Phil Jackson discusses The Luck of Eden Hall’s classic album “The Acceleration of Time” with ‘Curvey’ as he is affectionately known, and ventures into the legacy of the atomic bomb, the thoughts of Sri Ramakrishna, Curvey’s latest project Custard Flux and future plans.
Please note that this is an abridged version of a feature that will appear in the next issue of ACID DRAGON magazine.
I first came to your music through “The Acceleration of Time”: what were the main concepts driving that album and, generally what inspires you to write music?
Well, back in those days most of my inspiration for lyrics came from my daughter and things she’d say that I thought were brilliant. Music, on the other hand, usually comes to me while I’m playing an instrument. Like, I’ll stumble across a riff or a chord progression that I want to keep, so I’ll record it on my phone for later reference, unless I happen to finish the idea right on the spot. Sometimes after I get a handful of ideas recorded a couple of them work together nicely. A lot of the ideas get discarded.
When Mark Lofgren and I started writing songs for “The Acceleration of Time”, which was his title, he suggested we make it a concept album, and to keep that in mind when writing lyrics. I just started writing about anything that loosely related to time, and he did the same. After a while, we had a collection of songs that were all fine on their own, but as an album it wasn’t very strong, and I really didn’t like where it was going, so I stopped working on it. Right about that time, my wife told me she was looking for a new job, which would involve moving to another city. I went back into the recording studio and channelled my anger and sadness about having to leave my house, my band, my friends, and Chicago, into a handful of stream-of-consciousness: instrumental tracks, and then beat the drums to death over the music I had laid down, completing everything in about 5 days. I was pretty happy with the new direction, and the spontaneity of composing that way, and started thinking about a title for a new solo project, and all that, and then it dawned on me to insert these instrumental tracks in between some of the pop songs we’d written for “The Acceleration of Time”, and voila! That transformation made all the difference. I knew I had something worth releasing.
It sounds like quite a cathartic process! Your music is saturated in psychedelia in title and words: processions of marshmallow soldiers and clockwork puddings to quote. How much psychedelic music have you heard and what has stuck with you the most?
My first exposure, other than psych-pop songs on the radio, like ‘Open My Eyes’ by The Nazz or ‘Pictures of Matchstick Men’ by Status Quo, was when I bought the “Sgt Pepper” and “Magical Mystery Tour” LPs. Then Jimi Hendrix, Donovan, early Pink Floyd, and later on The Dukes of Stratosphere. I loved The Psychedelic Furs and The Church, Dream Syndicate and the first Zodiac Mindwarp releases.
How much of your music is autobiographical.
I suppose there’s always a little bit of my life experiences mixed in. I mean, a lot of ‘Blown to Kingdom Come’ is about a really hot summer night spent with a girlfriend. The violent part of the lyric was my reflection on our gun problem here in the USA, and how people’s lives are thrown in to turmoil because of lunatics and guns. A healthy Society really doesn’t need guns.
Agreed! I wanted to know about the other members of The Luck of Eden Hall. The title track was written by Mark Lofgren and is set in Wales. There’s also Carlos Mendoza at the drum stool on tracks like ‘Arthropoda Lepidoptera’ of course, although you play most of the drums yourself.
I play all of the Mellotron parts on “The Acceleration of Time”, except for a couple tracks Jim Licka played on. Everybody had busy lives, and frankly I just didn’t want to wait. I just wanted to get the music recorded as it was coming to me, so I did it all, which really wasn’t anything new in the band’s recording process. I did that on most of the The Luck of Eden Hall albums.
It must have taken a long time to get the arrangements and production of “The Acceleration of Time” the way you wanted them. I note that some of the material was from a couple of years earlier.
‘The Happiness Vending Machine’ and ‘Arthropoda Lepidoptera’ were released as a single on Headspin. Once I had inserted all of the instrumental tracks, I finished up some of the other tracks, like the end of ‘Only Robots Can Search the Deep Ocean Floor’, so they’d blend in with the new instrumentals. Then I found some nice recordings of clocks and put it all together. I went to an antique clock shop, Father Time in Chicago, and they let me put a whole bunch of old pocket watches together on the counter on some black velvet to snap a few photos. I blurred one of the images in Photoshop to create the album cover. My friend, Simon Lewis donated the cool photo for the inside spread.
‘The Happiness Vending Machine’ is, for me, a ‘greatest hit’ that deserves to be on any Psychedelic ‘Nuggets’ kind of compilation. You must be proud of this one. Finding great riffs is like treasure hunting – there were so many around in the 60s and 70s, but not so many nowadays! What are the origins of this song.
Thank you. One day, I sat down at the piano with the intention of writing a hit. Money was going to be the subject. The lyrics and riffs all happened at the piano that day. The magic happened in the studio. The fuzz guitar and the classic Sequential Circuits arpeggiator were fun. I played everything on the track, then had Carlos re-record the drum part just like I demoed it, and had Jim do the same with his Mellotron. One of the radio stations in Chicago played it quite a bit, but alas, corporations rule these days, so it never had a chance.
How did the Fruits de Mer release come about? Keith Jones has done a wonderful job promoting psych and prog leaning music don’t you think? It’s mostly covers but there are two originals from a 2012 EP that caught my ear – ‘Bangalore’ (Is that sitar I hear on there?) and ‘This is Strange’. What can you tell us about those two numbers.
I love Keith, and owe him a lot. I was contacted by Keith’s original FdM partner, Andy Braken, about recording a song for a compilation on Fruits de Mer Records. We recorded ‘Love Is Only Sleeping’, originally by The Monkees. That comp was “A Phase We’re Going Through”, the first LP FdM released. We did a bunch of cover songs for different releases, and I was really thrilled when Keith approached me with the idea of an EP with two covers and two original tracks. Yes, I used a real sitar on ‘Bangalore’. We never really pulled that song off live, though we tried. The riff for ‘This Is Strange’ came about while playing through my Echoplex and panning the signals hard right and left in my studio monitors. The flanging was accomplished the old-fashioned way by using a tape machine. No pedal or processor can match that real flanging effect, but it’s hit or miss and takes work.
As we are talking about Fruits de Mer, we must address cover versions! The Association’s ‘Never My Love’ is a very different song from, say The Doors’ ‘Crystal Ship’ and in turn these are very different to Yes’s ‘Starship Trooper’ There are also some more obscure choices like Detriot’s SRC (‘Black Sheep’) I’d say! How did you decide which ones to cover and how did you go about the process of learning them then deciding how to put your own stamp on them?
I did most of those covers on my own, or with Lofgren. I think there were only two covers that the entire band played on, ‘Lucifer Sam’ and ‘Crystal Ship’. I had Vito (Custard Flux) play with me on ‘Starship Trooper’. Usually, Keith would put out the word that a new project was underway and anyone interested should submit a song. I just picked songs I always liked and forced them to fit the criteria, like “must be flanged” or “must last at least 20 minutes”. I had a lot of fun recording those cover songs.
Custard Flux is a different band to The Luck of Eden Hall of course. There’s Vito Greco on guitar, Timothy Prettyman on bass and Nick Pruett at the drum kit (great drumming on ‘Peace and Love’ by the way) and a guest mellotron player, Andy Thompson, heard to good effect at the start of ‘Burning in the Sun’. How did this band come about and what you can tell me about its individual members?
One day, I received a call from my friend Lee in Chicago about an old harmonium at an estate sale he was working at, so I drove three hundred miles, bought the harmonium, and brought it back to Detroit. I fell in love with it, but after about a week of playing on it every day, the old burlap straps on the foot pedals broke. I decided to take it apart and refurbish what I could. When I put it all back together it sounded even better, almost like a B3 organ. It inspired me to record everything acoustically and also helped establish a new sound, different to The Luck of Eden Hall. So “Helium”, the first Custard Flux album, was just me playing every instrument. It wasn’t what I wanted, but was fun to create. When it was time to record the second album, “Echo”, I asked my friend Tim Prettyman to play double bass and a band started to form. I had been bouncing songs off Vito Greco and playing with him was always great fun. The fourth album was ‘Phosphorus’, another double album, like ‘Helium’. I wanted to do more instrumental tracks and extended pieces and was especially pleased with how we handled the title track and ‘Strawberry Squid’. I finally found a drummer, Nick Pruett, that could really play and was interested. It’s the band of my dreams. The fifth album needed to be different, now that Custard Flux was a proper band. It took seven years, but at the accelerated rate, seems like only an instant now. I decided to go all electric. Mellotron felt like a perfect fit, so I asked my friend Andy Thompson to play on the record. He’ll also be joining us on tour in the UK.
“Einsteinium Delerium” has garnered lots of great reviews including here on DISS. It is described as a “conceptual narrative of our historical atomic madness in variable time signatures”. You urge listeners to find out more about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I was particularly interested in your quote from Sri Ramakrishna when he wrote of “sectarianism, bigotry and its horrible descendant fanaticism” and human history being “drenched in human blood”. Why it is so important to you to ‘raise the level of the conscious mind’ (I am quoting from an old If number I think!) of your listeners?
Firstly, all of humanity is insane. The projected thoughts in any human mind at any given moment, insane. Shaping what we deem to be reality on a little blue speck in what seems to be an infinite universe, fucking insane. That being said, it’s really not fair to all the other forms of life on this planet to be trapped in the asylum with us, so we should do all we can to expand our collective consciousness and try to embrace our inner hominid self, and smile lovingly at our neighbours, because a chain reaction of warm fuzzy smiles is far better than nuclear winter.
It always intrigues me how artists decide what to include in the final mixes of their music. Who decides what goes in and how much spontaneity is there, as opposed to multiple takes?
I guess as the producer, I make the final decisions. Being that Tim and Vito live in Chicago, while Nick and I live in Detroit, the three hundred miles in between make it difficult to rehearse or record, so we recorded our tracks separately. I threw down a scratch guitar and vocal track for each song, then had Nick over to work out drum parts. We usually recorded two songs in each session. He brought his own microphones and we took some time to get the best drum sounds we could; it’s definitely the best I’ve ever recorded. Tim came to Detroit and recorded all of his bass parts over one weekend. I put a mic on his amp; we didn’t go direct. Vito came to Detroit and we recorded some ideas, but the bulk of his parts were recorded at his home in Chicago, then he came back to Detroit and we inserted his parts in my studio. I only gave minor guidance to the band on a few songs, and for the most part, everyone came up with their own parts and sounds. I really wanted this album to be a joint effort, and it shows. Andy recorded his Mellotron parts at home in England, of course. I tried not to over produce the mixes so the songs could be replicated in a live setting.
What are your future plans and do you get many opportunities to tour?
This will be our first tour. Booking gigs isn’t as easy as it used to be. I’ve got the better part of our next album written: the music never stops! Those who attended “The 20th Dream of Dr Sardonicus Festival” in Cardigan, Wales, will have the opportunity to purchase one of the new songs on a very limited lathe cut split single, with Moon Goose, on Fruits de Mer Records. ‘Opportunity Knocks’ is the song’s title and it’s also included in our live set. We’ll be recording an in-studio performance at Visual Radio Arts in Wilts on August 3rd, and it will be available on line for all to see and hear at some point.
Which of your albums would you particularly recommend to our readers?
My two favourite Custard Flux albums are “Oxygen” and “Einsteinium Delirium”. The Luck of Eden Hall albums would be “The Acceleration of Time” and “Victoria Moon”. Also, check out Mark Lofgren’s “Black Moon Book” project.
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