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CWAS #8
Summer 2001
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Spring 2001
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Summer 2000
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Winter 1998/9 - The Lost Issue
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Summer 1998
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Chris von Sneidern
by Matt Dornan
pictures
by Steve Pitman
published version
 What first
drew you to San Francisco and what about it keeps you there?
Well it's the best American city, bearing in mind that New York is, sort
of, fantastic but not liveable. Not for the lifestyle that I want to live,
you know. I don't want to work on the treadmill and, I think, to survive in
New York you have to do that, or live in worse squalor than I'm willing to
put up with. San Francisco beats LA by a mile. It's a good looking place,
the only problem with San Francisco - though it's been better lately - it's
just not a good town for women. For one thing it's the gay mecca which
doesn't really affect me, but a lot of people complain that the spirit of
good hetero play is just... not as exciting. It's a big thing there you
know? Not just gayness but being different. San Francisco's the land of
broken toys, the city of broken toys. You go there... it's a place to be
yourself, be different or whatever.
People are trying to hold onto the Sixties spirit?
It's not just a Sixties thing, San Francisco's geographically in the middle
and out of the way. It doesn't have a lot of influence from anywhere around
it. It's been through a lot of changes lately. It's definitely the best I
can think of for who I am. It suits me. I tried New York, I didn't like it.
It's like you have to become a New Yorker to make it there.
Which, if any, of the bands you played in prior to your solo career
helped to shape your sound?
Well, the only band I played in... well I had my own band when I was a kid,
but that's like saying I fiddled around with girls when I was fourteen - it
doesn't really count until you're an adult... at least in my case. The
Sneetches... if anything I learned from them how to rehearse and how to put
up with rehearsal. They would just rehearse shit over and over and the way
I rehearse now, it's like 'Boom! Geddit? It's not working?' We don't play
the song. And Flying Color, I can't say either is most like my thing. I joined
The Sneetches because it was the best thing available to me and it was fun.
I had to play bass, it was a compromise for me. And I couldn't write songs
for the group either, so I left them to join Flying Color and left Flying
Color because I was being repressed, you know? Being told my songs weren't
good enough and that kind of thing which , with hindsight is, I don't
know... insane.
Were these songs heading in the direction you wanted to go?
It's what people do, you know? It's like, say you're the leader of the
group and somebody comes along who's obviously on their way to being the
same thing, be a band leader. If you're a real leader, visionary, then you
give your people away to excel on their own. You figure out a way that's
mutually beneficial, but to tell someobody that's with you 'You're not good
enough' therefore you maintain your 'position' - that doesn't get anybody
anywhere. Flying Color essentially broke up when I left the group. I didn't
really answer your question, but I learned a lot from those groups and I
learned, basically, not what to do.
So now you're in charge, how to you choose the people you work with?
What do you look for?
I'm still working on that. I think I know what I'm doing and then I pick a
drummer who I think's good but is too fucked up to make it to the studio or
I'll pick people who I think will work but who live three thousand miles
away, so i have to organise them in New York and put them all in a studio
and then I have to squeeze what should take three weeks into a two and a
half day session. I'm still going back and forth on what works and what
doesn't.
I guess that's the luxury of recording on your own.
Yeah, on the last record, Wood & Wire, I was trying to 'open up my
world' because I'd made those first three records basiclly playing
everything and controlling the whole thing and it had that sound, you know
how the Jason Falkner records... it's that sound of one man playing
everything. No matter how good a musician you are you can only, in the
moment approach it from maybe three directions, but you work with other
people even out of their inability to grasp what you're doing they're going
to approach your idea from another direction.
This is most obvious to me with Circles when compared to the version on
Yellow Pills 4. It's more natural sounding, it's lost that slickness.
Both those versions are people playing, a bass player and a drummer, but
the drummer that played on the demo just doesn't have the chops that Dennis
Diken has. So he couldn't do those Kenny Jones fills that are on Wood &
Wire. Ringo couldn't have done those fills either. When Wood & Wire
came out one of my fans said the version of Circles just isn't as good as
the Yellow Pills, what happened? What did you do? Like I would know what
the difference is. Any time you set up the instruments in a room, even if
it's the same people, you wipe the slate clean. You can't go back and
recreate. Sometimes you can amazingly recreate but often it's not the case
and every time you record the song over you may take a step closer but you
often end up taking two steps away and that's the problem with doing demos,
and that's the problem with having your own studio because the demos become
the definitive version of them. Yet they've got a crap drum sound or you
rushed an aspect of it so youdon't feel comfortable putting it out on a
record. But I've probably put out more stuff like that... I've never set
out to make a record. I've always made tapes and said 'well, there's a
record.' In my opinion my records don't sound that good sonically. Even
Wood & Wire's a little dirty, grungy.
People that employ you as a producer, what are they looking for?
I often wonder about that, you know. Because I can't see it, whatever it is
that I have. Like 'You wanna work with Chris, ya know?' Some things are
second nature to me, I'll hear something and go 'that's wrong, don't do
that' but then I'll start second guessing myself and go 'wait a second,
this isn't a CvS record'. What I'm not comfortable with works perfectly
well with someone else, so I try to open my mind up with that. But then,
for example, working with Khoi on his record and I notice the difference
between the record that we did a couple of years ago, the Big Wheel record
[Rugby Train] and the new sessions that we just started last week. It's
almost like the producer thing where they have their fingerprints on
everything? Like it's an ego trip? I think you gotta do that in order to
stay interested. I played bass on his tracks and, all of a sudden, I can
relate to it more? Seems really selfish and self-centred but it's what it
comes down to, I can get my head around it because I'm part of it, I dunno.
How did you get involved with the Pete Ham projects?
The guys came to my show in 94 and wrote me a letter, actually, 'Went to
your show, I'm a big fan' and all this Badfinger stuff and 'I'd like to
have you play on these demos of Pete Ham' and I'm like 'why?'
Were their any ethical issues?
Totally! I didn't wanna do it and on the first volume, the 7 Park Ave, I didn't
play. I just edited, chopped up the songs from three minutes down to two,
down to one forty five. So all those songs are bits now. And then on volume
two I played and produced some tracks, overdubbed some drums and bass, and
I felt really timid about what to put on there. I would have done it
different now, I'd have gone the whole hog.
Did you do it because if you didn't then somebody less respectful might
have?
Well, that and there was money involved! 'Oh, okay, I guess if you really
want me to do it.' I personally would rather just hear it as is. But the
guy who had the final say wanted a full-fidelity thing which, I guess,
makes sense but I think a pure fan doesn't want to hear Chris von Sneidern
or anybody else, you know? I think I could have gone further but because
there's no feedback from the artist I was second guessing myself the whole
time.
Forgive me for not owning records by Paula Cole and Jewel but your bio
tells me that you've worked with them.
Well Paula Cole did some demos at my house when she was doing promotion for
the Harbinger record I think it was, her first Imago record. We did like
four songs in a day or something. As a list of, you know, 'clients' it's a
recognisable name, she got her Grammy three years later. And Jewel, we did
two versions of a Fleetwood Mac song and two versions of our national
anthem for the Superbowl and I played acoustic guitar. I guess the funny
bit was playing the acoustic guitar real close to Jewel who's singing the
national anthem... it's like 'let's sing another song, baby!' It's kinda
funny with big stars, cause Jewel's a big star right? I opened a show for
her in San Francisco three or four years ago and... nothing really special,
you know? Good looking girl, as far as what we're told a good looking girl
is. She's got blonde hair, big tits, you know. She wears leather... but not
my type. Apparently I'm not her's either! Everybody on the session for
those tracks we did went on tour with her, all of them except me! Because
her manager said 'That Chris von Sneidern is trouble, we're not hiring him
to take on tour!'
It says you worked with E of the eels. I've scanned my CDs for your name
but...
After he recorded A Man Called E, the second record that came out the tail
end of 93, in maybe February of 94 he was putting together a band because
Parthenon Huxley was splitting off and we have mutual friends. I auditioned
and 'Yeah, he can play guitar and sing, he's got the gear.' And I think he
was in a place where it was like 'yeah, I gotta do this thing' but he was
really uninspired I think. You now the drummer for eels, Butch? He was
there, he wasn't called Butch then, and this guy Chris Solberg - he's a
little older, he's more like a company guy, he's not a hipster you know,
his time came in the early seventies you know? - and I was just in it for
the allure you know? Like 'he's got a label deal, maybe this will help me
in my career' and that actually kinda ruined things because E and I were
kinda friendly but then it got down to this money thing with the manager
and the label was trying to figure out how to not spend money, so they
trying to cut it out of everyone's weekly salary and this other musician's
like 'well we'll just hold out man, tell 'em we're not going on tour unless
they give us eight-fifty a week plus thirty-five a day' which is a fucking
lot of money. But I said 'I'll go along with that', solidarity, you know?
Looking back on it, from a position of wanting to promote a record I'd have
gone 'you're a fucking asshole, man. C'mon, you won't do it for
five-hundred a week?' But I'd just put ut Sight & Sound, I didn't
really want to go on tour with anybody else, there really wasn't anything
to gain from it. I didn't really like playing his songs. It felt like, at
the time, he was not into it. He didn't want to rehearse, he'd want to goof
off, he wasn't having a good time. Then, shortly after that, his whole
thing turned around. He got dropped, essentially, and then a couple of
years later he got his deal with Dreamworks.
He stopped writing songs about sunny days, it was all doom and gloom
from then on.
He always had that in him. He was a downer, always. He had that Beatle-y
influence from Parthenon. The record to get, apparently, is the Mark
Everett record, it's called the Mark Everett something... 'Cool Dude'
record or something. It's one of those things that if you were to show it
to him he'd like flip, he's apparently not comfortable with it. We've
really gone on about E! That suicide record was a bit of a downer!
What makes a good pop song?
I dunno, what makes a good dinner?
The right ingredients, I guess.
And the right presentation, the want to hear it. It's in the ear of the
beholder.
When you get an idea do you always know where it's going to go?
No, I'll put it through the filters, you know? I'll see if I can play it on
the guitar but... [a police siren wails] what's that? Oh, they're coming in
here! Selling mobile phones without a permit? Er, no how do I take the
germ...
I don't want to reduce it to a formula but do you have a method or do
all songs come differently?
There's some that come to me in the street, where it's purely a melody and
those are usually the strongest, memorable ones. But usually the simpler
ones, I've been writing more of those rather than write the song by the
chords and then put the melody on top of it. That's how I used to write
them, bang out chords and then fit words... and I find that tunes are
harder to stick in the head than those that are led by melody rather than
words. It makes sense saying that but most songwriters sit and bang out
chords and 'da, da, da-da, da.' I do it both ways, sometimes I'll have a
tune and then I sit and write words and fiddle around with the phrasing and
write a few verses with a particular phrasing and then try some that have
fewer words, to try to, like, simplify it? It seems like, as often as
people say 'keep it simple' no one ever does.
The key is to make it appear simple.
Just leave a few edges in but keep it... I guess if you were to take some
song of mine that you would say was a kinda craft-y one I wouldn't be able
to tell you how I came upon it, you know? Those things are gifts, like a
good guitar line or a good gig. I'd like to think I know what goes into
preparing for a good show or a good recording session, but I can give
examples of how good preparation leads nowhere. It's like that whole thing
where if you have a good rehearsal, you'll have a shit gig, and vice versa.
But the good thing about songs is that if they suck you can just write
another one, or you can take a piece of it and regurgitate it. We've all
heard box-sets where there was a piece of a song, like some Zombies song
that's half of something off of Odyssey and Oracle.
There's the vocal melody of The End off of Wood & Wire that is
reminsicent of Bob Dylan's My Back Pages, an homage or lucky accident?
Well it does a kind of descending chord thing and the phrases are maybe the
same meter in a lyrical sense, syllables and that. It's not a stretch for
me to have gone Dylan-esque on that, especially "Waiting for you to
make up your mind in the end." When I first played the record for John
Wesley Harding, he was like 'Doh, never heard you do Dylan'. When we were
doing the recording I was telling the drummer, 'kind of a Blonde on Blonde
feel on this.' I mean I was aware it was kind of Dylan-y, but he was...
what's that 'You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine'... he was doing this [mimics
percussive pattern]. I was like 'What's that!?' He's like 'well, I was
going for an Obviously Five Believers thing.' Uh, just play the song! So there
is that. When I've got to catch myself headed into somebody else's
territory I don't usually stop but I become really aware of what it is that
it's just like.
I didn't mean in it a plagiaristic way. It's when you find yourself
taking a phrase from one song and in your head it takes you to another in a
very natural way.
Good work, you could be a musicologist.
What I was leading to is that when you write something that's catchy,
aren't you always convinced that someone's already done that?
Well it's a small palette really. If I just go onto auto-pilot it just
sounds like Rubber Soul, and I've done that, I've played that you know what
I mean? It all sounds like 1966, I can't do that. But growing up on that
stuff it's in there, you can't blame people for sounding like that but I
guess you can blame them for not trying to grow. Squeeze'll always sound
like that sound, Crowded House will always have their sound but that's no
reason to just re-hash. One thing about The Beatles that's kinda strange
and awesome is that every record was different. They have I Am The Walrus
and ELO based there whole career on that one song. That was just one little
thing.
And this is why people are afraid to diversify now. Like with The
Sportsmen project, you have to rename a Chris von Sneidern record because
you're not making the music Chris von Sneidern is expected to make.
You know what it was? Well I fell victim to insecurity, because I was
afraid people weren't gonna like it. So you know what I did? I made people
not like it. If I'd just said 'This is the new Chris von Sneidern record,
it's a little different, got some different players, really cool. Don't be
confused by the presentation, it's the same old CvS,' people would have
probably been more receptive to it. But because I was making all these
excuses for it, presenting it under a different name and all this other
bullshit, people got turned off. So I'm gonna put it out as a Chris von
Sneidern record. Chris von Sneidern 'as' the Sportsmen or 'with' The
Sportsmen, or 'in league with' The Sportsmen. I was going to go back and
pull out the cover songs and pop in some new things. There's eleven songs
on there, seven originals and four covers. Two Allen Touissant songs,
there's a song Wilson Pickett had a hit with, 'Boogaloo Down Broadway', and
there's another song called 'She's Looking Good,' or a Roger Collins song?
I was just going through some soul records and just picked a bunch of songs
I thought were cool. It was a weekend project. We just had two days in the
studio, we just set up and blasted through the songs. The whole thing was
more of an experiment for the live thing, the persona of being over the
top. Being a singer-songwriter you have this thing... with The Sportsmen on
was on tables, I had a wireless unit, I was running around screaming, doing
sermons! I was like getting down on the floor and screaming 'I wanna tell
you...' It was a little bit silly, this skinny white guy trying to be James
Brown. It's like 'get the hell outta here, man!' But I had fun. We only did
four dates, the lodge is closed for The Sportsmen.
That should be your perogative. You shouldn't have to fit within the
boundaries set by other people.
This is the age of marketing. The only reason the pop community exists is
because it's narrow. There's a lot of fear out there, people are afraid of
being out of their little 'thing' because then they don't know about it.
It's like 'I don't know about that so I can't talk about that to my pop
friends. We can all like the Owsley record.' The Owsley record is not Power
Pop. It's a good fucking record, but it's not Power Pop. Then there's all
those bands that I kinda know, like Cherry Twister. I wouldn't know Cherry
Twister if it was playing right now, but I know the name. Mannix, ditto.
Myracle Brah? I think I like 'em but I don't remember, you know.
Splitsville? I think I like them too but aren't they the same band? There's
so many of those niche market bands and I try to follow it but I'm not a
music follower which is kinda weird coming from a musician but I just don't
budget in buying all those records.
Given that Sportsmen songs were based on 60s US soul and you're tendency
to cover songs from the sixties and seventies (during his two date UK trip
Chris played Mott The Hoople's All The Young Dudes, Big Star's Ballad of El
Goodo and Simon & Garfunkel's Sound of Silence), are there any
contemporary songwriters you would cover? Or have you given up on modern
music?
I haven't really given up, I just haven't stayed up with it. The thing is
there's so much stuff that I know that I don't know. Like the Small Faces
box set? I know Sha-La-La-La-Lee and Itchycoo Park, but that's it. I've
have a lot of catching up to do so I guess I'll catch on up stuff that's
from a richer era of creativity.
For me, the latter half of the nineties has been as rich a time as any,
particularly in terms of songcraft. We've lost that 80s thing where the
producer was the star, the musician just a vehicle for that.
Production-wise things have been really interesting [recently], kinda
harking back to the seventies. I just don't know where to start.
You start a magazine and then you're sent lots of records that would
otherwise pass you by. For every five that suck there's one that will spark
your interest.
Or I could just read yours.
When you produced the John Wesley Harding record, Awake, he expressed a
desire to use drum loops and stuff, yet it's a pretty straight sounding
record.
You know what the problem was with that? Neither of us knew jack shit about
hip-hop, nothing. We didn't have loops, you gotta go fine 'em. You gotta go
get the loops. We were like trying to do them, both of us were willing. You
won't catch me doing that stuff on my records. He was like 'I want this
Tricky thing' you know? I was like 'I don't hear it, why are you doing
that?' That's not my bag. I was like 'shall we use a drum machine?' There's
good things about the Awake record. Some weird sounds and some echo things
that we did, some filter things. But the hip-hop thing was the weak part of
my trick-bag. He was going through a change. He didn't want to make those
Andy Paley records any more with the Attractions backing him up and that
whole circus.
And then he went on to the Nic Jones thing.
That may go down as being one of his more listenable records. That and New
Deal. Those are the only two that I'd put on.
Not Awake?
Tracks from it. There's some tracks on there that are as good as anything
on the two I mentioned. In my opinion.
Are drum loops something you'd consider trying with your own material?
I actually experimented with some stuff just this year with some loops,
putting drums over loops, that's cool and it thickens up the sound
somewhat. You don't need to put shakers and things on, it's just this thick
sound. A lot of times you can use loops as a click track rather than
[imitates click track].
One last question. Relationship songs, do you consider them a bottomless
well?
You know, a lot of my songs are written and presented in the form of
relationship songs, you know? 'You did . . .' A lot of my songs are spiritual
songs, they're not about anybody, they're searching songs. It's all about
figuring out why you are and why everyone is and why anything has to be.
Philosophical bullshit. In the last couple of years, the lyrics have been
about changes, why people do what they do, why I do what I do. A lot of
times I'll start a song talking about someone else and then I go back and
turn the 'You's to 'I's. It depends who's singing them. You can take a
really dumb song and have it mean something if you sing it right, or you
can take a song that means a lot but if you don't know what it's saying and
you sing it it won't come across. Sound of Silence, right? That's a heavy
song. I never really realised it until I studied the lyrics. Once I
understood it, I'll never forget the lyrics now.
Red House Painters cover I Am A Rock and stripped of the trademark
harmonies it reveals something darker.
Well I Am A Rock's a little more obvious. I never really heard their
version, is it really down? Shock!
You're not a fan, I take it.
Well... Eitzel Junior. There's thousands of miles between you and them, to
me it's like 'oh, those fucking guys down the street.' It's not very
precious to me.
CWAS #5 - Summer
2000
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