by Molly Booker
[This interview appeared in The Agenda #14, January 2006, and previously in longer form in the glorious-but-now-defunct Providence Music Paper.]
This interview was conducted on a chilly October morning in 2004. Alec K. Redfearn invited me into his home and allowed me to ask him questions about religion, his family, music, and addiction. In the interview, Alec returns again and again (unbeknownst to him, I believe) to the theme of pieces and shards: his shattered leg, the somewhat schizophrenic state after sobriety, his lyrics, his influences. As I typed the interview, I was struck by the way he talks and thinks—it was largely pieces and shards as well; rarely a fully formed thought. I found Alec's speaking style to be just as illustrative of his creative mind as what he actually said.
Listening to your lyrics, I'm struck with how hard is it to get clear of the religion you're raised with—for you, Catholicism.
Yeah, that's true. For me, I was really raised with the Gospels as kind of the core of my faith in being a Catholic. I feel like in some ways I'm a product of Vatican II. The angle of religion that I learned was that it's a lot of metaphor.
So, from “I am The Resurrection and The Light” to “Dashboard Lazarus” ... what exactly does that mean, anyway?
Well, “Dashboard Lazarus” was actually... a friend of mine gave me a Santeria statue that was a little magnetic Lazarus: Lazarus the Beggar, not Lazarus the Resurrected, though I make reference to both in the song. It was Lazarus the Beggar with the dogs licking his wounds. It was supposed to be a good luck charm, and it was actually one of the worst tours we've ever been on. I was viewing the resurrection of Lazarus as a sort of zombie-horror concept. [laughter] Basically, the theme of the song is that the past is going to continue to haunt you, and that the bad habits that I've tired to outrun my whole life keep cropping up again in various new disguises; resurrected perhaps by my Catholic guilt. [laughter] The Jesus of my past keeps bringing this Lazarus back to life.
Zombie Catholicism.
Yes, Zombie Catholicism. Seeing the resurrection as kind of a scary concept at that point. Actually, one verse makes reference to the dogs licking the wounds of Lazarus, and another to rolling the stone away from the grave, which is actually, when Christ was resurrected they rolled the stone away. It's all part of the scraps of religion that I remember from my youth. I haven't gone back and read a lot of [the Bible.] I've gone back and read Job, and I've gone back and read Song of Solomon and other books that I didn't really read when I was younger. Song of Solomon I thought was really interesting because it doesn't seem to have anything to do with God. [laughs] Job is really interesting. I was really very interested in the chapter when he curses the day he was born. The language in that chapter I think is incredibly funny. He goes on in incredible detail cursing the day he was born, but he wouldn't curse God's name. He curses the day he was born instead. It's just a great rant, basically.
So in the lyrics, you use shards and bits of stuff...
My lyrics tend to be scraps of my subconscious. They don't tend to be terribly linear or narrative. They tend to be impressionistic and kind of postmodern in a sense. Kind of pulling things out of the air a lot of times. I think Dylan was one of my favorite writers along those lines. And Tom Waits, too; these kind of guys that would pull these references and just kind of use them to assemble another story altogether out of them.
Your lyrics tend to pull together visual images together for me. I can almost picture a wall where you've taken passages or snippets or pictures. In fact, you're not just pulling snippets and phrases and stuff, you're pulling on some of the most maudlin and difficult imagery of this culture.
That's true, that's true. That's the stuff that was really hammered into my head as a child. I'm not saying we were a very religious family; we were Catholic. It's a kind of line of Irish-Catholic people that were very like—my father is very dedicated to his faith. He spends most of his time studying his religion—religious kinds of stuff—to the point where I think it started making him a little crazy. Well, actually I don't know if it made him crazy, it may just be symptomatic or something. It was deeply tied in with a series of nervous breakdowns that he had. I think all of it had to do with morality and child-rearing. [laughs] How to deal with your kids ... how do you keep ... how do you raise them as good Christian children—because that's your responsibility as a Christian parent: to raise good Christian children, teach them the Way and the Life—when I was not having it. I think that was hard for him.
Because that was his role, not just to bring it to adulthood, but to make sure it goes into the world as a moral, Catholic individual...
Yes.
And that can be an impossible task, though, because how do you yourself know that you're a good Catholic?
Well, that's the thing. I think that's probably why my father dug into it very deeply. He was going to become a deacon at one point, and it didn't end up happening because—my father doesn't like to talk about it—it was a very political thing. It's like anything else, any political position, you kind of have to schmooze. My father's not a schmoozer. He's a very reserved, you know, kind of shy person. He's very different from me. I feel like we're very different but I also feel like I have a lot of elements of my father's diffidence, especially as I get older. But he doesn't talk very much. He doesn't have much to say. [laughs]
When he does talk, what does he talk about?
Yard work, mostly, these days. [laughter] The car. He's a very smart guy, but he chooses ... I mean, he's very smart in terms of mathematics and things like that. Really, he's a problem solver. He's the kind of person that really can—he's got that great logical brain, which is very different from me, because I'm a very illogical thinker, really. [laughs]
Do you think that translates into the music at all, or the way you go about composition?
I'm sure that that's part of it. You know, a couple of people have mentioned my “math brain” as a composer but I just don't see it. I used to be really resistant to that. I remember picking up a text of atonal theory, where they assign integers to pitches. Schoenberg developed a twelve-tone system, it was kind of treating everything in very mathematical terms, and I was really resistant to that at first, and now I'm beginning to realize that even baroque music is treating music in mathematical terms. It follows. It's logic. [laughs] It's a set of rules that ...
... like Bach....
... and what made Bach amazing is that he broke from those rules, he made a whole other system that basically pushed music forward, propelled [it.] Before that, [the people] wouldn't play certain [music] ... they were so religious ... it's like religion and mathematics, it's almost cabalistic or something.
Music was kind of a way that you could do both and get away with it.
Yeah, exactly; exactly. And it's mathematics in terms of a set of ... you're basically creating something within a set of parameters. The way music theory is taught is, it usually starts around the baroque era, with the four-voice vocal music, and it's taught in a really accumulative manner. You kind of learn one rule and start learning to apply it. So if you take a break you forget everything, which I did. [laughter] I had one year at Rhode Island College of continuing ed classes in music theory and it totally changed the way I write, I think.
How so?
I just started ... it got me to sort of more ... perhaps it's something that didn't really occur to me before, but maybe it was just the fact that ... I don't write—what I write doesn't really sound like baroque music, but I did something that was very inspired by the “Mole” vocals; the three-part vocal thing at the end was very inspired by what I was doing in Music Theory 102 [laughs] But obviously I did it in a minor ... this phrygian mode, with a lot of minor seconds and stuff like that.
Some of that shows up in vocals in the “I Am the Resurrection and The Light” composition.
Yeah, that kind of writing I applied to “Resurrection and The Light.” TRaTL is considerably more rhythmically complex than what I did with [Mole]. The thing about TRaTL is, I was trying to create really, really layered music, where it got to the point that the tunes would be so layered that [they] retained this kind of kaleidoscopic wash of stuff; of layers of these melodies and stuff.
And how do you figure out that you need a twelve-foot hurdy-gurdy in a song?
Oh, that had been kind of serendipitous. Steve Jobe just happened to roll in just weeks before the performance was supposed to happen, and I was going through this real crisis of faith where I had basically decided like—I wasn't really—I felt like I needed one person to really validate what I was doing, and Steve kind of rolled in and read through all of the scores and said, “God, this is incredible. You've gotta finish this.” So he really kind of stepped in and kind of gave me the confidence and momentum to finish it. So the giant hurdy-gurdy—the fact that he turned up and had the instrument available and said I could put it in B-flat; it sounds really good in B-flat, and I thought, “well, okay, I can build something around that.” The giant hurdy-gurdy provides this polytonal drone to go against a canon I made out of the melody of the first song. I was looking to have some sort of noise elements—I was first thinking of actually getting Chris Kites to do some of his analog electronic kind of buzz-drone stuff. Some of the transitions I wanted more of a thick noise for. The hurdy-gurdy is still very musically ... it's a root fifth and an octave ... I think two octave strings and a low root string and a fifth ... so, if it was in B-flat, it would be three B-flats and an F ... so, it was in essence like a highland bagpipe drone, basically, but with the overtones of scraping and all the sympathetic racket that goes along with the rattling of the oil drum.
Steve had originally built that instrument for his Jeanne D'Arc opera that he did in the early 90s. And Steve actually has been a very strong influence on me as a composer; he is someone who I met when I first moved to town. He was playing vielle. His sphere of expertise is with medieval music. He's composed ... I think everything he does is deeply informed by his background in medieval music. But the way he harmonized these fiddle tunes—he'd do these English and French and Irish and American fiddle tunes, and he had this very, very interesting way of harmonizing them, totally unlike anyone else's approach to it. It's almost like this art-music approach, but with this rock'n'roll primitivism, with a lot of these plagal cadences, he's really into using four chords instead of five chords. That actually really had a huge influence on me as a writer. I came from this kind of pointy ... growing up on bands like Slayer and this kind of metalish stuff that ... these heavy metal guys that left the blues scales to sound more like Bernard Hermann; to sound more like horror film sound tracks which were basically experimental classical music. [laughs] It was given a practical context.
When did you switch out of the metal scene?
Well, I got into punk from metal. I was listening to metal when I was 14 years, 15 years old. I started stretching out first into like sort of Alice Cooper Band early stuff, which is more like psych or prog. Once I got into that, I also got into the speed metal—that was like mid-80s. That was real cross-over music, that's where a lot of suburban metal kids got into punk; like from Metallica they got into the Misfits or whatever. I ended up getting really into Black Flag—I remember the first couple things I bought. I bought the Gang Green “Skate to Hell / Alcohol” 7-inch; I bought Never Mind the Bollocks, which I thought sounded incredibly tame. [laughter] I kind of grew to love it, but at the time I thought it was kind of tame. I bought that at the same time I bought Damaged by Black Flag, which I thought was some of the most insane music I ever heard; I loved it. It was so chaotic and so swaggeringly nihilistic.
[laughter] Nihilists don't swagger.
Well, no; Mick Jagger swaggers, and I always thought he was—he's written some of the most nihilistic lyrics. He's actually one of my favorite lyricists. The Stones were singing just this incredibly dark stuff…. “Dead Flowers” is like this joyful sort of swaggering song about being a heroin addict. The whole thing is just such a “Fuck you,” such a “Fuck you” vibe; it has a certain kind of power that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck when I first heard it.
What happened when the Slayer Reign in Blood came out, which I think is one of the most important records in the past 20 years—it's such a powerful record, it's just ridiculous in so many ways, but it's so extreme—but I think, listening to that kind of stuff, I got in my head these kind of angular, angry, almost atonal set of melodies. You know, I think those guys were so ahead—they were one of the first metal bands to completely lose that rock'n'roll blues thing and completely going for—there's no trace of blues on that record at all. Even on the Metallica record, there were a little bit of those bluesy sort of phrases. I don't know if [Slayer] were the first to break from it completely, but that record really contains no trace of the blues. It's atonal music, basically. I don't know if they had a lot of method to their madness; I mean they sound—it's—there's elements to me of Bernard Hermann and free jazz and stuff in that record; despite that the rhythms are very constant and the lyrics are sort of shock value.
Do you ever wish you could go back and figure out what the hell those guys were listening to in the eight months prior to then?
Yeah; I get the feeling it would be terribly disappointing. (laughter) I mean, I don't really know this, I mean, I've read some interviews with them where they've cited 20th century music, but I think they were just trying to sound smart. (laughter) I think they accidentally stumbled on to what they were doing. Well, I don't know if that was necessarily true. They might have just been guys that watched a lot of horror films and kind of got into those sounds ... but they're also part of the lineage of bands, each one raising the bar, moving louder, faster, more machine-like, and less sort of traditionally melodic and more angular.
But, you know, when I started writing for the accordion, I started basically as a way to learn how to play it. And I was going through the Palmer Hughes set of accordion instructional books, which were these songs like "The Glow Worm" and "Michael Row Your Boat Ashore" and stuff like that, so when I started writing, I already had those kinds of shapes already under my fingers, but then I started infusing it with this sort of freneticism that was—you know, I think a lot of people thought I was listening to a lot of King Crimson, and I had listened to some King Crimson—but I think I was being informed more by these angular, metalish shapes, but then with this bouncy sort of accordion [feel].
So, it's part of the local story that you used to be a heroin addict. What was it like telling your folks that you were an addict?
[laughs] I think they had suspected, because I was not the kind of person that wore my addiction with any grace. [laughter] So telling my parents that I was an addict was obviously something that became necessary to do.
How old were you when you started using [heroin]?
I think I was about 24, 25 when I started using it.
That seems awfully old to start using.
I know, I know. It was almost—I consider it a mid-twenties crisis that I was going through. There's a whole lineage to all of this. Basically, when I started playing accordion, the whole grunge, Seattle—what I consider to be a complete reduction, almost like a revisionist movement to me—punk had actually started to evolve into something else, that was over the course of the 80s, and that was this kind of weird Puritanistic reactionary sort of backwards movement that I was against at the time. [laughs] So as a reaction, I stopped listening to rock; really stopped listening to new bands, well, except for weird English and European prog rock; stuff like Can and bands like that. But what I really got into was Irish music and lots of gypsy and Eastern European stuff, and a lot of free jazz and stuff like Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, stuff like that. That's when I was doing the bulk of my writing, the bulk of my learning how to write was in that period. So, when I started getting back into rock music, there were a lot of weekends of heavy drinking and pot smoking and stuff in that phase. I was living upstairs from the old AS220 at that phase, which was above Club Babyhead. We were in the top floor of that building, so every weekend was a party at my house, basically. It was like this "fun" scene, you know. What ended up happening was that I ended up quitting my job, then I was available to drink heavily seven nights a week, basically, which I did. And you know, I kind of had this weird, romanticized Baudelaire-esque vision of this sort of like veritas—I'm going to plug into something; I'm going to plug into some cathartic state by just drinking all the time.
Then I got hit by a car, which was unrelated to the drinking, but what it did was... I was in a lot of pain, so I had to rely on a lot of opiates to get me through the beginning of that. And I wasn't on opiates for very long, I was weaned off of them very quickly, but I had gotten a taste. I switched to pot and booze again when I was hobbling around on crutches for six months. And then when I got a job again, it was where I had to move around a lot. I got a job where I had to be on my feet a lot. I didn't go to physical therapy—I didn't have insurance.
You cracked up your leg pretty bad.
I basically had two broken legs, one hairline fracture, one really broken, where they had to put a titanium rod in and sew it back up. When I got back up and running again I was working at the cafe at the new AS220 when it moved. And they had just gotten their beer taps, which was really bad news for me, because after work I'd just get shit-faced drunk. You know, I started kind of re-integrating into the rock scene, which is when I think the Amoebic Ensemble started to become louder and more brash; we were playing more rock shows and stuff like that. And right about the time that I was doing that, heroin was starting to become popular among kids in bands. And I already had a taste for it, and I was already plugged into the kind of nihilistic, wanting to reach some sort of trance, cathartic state; because I thought it would aid the music; that it'd be some sort of weird spiritual ... well, maybe not spiritual journey, but maybe some kind of ... I don't know. I think I was just restless. I wanted something to happen. I wanted to throw some wild, chance elements into my life that would propel me ....
We've talked before about how heroin addiction is in some ways a passive death wish.
Yeah, you know, there are definitely ways in which that might have been there, but it was also sort of a life wish [chuckles] in the sense that I wanted to experience everything. I wanted to know what it was like; I wanted to experience this kind of transformation. I was just interested to fuck it up a little bit; to derail it....
Not just to push the envelope, but to rip it.
Yes. And I thought it was a real rift from conventional wisdom, you know—“I think it'll be good to be a junkie!” That's really, really psychotic thinking when you think about it. I thought, “I'll experience things that none of my other friends are experiencing,” and I was right, [laughs] but not in a good way.
Do you think there's a connection between an addictive personality and musicianship?
I think people who are musicians who explore are going to explore altered mind-states, and one thing that's not commonly known about—when you think about “heroin addict” you think about someone passed out on the street, but heroin is a very hallucinogenic drug in a lot of ways. You enter these trance dream states and I think that as a musician—it's not like LSD, or something, but you have these visions, and I think that anyone who has explored drugs as a means toward creativity has ... I think it's a very common thing for musicians to explore sort of altered mind states.
What about the addiction side of it though?
Well, the addiction side of it is ... well, I think that artists and musicians tend to live in a world of unreality. That may be a very Republican view of it, [laughter] but there's some truth to that, which is part of it.... It's a commitment to a world of unreality. Maybe the unreality reflects your own reality; maybe your own unreality is a piece of it, but it's a world of unreality. It's this completely abstract thing. There's no real use for music, in the very utilitarian, Ayn Rand sense of usefulness, you know, if you want to get really Puritanical about it. I mean, you know why these religious extremists ban music ... Well, probably because it competes with their concept of spirituality, but I've argued that in the world of the pragmatic thinker—which I am not a pragmatic thinker—but I like to try to see things from, I try to see things from other people's shoes a lot.
The experience of other states of mind.
Yes, exactly. And you can also argue that money and wealth is a state of unreality, it's so abstract, though it seems more tangible. [laughs] But I think that artists and musicians deliberately seek out the intangible. The really good ones do, anyway.
I read back over the lyrics to “The Resurrection and The Light” this morning. It's a eulogy for dead friends, right?
Yes. The piece is all about death; it's about trying to grasp death, to process death, and also try to process faith, you know ... and there's no resolution. [laughter] The piece is musically and lyrically completely unresolved, and the lyrics are more poetic and more image-driven than narrative, and I wanted that; I wanted to kind of leave it open to interpretation.
It seems that a lot of the lyrics are about the body-experience of mourning. It's not an intellectual piece whatsoever; it's the clawing at the walls and the heartbeats and the radiators, and it's a very physical—a very visceral experience of mourning.
Yeah, it's a sort of loneliness, and what you can interpret as ghosts, ghostly sounds; a sort of—more the absence of some sort of conversation. It's the sounds of your general environment transforming into something ghost-like. I sort of had a really deeply paranoid period when I was living downtown in a really noisy building. I had this horrible anxiety. This was shortly after getting out of addiction, the first year in. I was convinced that there was someone coming up to murder us every day, like someone was going to come to the door, so I was listening to the building and the clanging and the scraping ... and I really think that that place was haunted, too, because I'd find these cold spots on the floor a lot. It was weird ... it was a weird vibe. But I think a lot of it was also just the shaking off the raw nerves of post-addiction; being exposed and all that kind of ties in with that experience.
How long did it take to you to kind of get your skin back on?
Ah, it took a while. I was really convinced that people were going to climb in my windows and butcher me in my sleep for about two years after [getting out of rehab]. I was deeply paranoid about people coming to kill me for a while. [laughs] I haven't really told anyone this, actually. To the point where I couldn't sleep. To the point that I was terrified all the time. You know, what was interesting is that I was starting to feel that way when I was on the heroin, too. The last round of it, when I would nod out, it would become rather nightmarish and horrifying. You know, the visionary aspect, the hallucinatory aspect of the drug really started turning on me at the end.
How?
I actually started getting more into cocaine at that point, and the heroin was there to kind of take the edge off the coke. But it started to feel like there was a deep paranoia that got instilled in me and it lasted a couple of years. I didn't feel safe anywhere; that was the big problem. It was almost like reverting to a child-like state. It was a deep terror. [long pause] I think I addressed a lot of that terror in TRaTL, too; this sort of fear of your demise or your death ... but there's more to it than that. The problem is that the writing—when I write, it's these scraps of things that have been going through my head for the past few years, and I don't have a very deliberate idea of what I'm doing at all. [laughter] I know that I'm trying to move the imagery in a certain direction, and I have this sort of overall thing that I'm thinking, but it's never as simple as—I can never break it down to a narrative, unfortunately. It all just becomes scraps and pieces of things that assemble a picture that maybe would be better suited to a visit to a psychologist than an audience. [laughter] I don't know. That's a rough thing to say. [laughs]
