Brian Cullman Interview for Wicked Spins Radio

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WSR – What was it about OK Savant that when their time came for them to be signed that you all split?

Brian – OK SAVANT was such a wonderful band, with Sara Lee (from The Gang of Four and The B-52’s) on bass & vocals; Larry Saltzman (from The Love of Life Orchestra and from Paul Simon’s band) on guitar; Steve Holley (from Wings and Roxy Music) on drums; Leslie Winston on keyboards; and at times Vernon Reid would help out on guitar. The A&R guy who signed us was fired just as we were sorting things out with the label, and with him gone, we had no protector and got bounced from desk to desk. It was typical of those times …the label didn’t really want us anymore, but they didn’t want to let us go. While we were in limbo, Steve Holley got offered a gig with Joe Cocker, Sara Lee got a tour with The B-52’s, and I was asked if I’d go to Morocco with Bill Laswell, who was recording The Master Musicians of Jajouka. And that was that. We just drifted apart and into other work. (Though I recently saw Steve Holley, and he asked about putting the band back together for a tour and an album. That would be great! I’d love it!)

WSR – You make music that you want to hear, to you what is the importance of making music that stays true to you and not panders to the will of others?

Brian – Pandering? True to you? Phil, you make me sound like I’m a purist or a bit of a drag. I’m just trying to catch whatever fish is in front of me. And I keep hoping it’ll be a magic one.

WSR – How did playing music help you in your career as a music journalist?

Brian – In the States, it’s not unusual for a journalist to also be in a band, but in Africa and the Middle East, it’s very uncommon. And there’s a class distinction…journalists actually get paid and get invited to parties and events, musicians are usually left outside the gates. So when I was travelling in those worlds, it opened a lot of doors for me…a lot of doors that I hadn’t even realized were closed. I was on a tour with Algerian singer Cheb Khaled, we’d been travelling together for about a week, and just for fun I put on a cassette of my band while we were driving. And Khaled cracked up laughing and nearly drove off the road. “Oh man!’ he kept shouting. “You’re a monkey too! You’re a monkey too!” I think he meant that as a compliment. Shit, I hope so. Maybe I’ve had it wrong all along!

WSR – Every musician has a story, one that they can tell time after time which amazes all of their fans. So what is your story?

Brian – When I was about 15 years old, I made friends with an Australian journalist named Lillian Roxon who was living in New York and writing for The Sydney Morning Herald. She’d published a book called THE ROCK ENCYCLOPEDIA, and I not only read it, I corrected it. I was that sort of kid. I couldn’t help myself. She had all these stupid mistakes in there, like having John Stewart from The Kingston Trio as a member of Buffalo Springfield, and I sent her 30 pages of corrections. Instead of being offended, she called me up and asked if I’d work on a second edition with her. I was so excited! She took me to Max’s Kansas City and to The Scene and to all sorts of clubs. And everyone knew her and loved her, so it was an amazing experience to see the world through her eyes. And when I got a guitar and started writing songs, she was the first person I called and wanted to play them for. I couldn’t play them for my family. That would have been wrong on every level. They would have hated them. And if they’d liked them, that would’ve been even worse.

So I called Lillian, and she talked me into playing them for her friend Danny Fields. Danny was the hippest man in the room and still is…he’d signed The Stooges and The MC5 to Elektra, he’d hung around with Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground, and his apartment in The Village was the stuff of legend. When we got there, there were no lights on, but there were candles everywhere. Jim Morrison was passed out drunk on his couch, Nico had locked herself in the bedroom to get away from Morrison, Edie Sedgwick was crouched in the corner in nothing but a bra and panties, cutting out pictures from Vogue Magazine, and Leonard Cohen kept calling every ten minutes looking for Nico. And there I was with my thirty dollar guitar and these crummy little songs about moths and snowflakes. Talk about baptism by fire!

WSR – Tell us about working with Stanley Tucci please, why will asking about him bring a smile to your face?

Brian – My friend Margot Core was music supervisor on a screwball comedy that Stanley Tucci was directing called THE IMPOSTORS. It was a lovely movie, very wild & silly, with an improbably great cast : Oliver Platt & Stanley Tucci & Woody Allen, Steve Buscemi, Isabella Rossellini & Billy Connolly and just about every comic actor that you could imagine. But someone had scored the film to a lot of old Dixieland music, and it felt corny. I was brought in to advise them on how they could fix it. And since a lot of the movie took place on a cruise ship during the depression, I thought it would make sense to use some old Cuban songs, The Lecuona Cuban Boys or Don Azpiazu, or maybe some tango from Carlos Gardel. Stanley liked the Cuban songs, but he absolutely flipped over Carlos Gardel and just thought it made perfect sense for the movie. So I gave him a Carlos Gardel CD and shook hands and figured that was that ….maybe I’d get invited to the opening. Or maybe not. But a few days later, I got a really sheepish call from Margot ….they had tried to license tracks of Carlos Gardel, but his estate was asking more money than they could afford. And she asked if I could write and produce some music in that style. So of course I said yes. And decided I’d just figure it out later.

I found a great group of Argentine musicians who were performing on Broadway, and they did all the heavy lifting. They were unbelievably arrogant, but they were so good that it was hard to fault them. We set up a screen in the studio, and they played along to various parts of the movie and brought so much life, so much character to those scenes that it was inspiring. Stanley Tucci, bless him, just kept jumping up and down in the control room like it was Christmas. Once, after a take, he simply leaped up and ran into the studio and started hugging the musicians. It’s perfect, he said. It’s perfect! No, they shook their heads. It’s not right yet. And they sent us back into the control room like naughty children. And damn if they didn’t play it even BETTER!!!

WSR – To many Nick Drake was a genius, some feel the world wasn’t ready for him. What was he like and did he influence you in any way musically or not?

Brian – Nick Drake was such an enormous influence on me that I can barely put it into words. He’s probably in every note I play. It’s like asking a fish if he was influenced by water. I’m still swimming in his shadow.

WSR – All Fires was a great musical experience like no other, but The Opposite Of Time is in a completely different league. You not only hear you feel the music too which I cannot deny requires great talent to do. How do you write feelings into your music?

Brian – Thank you. I got very lucky, and I had a lot of help.

WSR – Having heard your vocals and also many people describe your vocal greatness, how would you personally describe your vocal talents?

Brian – Someone once described me as sounding like Dion on quaaludes, and I’ve modeled my whole style on that remark.

WSR – There were a few people who helped with The Opposite Of Time who themselves are musical legends, who did what and how did you come to work with them?

Brian – I’d always wanted to sing with Jenni Muldaur (daughter of Geoff & Maria Muldaur), she has such a pull and a gravity to her voice, like it’s an integral part of the solar system. We’d sung together at a few birthday parties alongside Teddy Thompson, but she was always on tour with David Byrne or working on a show with Elvis Costello. I could never pin her down. Then sometime last year she called and asked if I could help her out with music for a memorial for Lou Reed. She wanted to put together CDs of the music he’d been listening to in the days right before he passed, and she had a list of all these songs by Link Wray & Ornette Coleman, The Marvelettes & Bo Diddley, The Shangri La’s & Ernie K Doe. There were about 75 songs. And she needed me to find them and put them together into a very specific order within two days. It was a lot of work, and as I was hesitating, she said…if you can do this for me, I’ll come sing with you on anything you want. And that was that!

She sings on about half of my album, most of it singing with me live. And she was such a pleasure.

Jimi Zhivago worked really closely with me on the album. He’d worked with Glen Hansard and Jeff Buckley and Ollabelle, and he played beautiful slide guitar and ukulele and anything else that was needed, whether it was melodica or lap steel. He always stayed close to the spirit of the song, but he pushed the songs out of their comfort zone. Listen to his solo on “Tender Wheels”…. it drags Hank Williams right into 13th Floor Elevator territory!

Keyboard player Glenn Patscha is like my brother. He’ll constantly complete my sentences musically. Sometimes he’ll sit back and only play one note…but it’ll be the exact right note in the exact right place.

And Hector Castillo…man, I stumbled into him at just the right time. Ten years ago, when I met him, he was an assistant engineer at Philip Glass’s studio. He didn’t stay an assistant for more than about ten minutes. Within a few days, he was co-producing David Bowie, Lou Reed, Bjork, The Brazilian Girls and working with Beck, Roger Waters and Los Cadillacs Fabulosos. Hector makes everything sound better by just being in the room. You simply can’t bear to disappoint him, and so you don’t. But Hector is supremely uninterested in celebrity. Kanye West will call to see if he’ll listen to his new work, but Hector would rather go for a walk with his dog. I really like that in an engineer.

WSR – What famous quote and by who do you feel fits The Opposite Of Time

Brian – I’m still trying to figure that out. Is the opposite of time the absence of time? What takes us outside of time? Sex? Sleep? Eternity? Music? All of the above?

WSR – Its a hot day, the sun is shinning. You are on a hill, you lay down in the luscious green grass. Your head falls back and you breathe a full lungs worth of breath. What thoughts are in your head at this time?

Brian – Did I leave the water running?

WSR – To you what is magic?

Brian – My guitar staying in tune is magic. The internet is magic. Getting paid for doing something you love is magic.

WSR – As a man I admire musically and also as a journalist I would really love to get the chance to work with you on a article I am writing, this one. What question would you like to ask yourself?

Brian – We all keep asking the same question over and over : Will you still love me tomorrow

WSR – Thank you so much for this interview Brian, any final thoughts?

Brian – I’m still trying to figure out where music comes from. There’s a certain place you arrive at somewhere between the third and the eleventh drink, a crossroads, a calm in the middle of a storm, a place of clarity and quiet and weightlessness, between light and dark, between the promise of God’s grace and the certainty that failure is the price agreed upon, that however sweet the melody, the record will end and, just before the end, the needle will skip. And that’s the place songs come from. If you’re lucky, you might catch one. Or two.