' with two guitars instead of one guy. It just makes it a lot easier." It just sort of built up. We got this guy, Spencer Campbell, to play bass with us at one point and Toss [Panos] the drummer joined up and suddenly there was a demand for us to play in clubs. We didn't have a keyboardist and I hunted all over the place for a keyboardist for a long time and this girl at my publishers had sent me tapes of Sheryl Crow. I had know her from song writing. She was the only person who could play "King of Misery", the keyboard part, so I gave her the gig and we went out. She's actually pretty famous. "Leaving Las Vegas" and "All I Wanna Do", both of which I co-wrote.
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What I do sort of crosses into a lot of other categories. I have this contingent of people who think of me as a progressive artist and then a whole continent of people who have no idea that I do that. It's sort of like schizophrenic.
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MNN: What you do, you do well. You're also versatile.
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KG: I just like music. And I'm really into lyrics. So that's how Toy Matinee went on tour. That's why Marc Bonilla got involved. We did a lot of promo in L.A. and on the radio with Mark and Brian. They seem to think of me and Marc Bonilla as Toy Matinee because we were always the ones going on and we were a good schmooze team. We bounced stuff off each other and he has the same sense of humor that I have.
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MNN: Back to Giraffe. How did you come up with the name?
KG: The real story behind the name is really dumb. Way way back in the beginning of time I became really good friends with, Robert Farrass. I worked on records for him and he'd help me out. This was when I lived up north and had a studio in Sunnyvale called TRS. It was known as the tree house. I used to work on bands during the day and make eight dollars an hour and record local bands.
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At night when everyone went home I did this Todd Rundgren thing and played everything which is what I've always wanted to do even as a kid is record music. I mean the whole idea of overdubbing parts was, "Wow!"
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Giraffe started out as a production demo for me. I'd recorded all these songs over the course of four to five years from the time I was 15 until I was 19. I made a rule for myself when I was 15 and I got a job at a studio I said once a year I'm going to finish 10 songs, 45 minutes of music, and call it a record and put it on cassette or do whatever I can do to make it so that I would finish it. Otherwise I'm one of those personality types where I'll keep working on something and changing it and fixing it and redoing this and that and I'll do it forever unless I set myself a deadline and a goal. So once a year at Christmas I'd finish a record, give it to my family as a Christmas present, and put it away and go on to the next thing in January.
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So in 1988 the record that I had just finished or 1987 was this really weird thing with all these diverse elements and two of the songs on it were things I had written with Robert, "This One Night" and "The World Just Gets Smaller". There were songs I had written with Robert when we were trying to put a band together, but the band thing didn't work out. As long as they were there, they were part of this other thing that I was doing.
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We had a joke when we were trying to start the band what our name was going to be. We were goofing around with all these bands who use their last names and make words out them like HSAS. We were making fun of that whole concept. His initials are RAF and for his solo record that I was working on at the time he was going as RAF. So as a joke I wrote on the master tapes GIRAF and I said, "Hey man. We got a name now!" We used it as a joke for about a year. I just kept seeing this GIRAF written on the side of the tape box every time I'd get it out to work on it. It just grew on me.
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If you don't know how we got it, the actual animal giraffe is a cool thing. It had a lot to do with what I thought the music was about, too. This is a very strange record but the longer you listen to it, it becomes more beautiful. It makes sense in it's own way.
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A giraffe it goofy looking, but it's goofy looking for a reason. They have to be that tall to get to the trees. If you've ever seen a giraffe run, there's hardly anything else that looks as graceful as a giraffe running. It looks like it's in slow motion even when it's not. So I added the extra F and the extra E at the end and made this production demo.
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This was in 1988 when no one had ever made an independent CD before. I got a bug up my butt that I wanted to hear my songs on CD. So I was like, "Damnit! I want my record to come out on CD!" I had a friend in Silicon Valley who worked on computer and CD ROMS and things and I called him up and said, "You make CD ROMS from computer chips. Is the information that goes on a CD ROM any different from what goes on an
audio CD?" He said, "It's still just one's and zero's." So I said, "If I give you a tape full of one's and zero's that just happens to be audio, you could print a CD ROM for me that I could play on my stereo?" And he said, "Yeah. Absolutely."
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I called up a couple mastering places and figured out how I was suppose to do that and in January 1988 I sent him this tape and said, "I want 500 copies." I didn't know it at the time, but it was actually the first independent CD in the world. BAM Magazine, about a year later, did a story on "Now You Can Make A CD" for aspiring bands. They used the
Giraffe record as an example. So that's how that came about.
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It wasn't suppose to be a band really, it was suppose to be a production demo so that I could come down to L.A. and meet record companies and get gigs. It was really expensive business card. I'd give this thing out and say, "Hey, this is my band. I recorded this and did everything on this."
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It coincidentally started to sell, Greg Stone started to play it in San Jose and people started to say, "When can we see this band Giraffe live?" It was always like, "Okay. It's a band." And I got a lot of the guys that had hung around the studio together and we played the stuff on the record. Actually Scotty [Smith] had played some stuff on the record.
We just started playing live and it worked.
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MNN: The first Giraffe record is very popular.
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KG: I'm genuinely surprised by how many people remember that because it's so tiny. There's only 500 copies of that record in the world and I get more people who own or have heard a copy of that one than the second one, and there's twice as many of the second one. It's also the one I like better actually.
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So we played around for about a year and we played at Universal in this Yamaha battle of the bands competition and that's where I met Pat. We were half way through recording the second record. I used a lot more of the band on the second record which is why if you ever get a copy of it there's a picture of the band on the inside and I have a really stupid haircut. [laughs] I was the short guy with glasses.
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It's interesting the evolution of how I look. When we shot the album cover I did look something like Marc Bonilla and by the time we were playing out I didn't look like that but Marc did so that's another reason people get confused. My hair really did look like that. We were sitting outside and the wind was blowing up behind us and my hair went out and I look like I had this afro. When we got reviewed there were more people who mentioned this archetypical rock singer thing. I didn't really look like that. It's just this one photo. Plus the stylist, in L.A. and Hollywood you have to have a stylist on your photo shoot, for the last couple pictures of the day she tells me to take my shirt off. "Oh, you have a great chest, take your shirt off." I'm like, "This is so cheesy." I'm really not that kind of guy, but all right for these couple of photos. The photo that ends up on the record, is of course, big hair and no shirt and this silly bandanna tied around my head. I'm like, "What an asshole." I mean, if I saw that cover I'd go, "This guy is a geek."
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On the new record cover I'm naked so there won't be any stupid fashion mistakes. [laughs]
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MNN: How did you come up with the band name for Toy Matinee?
KG: I was looking for a metaphor for what happens when you give up dreams of greatness. Every kid has this dream of being great in some capacity whether it's I want to be the President or I want to be a cowboy. It's never I want to be an accountant, which there's nothing wrong with being an accountant. But there's a sort of an idealist state
of wanting to be great. There's a certain point in life where a lot of people just give it up. They'll say, "I think I'll do this thing that's easy because it's safe and comfortable and doesn't require much thought and everyone else is doing it and it'll get by." I was looking for this metaphor for that for a lyric I was working on. Not that it's a particularly good metaphor but I envisioned it as like I know lots and lots of people that want to write a book but instead of writing their book they'll go to the movies. It's like instead of sitting down tonight and working on the outline for my book, let's go see "Last Action Hero.".
The entertainment that's out there, to me, seems to get shallower and shallower and more the lowest common denominator.
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I wanted to portray this thing that you go and do instead of the thing that you ought to do as being kind of silly and cheap and a Toy Matinee was it for me. You were at a puppet show in the afternoon for no money and you could sit down and be mindlessly entertained and all the puppets danced. It's like going insane.
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I just thought for me that was the metaphor of what I don't want to do. I don't want to give up my dream of what ideally I want my work to be and I want the world to view me as. I don't want to sucked into blowing off and hanging out and watching the puppets dance. Turn on MTV, "Wow Madonna." "Wow rap." "Wow Beavis and Butthead." Be entertained by that instead of using my mind to create something.
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It also explains why Pat has a new band called Third Matinee. It's him and Richard Page. Richard Page is essentially doing my job. That's why it's not called Toy Matinee. Nobody was defined contractually as owning the name Toy Matinee. Had we needed to go to court over it, it was not registered. So that's why Pat's band is not called Toy Matinee.
Because he didn't want it to end in a court battle, which it would have. Which is also why I'm not using it. I could probably get away with calling it Toy Matinee but it wouldn't be honest. There was a band that was Toy Matinee that was represented by that record. What I don't like about bands is when they continue to make records under the name even after it's not that thing anymore. I didn't want to be lying to the public. Here's Toy Matinee and have all the Toy Matinee fans run out and say, "Oh, the new Toy Matinee record," when it isn't. It's not a Toy Matinee record. The thing I just made is a solo record. It'll come out under my name.
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MNN: What will the name of your record be?
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KG: We have these things we're going to paste on the artwork when it goes to press and I haven't decided. One title is "Radio Hostile," which is a joke between me and some of my friends, about the fact that record companies always want you to write a "radio-friendly" single. So this record is radio hostile.
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The other title that I'm playing with is called "Thud," which is a lot of things. It's what the record is, the sound of the other shoe dropping. Thud is the sound that my studio makes at the moment because of all the old weird gear I have in it. I like the word.
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MNN: What are you playing on the record?
KG: I do everything except there's one song called "Joy Town" which is a product of the Tuesday Music Club. The Tuesday Music Club is a collaborative of artists me, Bill Bottrell, Brian MacLeod, David Bearwald, and Dave Schwartz. We get together on Tuesday nights, drink, talk about politics, and make up music. We just write something there on the spot. "Let's make a song right now." A lot of times we'll play instruments we're not good at, so it's a strange funk thing.
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Tuesday Music Club, as you may know, is the name of Sheryl Crow's record because her whole record was written that way. We'd all get together at night, throw musical ideas in, write lyrics and because Bill was working in her record he'd have her come in and sing what we'd written like the next day. So that's the stuff that ended up being her record.
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MNN: What was your involvement with David Bearwald's album "Bedtime Stories"?
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KG: I played on it. I didn't really write anything on it, I just played piano on it. It's a great record.
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MNN: How many instruments do you play? Or should we ask, what don't you play?
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KG: I don't play violin or any violin-like instrument. I don't play mouth instruments that require skill like trumpet, flute, clarinet, or sax. I can play skill-less instruments like recorder and harmonica. Stuff like that.
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I'm principally pianist. I started on piano when I was four, although on my new record there's very little piano, it's mostly guitar. I've been playing acoustic guitar since I was probably six and I play electric guitar like an acoustic guitar. As any electric guitarist will
tell you, I play too hard and I play weird chords.
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MNN: Did you have any formal musical instruction?
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KG: Formally I played piano for 12 years through high school. I was actually trained to be a concert pianist but I rebelled. I made my teacher very very unhappy. She thought I was potentially good and that I was ruining it. "Why do you want to play stuff you write instead of stuff by the great masters?" I said, "Well why can't I be a great master?" [laughs]
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MNN: Any other formal instruction?
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KG: I never had any formal guitar or vocal training. There is no such thing, there's life and making a lot of mistakes and there's knowing what you like and what you are, and that's where I think a lot of songwriters get screwed up. I like a lot of things but they're not me. I
like punk music, but if I was to put a band together and write punk songs, it wouldn't be me. Just from having played extemporaneously, for lack of a better word, since I was four just sitting at an instrument, you find things that are you. Things that you emotionally connect with and I try to be true to that.
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It gets confusing because if you hear something you like and you want to do something like that. There's a song by Beck and I could do something just like that because I know how and I know the studio so well. Doing that would probably make me really popular around town. I could probably get a deal a lot faster. I could get a lot of money behind me a lot faster, but it wouldn't be honest. I would feel hollow about it. People would be going, "Hey man, that song you wrote that sounds like that Beck song, It's great," and I'd go, "Eh, it's not really what I do. It's not really me." A lot of what I think has kept me obscure is my resistance to doing things that would make a record company happy. I'm just doing things that make me happy. Hopefully my ideas connect with other people.
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The fact that Giraffe at 500 copies, I still get people at least twice a week saying, "I really love the Giraffe record." That feels good to me because I'd rather have two people a week tell me they love the Giraffe record than 10,000 people a day tell me they like that song that I wrote that doesn't feel like me.
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MNN: Would a commercial song be at least financially rewarding?
KG: I'm doing all right. I'm really, really lucky. I'm not really lucky in anything else, I'm terribly unlucky in love and career but I get very lucky with money. I get jobs that just happen to come in when I need them and they just happen to be for a good amount of money. That's how I was able to build the studio.
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MNN: Were you the singer in Giraffe?
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KG: Yes. All of it was me. My voice changed, how I use my voice and how I sing changed drastically from the second Giraffe record to Toy Matinee. On a lot of the Giraffe records I'm still singing like a Keyboardist, musicians will know what I'm talking about, and there's a thing that keyboardists do when they sing. Piano and keyboard instruments have notes that are here, here, here, and here and they are very distinct separate notes. You think of music in terms of the actual notes. If you listen to the Giraffe records and how I'm singing is very precise and very keyboardist-like. It sort of lacks emotion in a lot of places for me, from my perception of it. It doesn't communicate the ideas emotionally because it sounds so technical. It's almost like how drum machines don't sound as emotional as a live drummer because drum machines have nothing in between 1, 2, 3, and 4 whereas drummers have these sort of feel things that move stuff around. When I started Toy
Matinee I wanted to learn, first of all, to sing in a register that was closer to my talking voice because Giraffe was very high pitched. I spent a lot of time craning my neck to reach those high notes cracking and doing all kinds of crap because I thought you had to have a high voice to be a singer. It was as if I was trying to be Jon Anderson or
something. I didn't manage my voice.
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On a couple of Giraffe songs I had to tweak the tape deck up a half step to get the notes because I had written it and recorded it too high for me to sing.
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"The World Just Gets Smaller" is that way, very tweaked. It's way up there and a couple other songs, like "Everything We Are". I wanted to do something where I could communicate the ideas in the lyrics more like talking and the singing would be more natural. It'd be more honest. I wouldn't be trying to impress people with notes, I'd be trying to impress people with character. That's why the voice sounds different. I have taken it on the new record even further into that. The voice is really dry and right up front in the mix. There's not a lyric anywhere on the record that you can't get from just listening to the record.
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The one your readers will like is called "Shadow Self". It's an essay on the dark side of human nature. Does that sound pretentious? It's like seven minutes long and I went nuts production-wise. I just wanted train wrecks of styles, so like every eight bars it changes styles dramatically, instrumentation dramatically. There's acoustic guitar and then this hip-hoppy bass part and a male choir of vikings singing at the same time. Then there's out of context things where a really sweet sounding flute is against these very punk drums because I like the clash of style. That's my favorite track in an adventurous sort of way. There are also some very personal songs on there, one called "Song for a Dead
Friend" that I wrote about a really good friend of mine who killed himself a couple of years ago. There's not production on it, it's just piano and vocal. It's pretty long and I haven't done that before either.
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MNN: What production and other work did you do for Madonna?
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KG: I wrote and produced one song on "Breathless", the least memorable of Madonna's records. There were two dance songs on that record. One was "Vogue" which was Chef Petitbon and the other was this weird assemblance of sound effects and stuff from the movie "Dick Tracy" called "Now I'm Following You" and that's what I wrote and produced.
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MNN: You're so lucky, you got to hang out with her. [laughter]
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KG: I got to so that's a privilege. If you know Madonna, it's a bit like hanging out with Satan! Actually I had fun with Madonna. She's very bitchy, very mean spirited, very inefficient, and she's totally committed to being those things. She has a good sense of humor about the fact that she is that way. It was tense, but fun to work with her. She'd
poke her head in the room every 25 minutes and go, "Are you done yet? What's taking so long?"
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MNN: When will your solo record be out?
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KG: As soon as my hair is long enough to take a decent photo [laughs because his hair was very short during this interview] ! It should be out late May or early June '94. [it should now be release early '95.]
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MNN: What do you want to do career-wise that you haven't done yet?
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KG: Oddly enough I want to make films. I have all these outlines of things I want to do, but I haven't had the opportunity to dive into it because I've been busy trying to get a career going as an artist/songwriter.
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MNN: Who would you like to work with?
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KG: I'd love to pull something good out of Peter Gabriel again. I think he has it in him. I think he started to fall back on things that work. It's like "Family Snapshot" is one of the greatest lyrics ever written and there isn't a single thing on the new record that I think is a great lyric. It's all sort of formula, Gabriel, biblical river crossing lyrics. It's become formulae for him. I think that he's a great mind and a great innovator and if there's a new sound and a new direction for intelligent music, it would probably come from him. But it won't come from him, I mean musically. When he made the third record, it was like
the hallelujah chorus for me because at last someone had shown the way to integrate good songwriting, good lyrics, and a punk attitude which is what I had always been trying to do and never really had a grasp on. When he made "Security," the fourth record, he took it a step further in integrating international music into that. I would love to work with
him.
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Jane Siberry. I don't like her now. She made four records as an independent artist in Canada, the last two of which were picked up by Warner Bros. There's a little Kate Bush in what she does, there's a little but not to the extent of Tori Amos. You should find her records "Speckless Sky" and "No Borders Here". They're both really, really great
records, and you'll see the potential for this person to grow into someone as creative and expressive as Peter Gabriel. "The Walking" is still a great record, too, which is the fourth record. Somehow she got sidetracked. She just put one out on Warner Bros. called "When I Was A Boy" that I think is really disappointing.
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MNN: What other projects are you working on?
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KG: I can give you guys an exclusive. I'm half way through writing a rock opera, that is God forbid a rock opera, that deals with a lot of the same things I've dealt with before like idealism being corrupted for money or fame or security. I want to see this thing done on a laser disc format and I'm trying to get the funding together and the people
together to do it. It's about half way recorded.
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I don't have much of a desire to be an actor, although I think that I should play Rael in the film version of "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" because I can sing it note for note. I used to rehearse that when I was a kid. This is the goofy thing that kids do when they're alone. I'd close the door, I'd put on my leather coat, and I would perform "The Lamb" from start to finish. I probably performed it a hundred times. Actually, I have a pipe dream in the back of my head where if I ever get to the point where I have enough money and enough time, I want to put a band together and stage it again. I think that's a great lost piece of work. For some reason, it just didn't stay. People have forgotten it at least in the genre of rock music that is also story, I'd put it right up there with "Tommy" and "Quadrophenia".
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MNN: How much unreleased material do you have?
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KG: There are five records actually that have not been released and there's good reason why they haven't been released. The song "Image Maker" is something that have grown with me since I was 15. "Shadow Self" on the new record, the one I was telling you about, is something I wrote when I was 15 that I yanked around into a new place. I do that a lot. I'll grab something from the bone yard and make it work.
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MNN: On the re-release of the Giraffe record, there is 20 minutes of un-released material. What is it?
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KG: It's not new music, it's old music that has not been released before. It's Giraffe material, some of which has been played on StoneTrek before, none of which has been available. Although, hardly any of this stuff is available. You can't go to the store and buy it. It's stuff that I left off "The Power of Suggestion" because I didn't think it was produced well enough. I didn't think the sonics were up to snuff and when I made that CD it was made to be a production demo so there was no reason to.
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MNN: Why release it now?
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KG: Because it's fun. Because they're good songs, very interesting songs. I mean, it was at the time. I was doing it for reasons of fidelity but because there's interest now, I'm going to re-release it. There's a song we used to play in the set that people ask me about, it's called "The Tired Old Man", but people call it "The Public Song", it was sort of the centerpiece to the Giraffe set but wasn't on the record, that will be in there. There was one recorded live at Universal Amphitheater, but we haven't decided which. We have over 20 minutes worth of junk that we could put on there but we only have room on there for 20 minutes.
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MNN: Will you tour with the release of your solo record?
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KG: Yes, but I have to find a band now. The story of my life, make a record, find a band. I think I'm going up to Seattle this time to look.
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MNN: Will your solo record have a limited release like the Giraffe records?
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KG: Oh no. This is fully, nationally distributed. It will have a wider release than Toy Matinee did.
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MNN: How many copies of the Giraffe CD will be released?
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KG: There will be 500 copies of the Giraffe record, "Power of Suggestion", because we can't do it any other way. We're using the original artwork and you won't be able to tell from the outside whether it's an old one or a new one. You'll have to actually play it. So what I expect to have happen is some of the old ones will get dumped in the used bins when people buy the new one and then it's good luck. I always like stuff like that on vinyl where there's a hidden song. "The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief" record, that is the coolest thing. They have on side two a double groove. It goes all the way through the record. So if you put the needle down it'll play something and when you
put the needle down again, it might play that again or it might play the other thing. It is so bizarre. I owned that record for three months before I realized that side two was different. I'd go back to try and find something, I'd be like, "Where did it go? Wasn't that here?"
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So the Giraffe record, "The Power of Suggestion", there will be 500 copies available from Mike Kelley at Renaissance Records. The new record, probably called "Thud", which is under Kevin Gilbert, which will be right next to Giraffe in the stores. See, Giraffe, G-I-R, Gilbert, G-I-L. That will be widely and internationally available, and there should be plenty of copies for all. Probably way more than are necessary.
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MNN: What will be the first single off your new record? Will you be doing any videos?
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KG: We're going to do a video for "Joy Town", which is probably the first single. It's very alternative. It doesn't have much at all to do with things progressive. It's just a really good lyric though I don't know how your readership will respond. There are things on this record
that I think they will love and there will be things on this record that they will be fast forwarding over forever. Sort of like an Emerson, Lake and Palmer record.
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MNN: Do you consider yourself a progressive artist?
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KG: What I'm trying to do is, and I'm actually consciously trying to do this, is de-stigmatize progressive music by integrating it with things that I do that are not progressive and that are largely considered to be a good idea in 1994. Where as progressive music is not generally considered to be a very good idea. By throwing in a song like "Shadow Self" in with some of these other songs that are going to go straight to
KROQ and the credibility that working on Sheryl Crow's record gives what I do, it introduces a whole contingent of people to the fact that music can be more than just fashion or more than just anger. That's all.
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Just from working in the industry, there's a big stigma about that if you do a song that's eight minutes long and you're not a metal band, that they largely consider that to be a bad idea and not worthy of being invested in. Because Dream Theater slides by as a metal band, they get promoted and that's considered a good idea. But any number of bands that have made pretty cool records that aren't that hard edged, they'll get hurt.

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