punkdaddy

 

Interviewing Richard Lloyd is tricky. He has been doing interviews for over 35 years. He’s done so many that if you’re familiar with him you have probably learned most of his anecdotes by heart. He is nothing if not accommodating, and he likes to talk. He will tell you, “feel free to interrupt me.” You’ll find that’s not as easy as he makes it sound, and he goes into these long monologues, ticking all the ‘talking points’ as he goes: the Jimi Hendrix story, talking Hilly Kristal into letting Television play CBGBs, the ‘Lodestone,’ and fulfilling his destiny to become a world-class guitarist. But it’s the measure of the man that no matter how many times you’ve heard these tales told, you still come back to hear him tell them one more time

If you don’t know the Hendrix story, it goes like this: Richard was at a birthday party/rehearsal for Jimi Hendrix and the Band of Gypsies, at the invitation of his good friend Velvert Turner. He was sitting next to Hendrix as he was saying that he was not happy with the direction he was going. Richard says he turned and said to Jimi, “you can do as you like, people love you, I love your guitar playing – if you’re in a rut, just take a vacation and then get back to it.” Jimi swung around and punched him three times
Outside, after the party, Jimi was waiting for Richard in the parking lot. He called him over, rolled down the window and asked for Richard’s hands. He held them and wept on them while apologizing for hitting him. It went on for about 15 minutes, until finally Jimi drove off. In those moments, did some great, secret gift pass between the Hendrix nasolacrimal ducts and young Richard’s eager, open palms? Did lightning, so to speak, strike itself? Don’t be ridiculous. But Richard Lloyd definitely got something the rest of us didn’t
 

Jimi Hendrix. Is that where it all started for you?

Probably my best friend, I’d say, in this life, was a scrawny black kid from Brooklyn, who claimed to know Jimi Hendrix. And nobody believed him, except for me. Because I believed him I had access to that world. And so we spent a lot of time following rock stars around, going backstage at rock shows at the Filmore East, y’know, stuff like that

 

That was Velvert

Velvert, that was his birth certificate name. That friendship was everything. We were both set on something. Like Shackleton’s journey, I mean, we would do anything. What I used to launder was, ‘I’m not an audience member, I don’t belong in the audience. I belong backstage,’ and that’s where I spent most of my time. It was completely wrong, to me, that I was in the audience. So I got very close – not personally – to all the guitar legends, Jimi, Jimmy Page, the Allman Brothers, Pete Townsend and the Who. So, it was a real absorption, y’know?

Kids have magical thinking and then society beats it out of them, because society has entered into this mutual somnambulistic, semi-waking consciousness that’s hypnotic – it’s a hypnotic trance – and you have to become dis-illusioned

 

Television: Richard Hell, Richard Lloyd, Tom Verlaine

I went to LA. I grew up in New York, there wasn’t the opportunity I felt in New York, so I thought I could go to London or Los Angeles. But London is crossing the great water, and LA is still in the same continent, so I went to LA. And I spent two-and-a-half years there. And then I heard there was this scene in NY, which was the Dolls and the Mercer Arts Center. So I decided, ‘Aha! the world has turned, as I thought it would. And now there’s an opportunity. I gotta get my ass back to New York’. I hitched a ride back with a guy who had a Lotus Europa, it could cruise at 125mph all day long

Then I heard that the Mercer Arts Center fell down, but I was already on my way back to New York. LA was just like phoney-baloney plastic people. I can’t take it there more than like two weeks. I literally start to lose my mind. I start to feel like I’m in a hallucination

So anyway, we got back to New York and I fell into Max’s Kansas City. I was dirt poor, I was saddling up to girls and saying, “God. you’re beautiful, I love you. Take me home. You pay the rent and all the bills and I will provide me. I got a lot of takers, y’know, cos I provided a LOT of me. If you read, there’s some book, I dunno, about Casanova or one of those guys, who would literally give a woman his whole being, whereas most men have a secret place, they never give all of themselves. But, y’know, he would. And, y’know, I would. I drifted from here to there. If it wasn’t girls, it was guys chasing me

I had to support myself. I had made a deal with poverty. In order to accomplish what I needed to accomplish, I had to have an aim that you never forget. If you go up in airplane, you’ll see that the rivers have switchbacks, but they’e always going downhill. They’re going to the sea. I had my own aim and my own what I call the ‘lodestone,’ which is a natural magnet, in my pocket. So no matter what I did, I would go the other way from the lemmings and not fall subject to the hypnosis. I never wanted a job. I didn’t even want to grow up. And be a ‘man’. I thought men sucked, they stank. Y’know? I mean, go to a football game and a bar with men in it; it’s just disgraceful. It’s like they never reach their full human potential, and yet they take for granted everything that they see around them that somebody put their soul into. We let the one-in-a-million do the work and everybody else just goes around like their life is a sieve. All their energies go towards their desires and their aversions

Billy Ficca, Richard Lloyd, Tom Verlaine, Fred Smith

I mean, look, when you want something you have positive thoughts about it, but you also have negative thoughts about it. Nine-tenths of the time the negative thoughts will outweigh the positive thoughts, y’ know: “What if I don’t make it… I’m not gonna make it.’ People said “Get your high school diploma,” I said “Screw you! When they stop teaching and start commencement exercises, I leave!”
Y’know, I spent three days in college (roars with laughter). That was enough to let me know that I didn’t want to go into academia. So what was left for me? Be a vagabond, hobo rock guitarist who wishes to get into that revered structure of rock’n'roll

 

Was it poverty that led to Richard Hell’s – and subsequently the punk – ‘look’?

Tom was wearing 35,000 year-old t-shirts anyway, he’s just what you call a metal-pinching nickel-nurser. There was one point where he went on tour and his luggage was supermarket shopping bags

 

Marquee Moon

I get the feeling you put a lot of store in ‘magic’ and destiny. Do you feel you were you born to do what you’re doing?

I couldn’t say that I was born to do what I am doing, but I was born with certain gnosis, y’ know, knowledge with a “g” in front of it. Certainly I was born conscious, and stayed conscious the best I could, in a world that’s semi-hypnotic, and socially reinforcing connective tissue of somnambulance

It terrified me at the age of two, three, four, when I looked at adults and I saw that they lied. That just chilled me to the bone, that I would fall asleep like they were; not realise that I had come from some place where none of that occurs, and was somehow dropped into this place, and I kicked against the goad a long long long time before I realised ‘ah, I’m in this place because this is the only place where there’s leverage, gravity, something to work against, build muscles, spiritually or otherwise’

It was in my teenage years, after having witnessed the Beatles and the Rolling Stones on television, y’know, I really didn’t care that much about – y’know I enjoyed it – but I didn’t care that much about the music. What interested me was more anthropological, like, how did the Beatles – most of your readers are probably too young to have witnessed it – but Beatlemania was an energetic event that traveled completely around the world, and was of an intensity that you only find in war. That blew my mind open, in the sense of what were these four young men singing?
I know that John and Paul had made a deal. They’d come to a construct, where they would use only simple pronouns, a lot: Please Please Me, She Loves You, Love Me Do. Look at their early catalogue. The first songs, they’re all the most simple, sort of common ground, personal pronouns you can get. So I wondered what was the magic of this thing that had occurred?

We had always had the blues, we didn’t know it, so we saw that the English had glorified the Americana, and those of us of that age followed the trail backwards. During about ’66-67 the guitar exploded, as its own voice, and that’s when I knew that not only did I want to be involved in it, but I began to think about how can I have an influence in this mighty machinery of rock ‘n’ roll. I formulated a picture, y’know, an image. I mean, language is linear. You can only say one word at a time. But image making, y’know, your imagination… if you don’t let it go free form, like a dog off a leash, where it’ll go just sniffing up the nearest skirt, or the nearest shop window, you can actually manage to form an image of what you want

I mean, call it magic. Moses against the Pharoahs, that was magic. What’s the greatest magic trick of all? Kill me and I’ll come back to life. You can’t beat that. That’s the most powerful magical trick in the book, and its been accomplished in the story of Christ Jesus, who also said if you have the faith of a mustard seed, which is almost invisible, and you say to the mountain “move,” the mountain will move, and I understood that he was right. I mean that’s what I brought with me

So when I was about 15-16, I delineated what the next 40 years of my life were going to look like – parameters – not exactly, but people would ask me what I was gonna do when you grow up and I’d say I already am what I’m gonna be when I grow up. I’d say it’s kind of ‘future think.’ You pretend it’s a magnet, and it draws you to it irrevocably

There used to be this wonderful – there still is – a statue of Balto. It’s a dog at the base of the Ididerod. It says dedicated to Balto who with indefatigable energy and indomitable strength, pulled the sled team to the salvation of Anchorage. Those words, “Indomitable fortitude,” they really struck me as qualities that I was going to need if I wanted this one sweet dream to come true, of being a world class, renowned guitarist, who had a impact on rock n roll. And that’s exactly what happened

 

Television and CBGBs. How did that all begin?

We needed a place to play. We had to rent our own theatre to have a place to play, an 88-seat theatre on 44th street, and we almost filled it. But then we were saying ‘we can’t just play once every three months, it’s ridiculous…’ So, Tom was walking down from the Lower East Side to China Town, where I lived and where we rehearsed. He passed Hilly fixing the awning, and, I mean it was a dive, under a flop house, there were bums, like, laying in front, or sitting on the steps drinking. Skid row for real, y’know, homeless cats trying to get a $1.65 together to buy a cot for the night and sleep on their shoes

 

So it wasn’t that it was this cool place you wanted to play

It was a place that we could make ours, where we would hold the power, be the house band, make the decisions about who would play there, who wouldn’t. When we said to Hilly what kinda music you gonna have? He said “CBGB: country, bluegrass and blues.” And what’s OMFUG? “Other Music For Undernourished Gormandizers.” We said, well, we play rock, and he said, “well, I’m not having rock,” and we said well, it’s not loud, it’s different, it’s really weird, it’s not what you’re thinking when you think ‘rock’. He said “still, I’m just not having it.” The next day I went up with our manager at the time – and mentor – Terry Ork, who had worked for Andy Warhol doing silkscreens

 

He was your roommate at the time?

Well, he had a huge loft and it had a front room – that the guy had moved out, and I was needing a place to stay – so he let me have that room. So, yeh, we were roommates

So, Terry and I went up and Terry talked Hilly into giving us a Sunday, which is the day he normally closed. How Terry talked him into it, he said what’s your worst money day? He said Sunday, sometimes I don’t even open. He says well give my band Sunday and I will guarantee you you will make more money at the bar than you do on Saturday, or I’ll make up the difference, because I’m going to invite all the Warhol people, the people from Max’s, and they’re all alcoholics. Hilly said OK, let’s see. We came in and did OK. We got paid a dollar a piece after paying for the cabs, but y’know, that made us professionals (laughs)

And then he gave us four Sundays in a row, and then a couple of other bands heard about it and starting showing up, and we decided that the best way to build the audience would be a limit, two bands per night, each one playing two sets. So, Talking Heads would play and then we would play, because we were the headliner, but then Talking Heads had the third spot, and we had the fourth spot, so if you liked one band, you really had to see the other one if you wanted to catch them twice, and this cross-polinated the audience

If you played there regularly you weren’t charged admission. I had free drinks the whole length of the goddamn scene. It was like hosting a three-year New Year’s Eve party to me

 

Was there much of a rivalry between the bands?

There was always a rivalry between the bands. But it was a healthy rivalry. It was a mutual-respect rivalry. I mean, there was almost no, like, nobody sat in with the bands. Nobody ever sat in with Talking Heads, nobody ever sat in with Television. I sat in with the New York Dolls once, y’know, and then later on it got a little more loose. We’d have jam nights in ’78/79. But mostly the bands were the bands and that was that

So Terry took over the booking. Hilly didn’t have a clue, he was clueless. He said “I don’t like much of this music, but I understand the kids…” And Terry, when he was uncertain, kinda depended upon me, so these tapes would come in – Terry would say would you listen to these, see if there’s anything good – or a band would audition or somebody would get to play once. Everybody who asked was allowed one performance. And Terry and I would discuss it, yes or no, do they go into the regular rostrum, and I would find something. We hired the person to take the door money, which was, like, $2… $4, I don’t remember exactly. It was cheap to get in

 

Two bucks to see Talking Heads and Television

And the Ramones and the Dead Boys. Maybe it was $5. But it was never much. But what started happening was there were people who were too young to be in the Warhol crowd. I mean, maybe they could get into into the back room of Max’s, where I lived, until CBGBs got underway – and still I would go there – that’s where all the heavy art people were. And then CBGBs was like, instead of this dividing line between the artist and the audience – they’ve bought a ticket and they’re a plumber – who knows what they did – y’know, and then the performers were on a big stage and high up, and there was an insurmountable gulf between the two…

But we took the door and Hilly took the bar. His wife actually had the lease. She would come in and pull the plug. On the Ramones. She never pulled the plug on us, put she pulled the plug on lots of bands. She said “I don’t want that loud music in our club.” Hilly said, “I’ll make you a deal. You can book the club over the weekends or during the week, pick four days one week and I’ll book three, and then the next week I’ll book four days and you’ll book three days, and at the end of six weeks we’ll sit down and look at the books”
Well, you can imagine what happened. Her nights didn’t make anything. It was so obvious. That shut her up (laughs). Otherwise we’d have all been completely demolished, if she’d had her way. Even Hilly, if we hadn’t busted through him, sort of like run him over like a juggernaut, like, ‘eh! we’re coming in,’ the whole scene couldn’t have taken place

 

Alchemy Live in NYC 2009

I’m familiar with Television’s albums, not so much your solo work. But I listened to Alchemy, Field of Fire, Lodestone, the Hendrix covers

You missed the Radiant Monkey

 

That’s the one with the crazy cover

That was done by John Holstrom

 

The guy who did Punk magazine?

That’s right, the guy who created Punk magazine, from whom the journalists said, “aha!” we finally have a label for this music

 

Well, there are so many stories about where that term comes from. People say that it might have been Lester Bangs, talking about the Stooges, or one of the Cleveland bands. You think it might have come from Holstrom?

I know it came from Holstrom, the magazine arriving on the NY scene. I mean, it may have been used as a word prior by – I don’t care who – y’know, but…

 

Shakespeare used it to describe weak boys who take it up the you-know-what

Like in jail, basically (laughs)

 

Yeh, it has a heavier connotation in America. I think that’s why Americans often say “punker” rather than “punk”

No they don’t! I never heard that in my whole life in America. No, I’ve heard of ‘punter’ – in American football. You’re crazy! You’ve been hearing that in England

 

Well, maybe I read it in a magazine (*or when I lived in America for 13 years)

Well y’know, then you’re basing your concept on hearsay, which is a significant problem in the world

 

Well, that’s right. The media is omnipresent and way too powerful. I see they’re beating the war drums for Iran over there, but, that’s getting into something else…

That’s why I like talking on the phone rather than preformed questions. Cos its always better as a dialogue, people should be in dialogue. Otherwise your going to ask rote questions and I’m going to answer with rote answers. It’s always better to speak to someone and find out what they are like

Richard Lloyd solo albums: Alchemy (1979), Field of Fire (1985) Real Time: live at CBGBs, April 21 & 22, 1987 (1987) The Cover Doesn’t Matter (2001) The Radiant Monkey (2007) The Jaime Neverts Story (2009) and Lodestones: Nuggets from the Vault (2010) And with Rocket From The Tombs: Rocket Redux (2004) and Barfly (2011)

Can you tell us about some of the other stuff you’ve done?

Well, I was in Rocket From The Tombs. I produced Rocket Redux, and then there was another one called Barfly. Then I did a redo, a 2CD disc of Field of Fire, where I took all the parts away

 

Stripped it of its 80s clothes?

Exactly. It was mixed by a Swedish Euro-disco guy. So I re-cut it. Basically, I saved some of the drums, some of the bass. On some things it’s just drums and then everything else is re-done; re-thought

Then, I did – because I had this debt to Velvert, and to Jimi Hendrix, because Velvert would immediately leave Jimi’s house, which was only a couple blocks from my house, and say I just came from Jimi’s lemme come over and we can practise guitar, and he would show me the stuff that Jimi was teaching him, and we would practise together, back and forth – so I did a record of Hendrix covers – ten Hendrix covers – called The Jamie Neverts Story… (* Jamie Neverts was Richard and Velvert’s code name for Jimi Hendrix when they were in public)

 

I think that’s a fantastic record

Oh, thank you. Y’know, guaranteed not to sell because… dealing with the family was ridiculous. It took them a year to OK the project

And then I found – I have thousands and thousands of cassettes – and a friend of mine had a machine that could take cassettes and make CDs out of them, or records and make CDs, or whatever. So I culled another record and put it out, called Lodestones, which some people think is the best stuff I’ve done. That’s available on download only

 

And Marquee Moon: widely considered to be one of the great rock albums of all time. If nothing else were to come from you, would that have been statement enough?

Oh God! And my participation in CBGBs, and my rooting for the Ramones, and Blondie, and Talking Heads, I mean, shit, sorry for the language, but I often say if I died yesterday, I’m content. But, y’know, I’m not. They won’t let me die. There’s other things I’m supposed to do. Some of it has more to do with the fact that I’ve always been awake, in a certain sense. And I’m a teacher. I wrote guitar lessons for Guitar World for two years, they’re available on DVD, you can also get the video portions on youtube

I’m like a musical law magnet. If you get near enough you become saturated. When I walk I leave wet musical footprints behind. When I sit down the chair gets musical. My aura is musical

 

- Fin -
 

 

 

©jonbarmak2012