Part two of Ken Shimamoto's interview with the MC5 bassist:

K: Bomp put out what are supposed to be the rehearsal tapes for Back In the U.S.A. [as The American Ruse]; it seems like the way the songs are constructed is kinda similar to what you did before, and the sound in the studio was more a product of Landau.

M: If that's the way it sounds, then I agree with that, because when we went out to Hamburg [Michigan] and we started writing material for Back In the
U.S.A., I was really excited about the material. When Fred came in with the song "Tonight" and those things and we started rehearsing them, we wrote those things just the same way we had developed as a group in 1967 and '68. Here's the song idea, then everybody started inventing parts. And then by the end of an hour of playing on the thing, here you had this really exciting piece of music that you could hardly wait to go out and play.

That was the rehearsal. We went into the studio with Landau and strippedeverything down to little fucking two-and-a-half minute pop songs. Maybe a more experienced producer would have found a better way, but who knows?

K: I heard that before you guys got kicked off Elektra, you were actually cuttin' some of those tunes in L.A. with Bruce Botnick.

M: Yeah! Those L.A. sessions...I don't know what happened to those things, but all of the stuff we did prior to Atlantic sending out Landau to produce MC5 had real fuckin' enthusiasm, real down-to-earth, out-in-space, ground-breaking possibilities. We were doing it up to that point, and as soon as we got into that fuckin' parquet wood studio out there in Eastland, Michigan, the whole thing went down the tubes as far as I'm concerned.

K: What made you guys re-cut "Looking At You" for that album?

M: There's a perfect example right there, 'cause we were still doing the song, and the version that we did on A-Square Records, that was classic MC5. "Looking At You" was one of those organic pieces that we liked to play live, and it was thought that we should do the "upgraded version," the...rehabilitated version (Laughs).

K: I guess at the time you cut High Time, things were not well within the band, but it's still such a great record.

M: It's amazing. On the one hand, we had this completely trashy sounding record called Kick Out the Jams where we did anything we wanted to do, just to put out a record, and then you have this other-end-of-the spectrum Back In the U.S.A. thing that's totally done in the studio with this rigid-ass producer who had no experience, with this kind of generic, sterilized sound, and then all of a sudden, we had experienced both poles, and just through a learning process, we knew what to do after that..."Oh, it's not that hard." Plus we had a much more flexible, easy-to-please producer in Geoff Haslam, and he was real receptive to creative ideas and was real easy to work with. He was the kind of person who, when we attempted anything, whatever we came up with had some merit to it. Then we'd only have to maybe do small modifications to make it work. With Landau, everything was shitcanned right from the beginning to start with a whole new bottom. With Haslam, he saw the potential of what we were attempting to do, and helped us to modify it so that it said something that was real representative of the band, of the people that were doing it.

Our personal lives outside the recording were completely, totally separate from each other. I don't think we could have had any more of a chaotic state of the band than we had at that time. But it's funny, 'cause the record sounds good. There's good material on there, the songwriting is really good, the performances are fine; they're perfect. It's not experimental like Kick Out the Jams with "Starship" and the reading of poetry or whatever, and it's also not the robotic, lacking-energy performances of Back In the U.S.A. It's like the perfect middle point. But by that time, even though we were doing it right, commercially, it was too late. Things are still the same. If a corporate music company gives you three swings at the ball, if you're not happenin' after two, that third thing better hit a home run or you'regone.

K: So, what's your take on John Sinclair?

M: I was thinking about it earlier before we started talking. In defence of John, he really was under a tremendous amount of pressure as a human being back then. I don't know if other people told you, but we tagged John with the name "Pharaoh." And not because of his hairstyle, either. It was affectionate. It was sarcastic. "Pharaoh of the Hippies." Back in those days, we were an arrogant bunch of kids. We thought we had the answers to everything. We thought the world revolved around the MC5, and the things that were going on in San Francisco or New York or anyplace else were irrelevant. Everything else was the product of media hype, but the MC5 was the only for-real thing there was. All these hippies and all these people on the West Coast that were supposedly innovating these new styles...it was
nothing, man. Because John Sinclair was the real guru. He was our leader. He was the person to whom everybody could address their questions and get real answers. He was the man. And we really believed in John.

So, the guy was completely pressurised by us, for starters, and then it seemed that as we got more well-known, that other people also looked up to John Sinclair as having the answers, so "John, how do we pull all this together, how do we get all the guys that are in Texas and all the guys that are in San Francisco and all the guys that are in Boston and all the guys that are in Florida, and Canada...how do we get everybody together so we're making one statement?" And in fairness to John, he didn't know (Laughs), but he was trying. And his way of trying was to get everyone in the same room and roll up a whole bunch of joints and pass around pot and we'd figure it out. No problem. So, it was working. I actually sat in the same room with Tim Leary and Allen Ginsburg and John Sinclair and smoked weed and I felt like we were all going in the same direction.

Trouble was, when everybody left the room and went off to their own sections, somehow the whole togetherness thing was forgotten. And you had people that wanted to be more violent and more confrontational and really kind of took the bait that Dick Nixon and his Administration set out to be more confrontational and "Hey, let's fight about it." And that was the wrong thing to do. Because as long as the people that wanted these values to live maintained distance, then it was always a question mark in the minds of the people who were in authority as to "What the hell's going on, and how do we deal with it?" They didn't know. But as soon as we, the people that wanted to make changes in society, got on their level and started to bash it out or set bombs off in places, then it was easy for them to know what to do to get us out of the picture.

And John Sinclair...we put him in the position, or he put himself in the position of being a media spokesperson, and really, I can't fault the guy for becoming overwhelmed with all of the pressure from people that wanted answers. In his own personal life, he had made a couple of mistakes out there by giving some of this sacrament-substance to a police officer. And they charged him with dispersion or possession or some bloody thing, and he had been in court a couple of times already on the thing, and he was going to jail. He knew it, we knew it. That didn't fit with business. One of the things that happened with Landau coming into the picture was he advised the band to lose John Sinclair and his whole political entourage. That was a very unhappy episode, because when we did that, when we got rid of John (and I don't know how we could have not), we also got rid of our whole kind of family connection. Our whole connection with the "people" thing. We just became a business outfit, then it didn't take long for everything to completely dissolve.

I think in 1968, there really was a genuine opportunity to change the world, and like most things that really have mega-proportions, it just kinda got washed away, and today the same old thing kinda marches on in caterpillar fashion.

K: Why do you think that is?

M: Well, because the world just doesn't change rapidly. Revolutions only occur when people are starving, and I don't think people are starving in the United States. And revolution is a bloody, painful, murderous, and only-glorious-at-the-end kind of thing. It only happens out of totally desperate conditions. And really, we had the luxury of living in America, where anything's available; you just have to go out and get it. Our desperation was intellectual. I mean, we really didn't have to go out and storm Washington, D.C., and take over the halls of Congress. Political conditions weren't that bad. Economic conditions weren't that bad. So really, you just had this "youth raising its fist at the old people" kind of thing. Am I contradicting myself yet? (Laughs)

K: When you went to play the Festival of Life at the '68 Democratic convention in Chicago, did you have any idea what would take place?

M: No. But I should've, eh? (Laughs) All I knew at the time was we were going there because it was an election year. The Democratic party was having a convention, and all these people were going to show the Democrats that they were our sole hope as a connection to the Establishment society. All I knew is we weregoing; I knew we were gonna play. It turned out that we got together with all these political people to smoke pot, and then we showed up at an outdoor gathering place, Lincoln Park, and set up the band on a flatbed trailer that was hitched up to a truck and had a generator, plugged in our amplifiers and started to play. Coincidentally, it was just a big excuse for the police to come out and show these crazy people where it was at.

We started to play and coincidentally at the same time -- I mean, I don't know if our music provoked this big riot to happen -- the police started to fuck with people that were just hangin' around or smoking pot. Everything was so in your face back then..."Here, I'm gonna show this cop that I don't give a fuck." And then the cop's gonna show you that he does. (Laughs) The thing just turned into stampeding and mayhem, people were running everywhere, cops were running everywhere clubbing people with their billyclubs. We were playin' this song and the helicopters were flying over the top of us, and all of a sudden, the stage begins to move (Laughs) and they're pulling us out of there with our gear, "Let's go right now or this stuff is gonna get trashed." That's pretty much all I remember.

K: Kind of a weird theory I've formulated about the band, specifically about Wayne...you look at some of the people he gravitated toward, including you, including Rob Tyner, including Sinclair, and including Landau, too...he's always looking for a father figure he can look up to who's gonna give him the answers.

M: I've always thought that. The whole career of the MC5 is like a resume of Wayne Kramer's heroes. He would move from one guru-type person to another, and that was the direction of the band in its stages. It's kinda funny that you noticed that also. I've never actually made that statement, but I've always thought that. 'Cause for a long time, the band was pretty much going sort of like the way mine and Wayne's relationship was. And then after that he hooked onto somebody else, and then it became something else. I think that's a really accurate picture.

K: Prior to the [MC5 reunion at the] Rob Tyner Memorial in '92, when was the last time you'd seen those guys?

M: Wayne and I used to talk on the telephone quite often. Wayne and I were in touch when he lived in Nashville. I was trying to get ahold of him for a while after I moved to Arizona because I really liked it out here and I saw a lot of potential for he and I to regroup on a musical level; I used to kinda fantasise that he and I could put a really great band together and take advantage of the fact that we had the MC5 so many years ago. I tried to get a hold of Wayne; he lived in New York for a while, then he moved to Florida, then he moved to Nashville, and around the time he moved to Nashville, we made the connection. We got each other's telephone numbers somehow or another, and we talked quite often back in those days. But I guess the time had passed when either one of us actually wanted to do a musical project together, or geographically it just wasn't feasible. But we've maintained that friendship. We have some pretty good reminiscences on the telephone, and we've managed to put aside our negative feelings and our hostile feelings over what may have taken place many years ago and really had some good laughs and seen eye-to-eye as friends.

Then when we had the Rob Tyner show, I re-introduced myself to Dennis, and now Dennis and I are talking on the telephone quite often. I don't know what to compare it to, what other people's experience is, but when you do something, have a project and experience with people and then years separate you and you come back and see those people again, you really have the core of sameness. You really love these people for what you've experienced together and how well that you know them, and it really is deep, the affection that you feel for somebody that you've been through such important events in your life with. I'm sorry that Roband Fred aren't alive that we could have this opportunity too, 'cause I'd love to be able to call Rob and Fred and just chat and say, "Hey, man, how's life treating you these days." We go through our life and people just fall off in the wake. They go their way and you go your way and we lose each other. I don't know how you can just keep it forever. I wish you could. I'm glad that I can still talk to these people.

K: At the Tyner Memorial, what kind of condition was Fred in?

M: It seemed like Fred was really tired, and Fred was moving slower than I'd ever seen him move before. All of the things that I said earlier were magnified by 10. In fact, it was so difficult to get Fred to get up out of the chair to go play the set that the stage manager came into the room maybe 10 times and finally, on the last time, he said, "We're losin' em, man. They're all going home. You gotta come out now or just pack your guitars away and forget it." Finally, I think I finally jumped up and said, "Well, if you guys aren't going, I'll go out there and play a solo set. Bye!" And I started to leave and then everybody came. But otherwise, Fred just would not move out of the chair. He was so obnoxiously into his own trip that it was beyond all reason. Finally we went out there and played and it just seemed like something was wrong, but nobody knew what, and Fred wouldn't say if anything was wrong, or if he was feeling bad or whatever. But I remember Wayne and Dennis and I saying to each other, "The next time I see you will be at Fred's funeral." And that turned out to be the case.

K: So he was already pretty sick by that time?

M: Nobody said that he was, but he sure appeared to be. But then he didn't actually pass away for a couple more years, so I don't know. The only time there was a glimmer of any energy in Fred's eyes was when we saw each other for the first time in the bar when I showed up. I stood directly in front of him and looked into his face and all of a sudden he looked up and he looked at me for about two seconds and his face lit up and he said, "Michael!" and we just kind of embraced right there and then after that he was gone. I mean spiritually. I don't know. (I shouldn't be saying these things.) His face lit up and we embraced and he was really happy to see me and I was really happy to see him and then after that moment, he withdrew again and this kind of armour went up around him. He shut down. I really don't know how to describe what was wrong with Fred there except that he didn't look well at all and he didn't act well.

I don't think I've ever seen another band come along that's even close to what the MC5 was. I don't know that anything ever will. Why is that?

K: I think it has to do partly with where you were when you began...can you think of a place in America that's more American than Detroit? And the intersection of a lot of social and political changes that you were hooked into. And that whole strain of American garage rock that I love and that you represented.

M: We were a product of the times, also. The whole explosion of English bands and different styles and the melding of R&B and blues and rock 'n' roll and pop art and Mod...all of these things were happening at the same time, so it really set the scene, plus the whole thing in the U.S. with LSD and pot and all those things. Just coming along and being alive at that time in the world was sort of like being sent into a laboratory of ideas. It was the time to experiment. Everything you did was ground-breaking work, 'cause rock 'n' roll was so young back then. Inside the High Time sleeve there's a cartoon.

K: With the egg...

M: That's Rob Tyner's cartoon...just one cartoon that he did. The MC5 was somuch like a child...like Rob Tyner's child. Or like his model car, the thing he worked on in the basement, his toy. He used to sit around and draw cartoons of the people in the band. That cartoon that he did on the inside of High Time was such a good way of putting exactly what the MC5 was like...these lost people in a foreign, alien landscape come upon this magical egg, and one guy has the balls to break it open and see what's inside of it. And the way the storyline reads in that cartoon, there's a lot of truth in it about what the MC5 was like.

K: On a somewhat less exalted level, we were gonna talk about Destroy All Monsters and your involvement with that band.

M: That was a crazy band. That was a really crazy time in music history with the punk movement and New Wave things and various things like that. It was a strange time for me 'cause I just got out of incarceration and I really didn't have any direction and Ron [Asheton] asked me to play in this band with him. Everybody was really talented, but everybody was really drunken most of the time. Our manager told us (he was really exasparated with us all the time) that our rehearsals were nothing but glorified cocktail parties. Everybody would drink six beers and a pint of rum before they would even tune the instruments. It was kind of ridiculous. But that's what we did back then. Some really enormously talented...the Miller brothers, those guys were great, Boston School of Music, really good players, good musical ideas, the band did some great stuff, but I don't think anybody was down to earth enough to do anything that had lasting implications.

There was never any money and there was never any funding to do an album. We never did an album; we did a few singles, and they came out on a U.K. label called Cherry Red. I think there are some albums that have appeared, some CDs that have appeared, but that's just like a former band member exploiting some tapes they made. I spent a lot of years playing in that band; it was close to seven years, but I think that band was really kind of obsessed with being local starlets or something. We went to New York, we went to England and stuff like that, but there just never was enough cohesion or leadership or something to get that band off the ground. Lots of talent, lots of alcohol.

K: The Detroit scene had changed a whole lot by the mid-70s.

M: It was really a lot different from the days of the Five and the Stooges and that, but still it was kind of hanging on to all of that stuff. Punk was like an extension of all that in a way. There was a whole new approach to writing music and that style of playing and dressing and fuckin' hairstyles...it was great. I guess some people say the Stooges and the MC5 were the originators of the punk sound; how could I not like it? I like it for sure!

Destroy All Monsters band was just too many personalities tuggin' and pullin' for their own way, and there just wasn't anybody in the band who was strong enough to subdue the chaos. We did a lot of spaced-out, rockin', jammin' and hard-ass rock and roll full-blast music. It was fun, a lot of fun doin' it, we got around a bit. I dunno what else to say about the Monsters except to say we did a lot of local schmoozin' and then like once a year we'd get enough energy up to go somewhere. Like Toronto, we went to Toronto a couple of times; we went to New York City, we played CBGBs, we played Max's Kansas City...y'know, we'd go to these kind of accessible places. We played in D.C., we played in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland...we used to play with Pere Ubu a lot, 'cause this guy, what's his name, David Thomas? Well, he booked us into the club in Cleveland that he used to play at all the time...Pirates Cove or something. Pretty cool club. We used to open for Pere Ubu when we played in Cleveland...It was a really killer, exciting time, the late '70s. Everybody was so jazzed. Everybody was doin' this totally radical shit...radically anti-social but it was really cool.

When we went to England, we got a lot of criticism for dragging out our old heavy metal licks. Just before bands like Def Leppard and those metal revival bands clicked. Just before that happened, we got really fuckin' criticized for being metal guys. At the time we were there, it was like 1980, and Madness and The Selecter and all this ska music was just gaining power. So here's Ron playing like...guitar...and they just about vomited, y'know, they puked. They said, "No way!" So it wasn't a successful tour commercially or anything; we didn't get a lot of fans or anything, but I sure loved England. I really loved being there, I loved everything about it...the history, the architecture, the people, the food, the beer...like a travelog. We were there for a month; we stayed up in York for awhile, we had a great time. Played in Liverpool and Leeds and all these cool places.

I've got this big kind of dark cloud feeling about Destroy All Monsters, maybe just from the way things panned out in the end, but when I think about it, we really had a lot of fun, and that whole period that we were playing in the late '70s was just full of creative energy. I mean, what the fuck, I'm lucky I was a part of that.

K: A coupla years after that you hooked up with Billy Frank in L.A. for that Empty Set thing.

M: I first went to Europe with Billy and the Empty Set and did a "cameo" with those guys. That was just before the Luminarios went on the first German tour. I went with Billy and would do like half an hour of MC5 and Destroy All Monsters and Mike Davis material, and those guys would play 45 minutes or whatever, and we did some Italian gigs and some Dutch gigs and some German gigs. It was cool.

We continued our conversation on the night of July 27th. Michael was preparing to depart on a tour of Europe with the Luminarios. We started out talking about the Luminarios live CD, the ingeniously entitled 3,000 Germans Can't Be Wrong (San Jacinto).

M: I just got some more copies of 3,000 Germans from Rich [Hopkins], so I'll be sending that to you...It's our live show, it's very laid back. It's not like some demanding thing, you can just put it on and listen to it and it's just beautiful music, it's really cool. I think the package is really nice. Rich put it together, sort of a Beatlish kind of cover, you'll see; it's our photographs that we took on the tour with our little 35mm camera. There's nothing super-professional, slick, agency about it; it's very homegrown. When you listen to it, it's got some kind of charming thing that I like. It got really great reviews in German Rolling Stone.

K: I'm anxious to hear it. There's a definite vibe about the music you guys play that reminds me of Arizona or at least the way I envision Arizona -- real spacious, real open. When Dennis Thompson was describing it to me, he just said your music was "real free." I think that about covers it.

M: I think our music is very tonal. We explore the tonality of things. We don't let ourselves get boxed into one particular kind of an approach or style. We're always looking for that soundscape thing, something that's really nice to hear -- not something that's stylish or fashionable, just something that's pleasing to the senses. That's the purpose of music...that is the statement.

K: How long has Rich been doing the Luminarios?

M: Rich had the Sidewinders, and the Sidewinders became the Sand Rubies, and at some point during the Sand Rubies, just before that band went through its first break-up, Rich decided to put another band together. And he just wanted this band to be representative of himself and his songwriting and whatever band he dreamed he wanted to have. So he just kind of started gathering musicians from time to time to do studio projects and put things out. I think the first Luminarios things were really Sidewinders people. And anytime he would do a new track in the studio, he might try different people out. The year that he started doing this was probably around '88, '89, so it's been going on eight to ten years in various forms.

K: And when did you hook up with him?

M: This version of the Luminarios with me in it? This is the third year. We've been hangin' for about two and a half years now. The end of '98 will be three years. And I think that's great, 'cause I believe that it takes about three years for any group to really get an identity of their sound, and really get to where you're comfortable, you know what you want, you know what you're striving for in sound. You can get off to a great start right off the bat, but it takes that time to develop and get rid of the things that were inefficient to get on to where you form an identity, and you have to have that.

So far, I've been able to meet a lot of people, like Dave Seger, who was the guitarist in Naked Prey, a great Tucson band; Stefan George, a great slide player, lap steel, singer-songwriter guy; various drummers, and guitarist Jimbo, Jim Gibson on El Paso, [drummer] Brad Kemp...a lot of different people have come through. Guitarist Kent Militzer and drummer Tom Cook from Minneapolis. Pretty much it's just Rich and myself...The Luminarios are kind of like Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. We've had a steady stream of talent pass through the turnstile of the recording studio. That's a great experience.

K: You told me in an earlier conversation about how "Careless" and "Apology" were done...

M: Yeah, well, that's actually the first project I was on back in the beginning of '96. My former female companion was a hairdresser, and she was giving Rich Hopkins his haircut. I hadn't really met Rich. I knew who he was, and I'd seen his band play once or twice, and he knew who I was from the MC5 past history, and he was getting his hair cut by my partner. He was needing a bass player, because he'd just come back from that first Luminarios tour of Germany, and his bass player went on to other things, and my girlfriend said, "Why don't you call Mike, because he just might be interested; he just got finished doing a blues band trip and he might be interested in playing some rock and roll now." So it took Rich a little bit of time to make a call to me, and I was expecting it, and when he called, I said, "Well, Rich, I'm totally interested in playing with you. I know what your sound is like, and I think we'd get along really well musically, and I'd be very, very up to match my kind of bass playing to your kind of guitar playing."

The very first project was Rich was commissioned by, of all things, Phillip Morris of Germany, Marlboro, to write a song concerning water for a promotional event they were staging in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and they had picked a few bands from Tucson to write songs that represented the elements of nature. We wrote the song "Careless" to be about water, and also, "Apology" was written during that time, but "Careless" was the song that was chosen for the project, and it turned out to be a CD-ROM that was put out in Germany. It was then used by people who were involved in a contest to come to the States and learn about the Southwest and they took the CD-ROM and remixed all of our songs and made their own presentation. Basically what happened is Marlboro paid the tab and got us all together in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on a ranch, and we partied our asses off for a whole weekend and really had a great time and played all the songs and ate well and drank good German beer. That's how I started with Rich, and I felt pretty good about that, so we just kept on doing things.

K: Talk a little bit about [lyricist/singer] Billy Sedlmayr.

M: (Laughs) Well, the first thing that comes to mind is that Billy is back out on the streets again. Billy is back in the free world, and Rich tells me that Billy's doing great, that he seems like he's gonna be well now, and he doesn't intend to go anyplace like where he just got out of again, and he said he's happy and healthy. And we want that, just for starters. Billy is a really enormously talented guy, lyricist, good singer, as you know from the stuff he did on El Paso and also on Glorious Sounds. It's really funny how Billy would just stay out of trouble long enough to do a record with us (Laughs), then he'd disappear. So he's back out again and God, wouldn't you know, we're doing a record again, so I guess his timing is perfect. He's a great songwriter; Billy and I collaborated on the "White Powder Ma" song. He's a fascinating character, that's what I can say about him. He's full of energy and totally eccentric. He's covered with tattoos and when Billy gets excited about a project or his work, he's unstoppable. We'll just see what happens from here, because he's also unpredictable in his behavior, so we'll just hope for the best. We're always talking about "Do we want Billy in the band?" but he's never free long enough. (Laughs) He always decides for us by getting himself locked up.

K: Wasn't he the drummer in the Sidewinders originally?

M: No, no, no, but you're close: he was the original drummer in the Giant Sandworms, who later became Giant Sand, so Billy played with Howie and Rainer and Seger. Then I guess Billy decided that he had more potential as a lead singer. We tried Billy out as a drummer in the Luminarios for awhile, but it just didn't gel.

K: Well, hopefully he'll stay free long enough to make the record....

M: Oh, yeah, I think he will. Rich mentioned that he and Billy had written another song. It's kinda weird, because now that I think about it, Billy must sit up there in his cell and just write lyrics like mad. He sends lyrics to Rich, and then Rich writes music, and by the time Billy gets back out, they have something to do in the studio.

K: What can you tell me about the Rich Hopkins Paraguayan connection?

M: Paraguay is the hometown of Rich's heart. He spent his Peace Corps time in Paraguay out in the sticks...a desolate little road town in the middle of Paraguay, helping people out, being there and whatever a Westernized person can do in a Third World country, getting to know folks and stuff like that. Learning whatever he can. And he met this guy named Concepcion Romero, kind of a folk balladeer; he plays acoustic and sings these Paraguayan love songs, and he and Rich formed a really cool friendship. Rich says that Concepcion taught him how to write music, how to write songs...I mean, it's a really warm, deep friendship between two people. And Rich's love for the Paraguayan culture...he speaks perfect Guayanese, which is not even close to the kind of Spanish they speak in Mexico...it's his heartthrob place on the planet. He always goes back, and Concepcion was just here.

We played a gig together with Stefan George and myself and Concepcion -- played an acoustic thing at one of the clubs here. We went in and cut about nine or 10 tracks in the studio, which will appear...some of those things will appear on a Luminarios CD, and most of them will appear on a new Concepcion Romero CD with Rich playing acoustic and me playing electric bass and Stefan playing accompaniment acoustic with Concepcion. The things that will appear on the Luminarios [CD] will be more of a pop kind of thing [with] a drumkit -- not rock and roll-y, but just sort of a bigger sound. So I'm really looking forward to that, 'cause those projects aren't complete yet. Really, really exciting, 'cause this music is so romantic and so warm and so deep and meaningful; the lyrics, even though I don't understand the language, I just know that what is being said is so much deeper than things that could be said in English. I can just tell by the tone of the guy's voice. I just feel fortunate to be able to play a different kind of music.

K: Rich seems to have a lot of diverse kinds of influences, like the Latin American strain, the Neil Young strain...

M: Yeah. We just did a Neil Young song for a Dutch label that's putting out a compilation of Neil Young compositions. We just did "Like a Hurricane" on it, and I must tell you, it sounds nothing like anything I've ever heard before. It's like space music, and really beautiful stuff. I'm very proud of it. It'll be on the next Luminarios CD. I'm so happy with it, 'cause it's so different. It's not...it's hard to even call it rock and roll; it's just music, it's a trip, it's like watching a movie when you're listening to this stuff. When you hear it, you'll just go "Whoa, what is that?" It's like dream music. It's very cool.

The next Luminarios CD is gonna be very different from the first two of the ones that I played on. I'm really excited about the direction it's taking. We're writing the same kind of words that we always wrote, but the way the songs are put together and used as a recording is totally different...it's like using the studio as a laboratory for sound paintings. Anything goes; you can do anything you want. Just having the words coming out, it's beyond...what I imagined. You kinda get into these categories and grooves in your head about "This is the way music is supposed to be," but it ain't necessarily so...it can be anything. When you take it out into realms that aren't like pop music idioms, it's fantastic, the results...it doesn't make it any less. Less is more!

K: It's interesting that you compare the Neil Young track to watching a movie, 'cause a lot of the Luminarios' stuff has that sweeping, cinematic thing going on.

M: Yeah, I agree with you. I think all along, even from "Apology" and "Careless," they tell stories. They're kinda like ballads in that way; they take the listener through a scene, what you called a cinematic event, and it's still doing that, only more so. With less restrictions, not with the same kind of parameters...just enlarging on it, making a visual/audio event. The thing I like about the Luminarios is that the music has this kind of storybook quality. And I guess we're really just makin' the most of that.

K: I really enjoyed hearing the two different versions of "Coffee Grounds and Goodbyes" on El Paso and Glorious Sounds and the way the song evolved with that spoken word thing.

M: Yeah, just Rich's guitar playing on one and on the next CD you have the same song with lyrics on it...just to give you a different look at it.

K: I also dug the MC5 and Stooges and Electric Prunes and Love covers on Glorious Sounds...very unexpected, but a lotta fun.

M: Before I got in the band with Rich, I knew from the way that the Sand Rubies sounded and from the covers that they did...they do covers of "7 and 7 Is" by Love, and "You're Gonna Miss Me" by the 13th Floor Elevators that's on The Sand Rubies Live, and they did a Beatles cover, "We Can Work It Out" or something like that, and I knew from the way they played those songs that I identified with the same kind of musical appreciation and the same kind of taste. I knew when Rich called me and asked me would I be interested in playing bass that we had something to go on because that's the kind of stuff I like. It's not like cornerholed into some R&B kind of thing or a blues thing or a heavy rock thing, it's what I like, so I knew that we could be successful professionally or really have a good time trying. A perfect example, "Too Much to Dream...," I mean God, the Electric Prunes, that was probably my favorite garage band. That's like the garage anthem of all time! Rich said he wanted to do that song, he's thinkin' about that, and I said, "Fuck, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's do it!" So we agree on our taste, and that's really a great place to start out from. We've got a Love cover on Glorious Sounds, too; "A Message To Pretty." I got my old Love cassette tape out and listened to those things over and over again and just completely got re-obsessed.

K: It seems like you have a real big following in Europe. How'd you happen to make it over there?

M: One of Rich's friends is this guy Chris Cacavos...know him? Green On Red? He was in that band, and Chris invited Rich to come over with the Luminarios and be the support band on his tour. This is the one where Kent went along to be the second guitarist, lead guitarist. So that has a lot to do with it, Cacavos and that connection right there, Green On Red. And while the Luminarios were over there, Rich got a deal with a European record label called Enemy. One year later he went back and (if I've got my facts straight, I might have things a little out of sync), one of the friends of the guy who has the Blue Rose label saw Rich at a club in Germany one night and went and told the guy from Blue Rose, "You gotta get this guy, he's fuckin' awesome." Well, Rich got back from the tour and Blue Rose called -- this is right at the same time when he and I started talking and I started doing some studio work with him -- and offered him a deal. So that's when he signed the Luminarios' deal with Blue Rose.

This coming tour is our fourth time back to Germany, and it seems like every time we go back, it's a little bit better than the time before...kind of an upswing. Everybody's real happy although it's not a big level; it's still on an upswing. It's movin' on up. People in Europe are just like...there's a segment of fans that really gravitate to the Southwestern rock and roll sound. They like Giant Sand, they like all the Tucson bands, they like the Luminarios...there's a lot of bands that aren't even from the Southwest that put out that kind of a sound. There's bands on Blue Rose that are from New Jersey, but they sound like they're from Texas. It is a kind of a style, and it's one Germans really love. Germans are pretty fascinated by the Southwest in general.

In particular, the Southwest has got a lot of romance and charm and legendary, almost mythical qualities. So there's a whole section of people who just love this kind of sound, and we keep honing our Luminarios experience, and every time we go back, the band is more crafty than it was the time before, but the thing is just gathering steam. So I'm really happy about that. People in Europe in general are more religious about their music; that's the way they appreciate it. We come back to the States here and the only people who know who we are, are other musicians. We don't have really any kind of following.

K: To shift gears a little bit, you have one song on each of the Luminarios CDs I've heard ["White Powder Ma" on El Paso, "Raenna" on Glorious Sounds], and they seem to be kinda autobiographical. Are you gonna have one on the new record?

M: Yeah. There'll be a Mike Davis song on the next Luminarios record. And I suppose it'll be autobiographical as well.

K: Do you have a lot of songs that you've written? I know the Empty Set did one ["Rockin' the Cradle"] on that record that Ron Asheton produced for them [Thin, Slim, and None].

M: Yeah, I wrote different things for other bands I was in, and it seems like that kinda material suited those bands, but this band is a little different. I still write songs in the same kind of mould, but whether they'd be appropriate for the Luminarios...it's a different style. I'm still learning, too.

Y'know, I've done all these other bands and things, but I feel way more potential with what I'm doing now than any of the other stuff, in a musical sense. The MC5 was a phenomenon, maybe a social phenomenon in a way, it was just something that came along and just begged for somebody to do that. This thing that I'm doing here in the Luminarios, I just feel so connected to it musically that I really feel excited about the new records we're gonna do. Not even just the one that we're workin' on now, but the one after that and the one after that...I have a really good feeling about what's goin' on with Rich and this whole Luminarios thing and the fact that we do use different musicians, you don't know who's gonna be in it, but the Luminarios is always me and Rich, and as long as I'm in there, I'm happy about that.