How did Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead come together? Did you have The Minus 5 in mind from the very beginning to work with you on the album?
Yes, they were…Scott (McCaughey) and I have done a lot of recording over the years (McCaughey first worked with Stace on 1998’s Awake). How we actually came to do it is just completely, typically coincidental. A really nice guy called Jim Brunberg owns a gig and attached recording studio in Portland called Mississippi Studios. He said to me, “Hey, if you’d ever like to record here, I’d like to give you some free time.” Portland just suddenly seemed like the ideal place to do the album. I thought I was going to make a much more rough and ready sounding album; just an album that we went in and did in seven days and mixed it. Well, in fact, what happened to the great fortune of the album, my friend, David Seitz, who’s a New York engineer and producer, said, “If you’re going out to do that, I’ll come and engineer it.” When that was thrown into the equation—he’s really good at his job, and he takes his work very seriously—then the album was able to turn into something really great. Then I got my old friend, Rob Seidenberg from Mammoth Records, to come out and produce the backing tracks.
I know (The Minus 5) they’re looked upon with the affection in which the Fellows are held, they’re kind of looked upon as kind of a great rocking, raw, raucous, brilliant band…like a seat-of-the-pants band. But what this shows is they’re an amazingly ego-less set of guys to have in studio who can be behind me or behind (Robyn) Hitchcock or could be behind any number of people, and they wouldn’t sound like anything else but that person’s music.
The versatility is terrific. (Bill) Rieflin is a great drummer; we all know that and have known that for years. Scott was doing most of the bass playing, which surprised me, actually. I assumed Peter would play the bass because that’s the Minus 5 lineup, but he was very happy weaving his little parts in and out of the songs. He’s pretty heavy on the album. All the rhythm guitars are him (Peter), and Kurt (Bloch) is doing more of the crazier stuff. People always say that Ringo Starr never made a mistake on any one take of the Beatles, which isn’t true. But Peter really never does. David (Seitz), who has worked with a lot of people, thought Peter was amazing, like a machine; once he settles on a part he just never gets it wrong.
Did a majority of the songs stay in their original forms? Or did they evolve once the Minus 5 joined the process?
It’s pretty much up to the musicians how the song goes except for the fact that I, in my mind, have various parts that I want to be in there, and I have the style of the song. On “A Very Sorry Saint,” I always knew I wanted it to be a piano, bass and drums song, almost like a torch ballad. I’ve never done anything like that before, but I just thought that’s exactly how that song should sound. Another song, like “Someday Son,” I very much wanted to sound Springsteen-y. I could also tell that “Top Of The Bottom” was going to sound Lovin’ Spoonful-y. So, what it is, I’m more going there with an idea of how I kind of want the song to sound, but, after that, I’m not telling anybody what to play.
When you’re working as fast as I’m used to working and on the budgets I’ve always worked on, there isn’t a lot of time, really, to say, “That’s just no good.” I remember once in my entire career, the song was “The World (And All It’s Problems)” on my second album The Name Above The Title, I listened to it after 3 days in the studio—we completely finished the backing track—and very unusually I went back in and said, “I just don’t like it. We’ve got to do it another way; it’s too thud-y the whole way through.” It was kind of that “Four On The Floor”-thing (by The Nylons), and I didn’t like it. I wanted it to be the first song on the album, and I didn’t want the first song to sound like that. That’s very rare. I don’t want to give an impression that everything is done out of necessity, but I do like to work quite quickly. Once you’ve decided on something, I think you kind of talk yourself into liking it and getting behind it and wanting to put it all together and make it into an awesome track. That was very, very easy to do with these guys (The Minus 5). “Top Of The Bottom” was done on the first take. The album was very much a collaborative effort.
I did kind of think with Adam’s Apple (2004) there was a chance that I would never get to make a good record that good, again. By good, I mean well-produced. And by “well-produced,” I specifically mean that thing that people, when you play it to them—radio people or your mom—they say, “Wow! This album sounds awesome.” People haven’t generally tended to say that about my records, but Adam’s Apple was a fantastically well made record. There was actually money spent on the record. Then, of course, the record company (Mammoth) closed (*purchased by the Walt Disney Company in 1998). It ended coming out on a pretty shitty label (DRT Entertainment) who didn’t do very much with it, all very sad, really. I thought, “Oh well.” That’s what happens—you finally get to make an album you really like, it could possibly get played on the radio or put in a movie, and then nothing happens. Well, whatever, no big deal. That’s how these things happen. But then to come back and have the album turn out like Who Was Changed And Who Was Dead, which, to me, is a better album than Adam’s Apple because, coincidentally—and it really is a coincidence—I think it’s a better collection of songs. I think it’s a more varied collection of songs, and, therefore, it’s more me. It wasn’t necessarily what I was even daring to hope to make, but it turned out really good.
Obviously, schedules must be tough to coordinate. If members of the Minus 5 aren’t busy being themselves, then they’re busy with being R.E.M. or Hitchcock’s Venus 3…the Young Fresh Fellows…the Baseball Project, etc. Are there any future plans to finally get the Minus 5 to tour behind you to perform this album?
I would love to do that. If there’d been a chance to do that altogether, I think we could have done it, but the schedule just didn’t work out. Ironically, the Baseball Project album was made after Who Was Changed And Who Was Dead, and then it came out before…that’s what you get for loafing. So, I missed the boat on that one. Scott and I have talked about doing—he always calls it—the Rolling Blunder. We’ve been talking about that tour for ages. That would be awesome. It would be “The Minus 5 Presents: The Baseball Project, Robyn Hitchcock and John Wesley Harding.” That wouldn’t be a bad tour. That’s one that’s kind of a dream.
Among all your albums, is there a common element that really makes a quintessential John Wesley Harding album?
Singer/songwriters never really have a quintessential album because if they aren’t happy to just repeat the same things over and over, again, they generally do things in many different styles. Each song has to be fleshed out in a different way. I’m particularly fond of an album like John Wesley Harding’s New Deal, my fifth album, but it’s really the first one where I knew what I was doing and took control of my situation. The first album was a very odd idea and a rather slap-dash live album, but the people kind of got, which was great. Then there were the three Sire albums, which are filled with the young enthusiasms. You can see why somebody like Scott, who was into those 70s singer/songwriters, would have gotten into those early album because they have that kind of devil-may-care, “Let’s do it” attitude to them, and there’s a great cracking band on them. It was a really exciting album (New Deal) for me to make. I think that’s probably when people either got off the boat because they just liked the bigger sounds that I made or got onto it. I think those people who kind of got on around then are still around.
* John Wesley Harding will perform December 2nd at Chicago’s Schubas with Dag Juhlin
For more tour dates go to www.myspace.com/wesleystace
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