Nels Cline – Dual tones
ND: How does Jeff Tweedy work as a bandleader?
NC: Jeff is ultimately, I think everyone knows, the person with the last say. But it’s not like there’s any mystery about that. I’m so grateful to have bands that have leaders. I was in groups that were so-called democratic most of my early adult life, and I find that situation to be potentially untenable in the extreme. Sometimes things become rudderless and things become unclear. I think when somebody has a final say it makes all kinds of things easier.
I think Jeff is interesting, because he kind of lays back for a long time before he asserts himself, as far as an opinion. That allows us all to feel like we’re participating, and making music together first, and then start streamlining it along the lines he was thinking about. He’s much more curious about what we’re going to do than what he wants us to do.
ND: In guitars, you have a real Jazzmaster allegiance, right?
NC: Absolutely. You know, Jazzmasters and Jaguars were joke guitars when I was a kid. After the three Japanese guitars that I had — that were really bad — when I was 17, my parents inherited some money from an aunt who died, and my brother got a real drum set and I got a Gibson ES-335. After playing many, many different guitars I ended up with that guitar. And so I considered myself a Gibson guy.
But then in the rock band, Bloc, I was a Strat guy, because that band was all about two guys freaking out on Stratocasters. I never warmed to the Strat, frankly. During that band I went out and got a Jaguar. It was going to be a Jazzmaster or a Jaguar, whichever one I saw first, because they were still really cheap then. Because of my fixation on Television and Sonic Youth, I felt that I needed to have one of these guitars, particularly to have strings behind the bridge, to get some of those Sonic Youth effects. But also because when I finally did play one, I found the whole shape of everything, the body and the neck, the whole feel of it, extremely appealing. So in the late ’80s I got this Jaguar that I played on all my Trio records back then, and all the stuff with Mike Watt.
Then I saw Joe Baiza playing this Jazzmaster one night at an old concert series I used to do on Monday nights [at a Santa Monica club] called the Alligator Lounge. And he didn’t have his Strat, and I said, “Joe, what’s with this guitar?” And I remember thinking, man, that’s the coolest Jazzmaster I’ve ever seen, it’s black, it just looked so great. And he said, “It’s Watt’s. He loaned it to me because my Strat’s being refretted.”
I knew [Watt] had guitars, I had just never seen this one. So I asked him when we started touring. And he said, “Well, I don’t need this guitar. Why don’t you use it on tour, and when we’re done you’ll have some money and you can buy it from me.” So that’s the guitar, the ’59 black Jazzmaster — it was black, until I scraped all the paint off it and started trashing it — that’s my main guitar. That’s the guitar I play with Wilco, it’s the guitar I played with Geraldine Fibbers.
I used to just think of it as my rock guitar, and I used to just throw it around. I didn’t realize when I first had it that it was going to be the best Jazzmaster that I’ve ever played. Oops. So now it’s almost destroyed.
ND: And talking about pedals and effects and so forth, for a long time you avoided them, right?
NC: Yeah, except for when I was 12 years old and I had a fuzzbox and a wah-wah, kind of like Ron Ashcroft; they were never really a big thing for me after that. I thought I was going to be Mr. Jazz, and I went and bought this little Polytone Mini Brute and I was just going to play my 335 into the Mini Brute and play without effects.
And the next thing that happened was I started playing in an improvising group with my brother and a man named Brian Horner, who played analog synthesizers and ethnic flutes through Echoplexes, and he just started doing space noise. Vinny Golia had left an Echoplex at our house, and I dug out my old fuzzbox, and pretty soon we were just making sort of howling music from the bowels of hell. And my whole life sort of shifted direction. I realized I had sort of a strange aptitude for using gizmos, and I just started using a little bit here and there.
But to me it’s all like colors. I know it sounds trite, but it’s really about expanding the expressive aspect of the instrument, and also to create color and variation to enhance the vision of the composer. That’s all it’s about.