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Going Shiva-Style With Ian Moore [Interview and Show Preview]
After being pigeonholed as the second coming of Stevie Ray Vaughn when he came into prominence in the early nineties, guitarist and songwriter Ian Moore began to slowly dismantle those expectations with each subsequent album after his debut. 1995's Modern Folklore was punchy and strange, and the never-released follow-up The First Third's "progressive sound angered the label head, Phil Walden, so deeply upon hearing it" that he and Moore came to blows. Moore's band dissolved after the album was shelved, and though Moore rerecorded many of the songs on And All the Colors..., the original recording was buried. With the arrival of last year's fast and clean El Sonido Nuevo that resembles Moore's early work almost not at all, you might think it'd be an odd time to start looking back. Perhaps it's the perfect time.
Moore revisited those original recordings of The First Third last year, when cryptically "a CD arrived in Ian’s mailbox sent from an old friend." Moore decided not just to release the album for the first time, but to reunite with his old band (Michael Villegas on drums, Chris White on bass, Bukka Allen on keys) for just six regional shows. Though his past might have been a millstone for Moore previously, in this interview he talks about appreciating both his origins and the serpentine path that is bringing him full circle.
I'll start by asking you about the release of this record you're calling the “First Third” Where was your head space on this album? Were you trying to make something provocative, because listening to it now, I don’t feel like it should have gotten the negative reaction from your label that it did. Were you surprised by that?
Yeah, the nature of how I feel about this...it's just a very big deal in my life, so if I were to try to encapsulate this in an interview, it probably wouldn’t translate the way I would hope. But it was a really volatile time in my life. My relationship with the music industry...and you have to keep in mind this was pre-indie rock, so there was not this plethora of cool underground labels releasing all types of music - there was this very, very narrow world outside of major labels releasing records. So if you weren’t on a major label and you weren’t a punk rock band, you didn’t have a career, period. Phil Walden - who was the head of my label at Capricorn - he and I developed a really deep bond. Phil had managed Sam Cooke and Otis Redding and then he started Capricorn records. And though I wasn’t a big fan of like the Allman Brothers and that segment, I was a big fan of this Southern record label owner who understood the timeline of music. And dude, this is coming out of the '80s...this was a really weird time. He and I developed this very intense relationship where he really felt connected to the music I was doing. As we evolved and we made our very experimental second record, it alienated Phil and a lot of our fans - it just created this huge rift and we never really recovered from it. And actually listening to the third record, it was supposed to be kind of a musically conciliatory record. I was trying to make a record still along the lines of what I was into - I was listening to a lot of Sly Stone and Stevie Wonder - but I was trying to make a conciliatory record, largely to Phil, you know. That's what I gather now when I listen back to it.
That's interesting. So this record was meant as a peace offering, and instead it just put him over the edge.
Well you know...there are bigger things going on here as well. I've always been interested in sociological movements and cultural trends, and having the career doing what I’ve done, I’ve been this big Rorschach test group for people’s feelings. I came out at a time where I was swept into the post-Stevie Ray Vaughn vacuum, and there was really nothing I could do to shift that paradigm. I was kind of stuck in the torrent underneath that, and I realize now in retrospect all the thrashing about was a kind of a beautiful manifestation of that, but not really to any great consequence. You know what I mean? A lot of people were angry because we weren’t him. That was basically what it came down to, and no matter what we did...if we had been too much like him, they would have been angry because then we would have just been copying his music. But in trying to have our own voice, it was just this weird...it’s hard to explain because it was a different time. And it's not an active thing anymore…
Right.
I think Austin’s finally started to move into some new territory, and they've reconstituted their stance. If a band's rootsy and cool now, they can have their own voice. For a long time that was not an option. It was just a weird time and I don’t know, I could get into the minutia of everybody’s psyches but basically, we were a band that had a lot of ambition and we were listening to really interesting stuff, and trying to put stuff together in that realm did not connect. I don’t know if you've listened to my first record, but that was the time I connected with big groups of people.
So your fan base began to splinter off after the release of your second record?
Well, actually after my first record it did it too. Before we put a record out we were just very psychedelic blues band and we were really into Pink Floyd and I was into Hendrix - garage-y and loud and lots of feedback. I had a lot of fans from that era, and then when I put out the first record, which really has this kind of kind of almost like Southern Rock vibe in the way it was recorded, a lot of those fans didn’t like it because it was too slick. And that’s what being a band is. You know, I just saw Explosions in the Sky. They played in Seattle at a block party up here, and I was just thinking about how some bands are so good at building this kind of brand, you know what I mean? In other words, they have a very linear path, and that's never been a strength of mine. Some people just continue to refine their vision in a way that’s gentle and pulls everyone along, and other people do it Shiva-style and just come in and just destroy one facet to start another one.
I saw you perform the day before South by Southwest this year, and you still play songs from your second record, you play from your new record...there is a trajectory there.
Yeah, I have one. (laughs) At the risk of sounding unbelievably pretentious, I’m an artist. I’ve always been, and I’ve always thought about it that way. I think what happens is that when you're met with material success you have to make some really big decisions about who you want to be at that point. My dad imparted the manifestation that the idea is the core, and I love and totally get off on those moments when you have a song that's written or a record that you’ve done that's really cool that's in the can. I’m trying to be a little bit more aware of how that manifests into a career - that hasn’t been something that I've done really well. At the same time, you know, in what would be considered material stumbles, that's how I continue to be surrounded by interesting people. Keith Richards had a quote which I will butcher because I'm terrible at quotes, but he said something about how some people like to drive in the fast lane, and he goes, "...but I like to be at the wrecks on the side of the road because you meet more interesting people there." And I totally agree with that. I’ve had an amazing career in that regard in terms of people I’ve been around and consequently what I’ve learned from them. When I moved up here to Seattle I was just a guy, and I didn’t come in with any bravado of the things I’d accomplished in Texas. Consequently I did shows as an acoustic guitar player with Elliot Smith, [Richard] Buckner, and Will Oldham and all these people who helped pull me into a new head space because it was a different scene. If I had come in being this blues rock guitar player that would not have been an option.
Right. And so where does the affection for power pop come from on your new record?
First of all, like everybody I grew up with the Beatles and the first records I listened to were Beatles and the Stones and stuff. I found out about Big Star maybe twelve or thirteen years ago, but when I was young I was really only into African American music. I was a musicology major at UT, and I was super into bebop when I first started playing. In retrospect it's funny because I remember going to the UGL where I'd listen to John Coltrane's Ascension and Om and all these really heavy records that I actually didn’t like, but I was just so convinced I was going to be this avant-garde kind of Captain Beefheart jazzy freakizoid dude. Obviously that wasn’t who I was at all, but you just go on different trips, and I think as I learned to write songs and really got into good song structure, there's just a natural drifting towards bands like Big Star and anybody that really has a gift. Big Star in particular because I really related to where they were coming from, being from Memphis and being Southern and having such deep roots in the 50’s and 60’s music with which I grew up. Whereas with some of the other power pop stuff like Redd Kross and The Posies...it's a little too, like, metal for me. It doesn’t really hit my button.
It's definitely going to be an interesting transition moving from your three-piece band to your old band for these reunion shows. How do you see that working out? Do you play terribly different now than you used to play, or do you think you’re just going to lock into a groove? It's been what, fifteen years since you played with these guys?
It's been a while, but I’ve been practicing a lot and I’m taking it very seriously. Another thing I've been working on is just being really respectful of the moment, and graceful to places you’ve been, because sometimes in not being so all about the past I’ve realized that I could come across as disrespectful to people that have walked those roads with me. I’ve been trying to be more aware of that. On a playing level, yes, I’m a much different player. I have a tendency to disregard the stuff I’ve done before because I’m always looking to get better and I want to be more interesting as a guitar player. I try to get past all the blues or the soul things, but at the same time, listening back now with a little bit of perspective I can see some things that I really like about it. There is a lot of fire and passion and true emotion, so I've just been trying to key in on that, and I’m enjoying it. I'm not a sentimental person, but it's nice to revisit places you’ve been - if only from an artistic side - to see if you can learn anything from what you’ve done there.
What have you learned from the experience surrounding The First Third?
I've learned that one of my favorite things in music is emotion. Sometimes just being a kid who really has their heart open even if it is a bit ham-fisted at times...there is a lot of value to that. The music industry right now is becoming progressively more digital, and there's a very reactionary take right now to music that’s not really based as much on time and experience. In the old days, there’d be, like, a Lester Bangs. There were always these music critics and gatekeepers who had done their time. And now there’s a big, big crossover and everybody’s made or broken by Pitchfork, and things happen so fast and the bands come and they play these festivals, and then 95 percent of them are done. That feels very manufactured and artificial to me, and I’m kind of realizing that I really, really appreciate those people in bands now that don’t have any knowledge of all this stuff, and I guess maybe I’m trying to do the same thing within myself. I’ve seen all these things now and I almost want to pretend that I didn’t ever see 'em. Just take the musical knowledge and the journey - take that and forget about all the people and all the bullshit that’s clouded my brain.
Ian Moore: [official]
