The Stereo Sanctity Interview # 1:
Carl Simmons speaks…

The first Carl Simmons song I heard was “Scotty Guffy sings”, which was included on the CD that accompanied issue #7 of Yeti magazine. I had no idea who Carl Simmons was, or Scotty Guffy for that matter, but the song really stood out as something special.

The vocalist sang in an unnaturally high-pitched male voice, sounding kind of like a big, wise, sad baby. The recording was clearly pretty lo-fi, with weird echoes and bits of distortion around the edges, but the song’s basic folk guitar still sounded beautifully clear and bright, carrying a melody so perfectly formed it was hard to believe it didn’t belong to a million songs already – as instinctive and calming as “Dem Bones” or “Goodnight Irene” or “Ring Of Fire”, yet wholly new. And the lyrics that this big, sad baby voice was singing over the top of this tune seemed strange and fascinating and kinda alien, certainly residing on a wholly different plain from your standard folk/blues themes. “Now I know secret science schemes / and I know snakes don’t float,” I heard him sing, “and I enjoy invisibility / even when I don’t / lay down down / in the arms you’ve found / slip away the waterfall / slip away the ground”, before returning again to the hypnotic chant that runs through the song: “skeleton bone, bone, body / my body takes me home”.

Sequenced on the CD in-between loads of whacked out garage/punk groups, noise artists and rediscovered Mississippi blues dudes, “Scotty Guffy Sings” sounded like something from a different world entirely, simultaneously far more naive and gentle, yet also far more emotionally involved and involving, than any of the stuff that surrounded it. It was clear that whatever this guy was singing about, it mattered to him a great deal.

Mystery is hard to maintain in this day and age though, and a quick web search led me straight to the Sacred Bones label, who recently (re)issued Carl Simmons’ album “Honeysuckle Tendrals”(sic) as a limited edition LP with eight songs, and as a 70 minute CD with over twice that number. A brief press release explained that the songs were recorded straight to tape by Simmons in 1999, and initially distributed in a homemade cassette edition in his home town of New Bedford, Massachusetts.

I proceeded, er, acquire the songs on the LP version of the album (the CD subsequently ordered and recieved), and what can I say? “Honeysuckle Tendrals” completely blew me away. It is simply one of the most wonderful records I’ve heard in years.

Over a background of garbled conversation extracts, echoed sound collages and fragments of mysterious verse, weird, over-dubbed vocal harmonies and that same slow and methodical guitar picking, Simmons’ distinctive voices sings a whole series of beautiful, multi-faceted songs, each of them anchored to a melody as undeniable as the one gracing “Scotty Guffy..”, equal parts atavistic folk, revival tent hymnal, anthemic FM rock. Each song seems to celebrate moments of cosmic splendour or deep sadness, with the lyrics veering freely between science fiction, folklore, turn of the century pop culture and everyday trivia, like psychedelic hymnals from a world where imagination, history and human relationships exist together in one eternal now.

The songs on “Honeysuckle..” move with a stream of consciousness fluidity that makes it hard to pull a straight narrative out of them, but their flow of mismatched imagery rings truer with each listen, leaving you free to pull out and create different narrative threads and mental pictures from them endlessly.

Similarly, I could continue in my praise indefinitely, but I think an mp3 example will suffice far better:

Mp3> Kaspar Hauser

Anyway, it soon became clear that whilst he remains an unfairly obscure figure in the music world at large, Carl Simmons is far from some lost enigma sinking into the whispered tapetrader folklore. He’s got a myspace page that says he is currently based in Providence RI, and he’s got an email address, and he plays gigs sometimes backed by a full band, The Human Orchids.

I’d been thinking anyway of branching out with this weblog and doing some interviews with great/interesting bands who haven’t got a lot of press attention, and in this case it occurred to me that I know NOTHING about the man who made this incredible music, and I was genuinely interested in finding out more, so, y’know…. one thing led to another, and the results of my email conversation with Carl Simmons are below.

****

So to begin at the beginning, because I know nothing other than the music on the album: Who is Carl Simmons? Where are you from, what do you do, when did you start playing music, etc?

I was born in New Bedford Massachusetts and have lived there most of my life. My mother’s side of the family is Norwegian and my ancestors were farmers until my grandparents moved to America and my grandfather became a fisherman. I started playing music in my early twenties. I started by making mix-tapes and then layering tracks with multiple boom boxes and, eventually singing over that and then playing guitar and, singing and things turned into songs.

How did you record ‘Honeysuckle Tendrals’? – it sounds amazing, with all the textures of sound and background noises and things…

Thanks, 'Honeysuckle' was the first album I recorded on my Tascam 424 4-track. It was recorded in my bedroom. I played a two-string guitar, plucking it back and forth like tick-tock-tick-tock. I borrowed a set of effects pedals but I don’t know what type or brand or anything. There are old recordings that my family made in the early 70’s that I used as backing tracks and some recordings of my friends having fun that I made with a handheld tape recorder.

Do you alter the pitch of your voice on your songs? It sounds very unusual…

On those songs I did alter the pitch. There is a knob for that. I think I was just not really confident with my singing voice yet. It would have been really odd to not speed up the vocals back then. That was the only album I did that on, however.

Are there any stories behind the songs on ‘Honeysuckle Tendrals’ that you’d like to share? They sound as if they’re full of personal details, but the imagery is also really fantastical, and I find myself making up stories when I listen to some of the songs.

The overall story behind the album was that I had just moved back home after abandoning a rented house on Lake Wendel in western Massachusetts. I wouldn’t say I had a nervous breakdown, but I got really scared of the woods and couldn’t live there anymore. So Honeysuckle is the product of returning to the safety of my boyhood home.

I’m of the impression that something close to a common mythology is somehow expressed when someone sings truthfully from their unique imagination. And the more personal that expression is, the more universal it somehow is.

Stream of conscious writing and a forgiving ear when it comes to performance and production are also nice.

Your myspace page says you’re currenty based in Providence, Rhode Island. What’s life like there? I’m a big H.P. Lovecraft fan and I’ve always wanted to visit.

I don’t know Lovecraft that well, but I read a Poe story recently: William Wilson. Poe, like Lovecraft, also had ties to the Providence Anthenaeum. I mention him often when I describe what it’s like walking around near my neighborhood. There are brick sidewalks uprooting all around and grand estates with the only old-growth trees around that have shaded centuries of mysteries for sure. You should visit; there is a macabre presence here to be certain.

Your songs are full of references to music and movies and popular culture. Do you have any favourite records / books / films that you think everyone should go out and listen to / read / watch?

You know what album I really like? The 1947 abridged version of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s 'Four Saints in Three Acts'. I put that on a tape with that as the A-side and Edith Sitwell’s “Façade” on the B-side; they make a really nice pair.

I didn’t know anything about Kasper Hauser until I looked him up after hearing your song of that name – how did his story influence the song?

The influence really came via Herzog’s film “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser,” which is one of my favorite sounding films. When I think back on that film I hear the wonderful tones of all the actors’ voices and the immaculate soundtrack choices. There is a scene in which Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh sings and plays the piano that turned my head inside out. I made a tape recording of a lot of that film …actually while I was making that tape recording my brother and his girlfriend came home from going to the Fort Wayne Zoo for the first time and they didn’t know I was in the middle of recording and my brother is talking about how awesome the zoo is and that how he had lived there for eight years and had never once gone to the zoo and he was totally blown away by the experience. I love that recording.

Who is Scotty Guffy? What is he singing about?

He is a good-ole-boy I met while living in Indiana. I think he was the kind of person that the last two songs on Kristofferson’s 'Silver Tongued Devil and I' seem to be about. That’s what he is singing and singing about as I remember.

How did the reissue of the album come about with Sacred Bones? Are there plans for any of your other tapes to get reissued? If not, do you have any copies of them left that people can buy?

Keegan Cooke, who did the beautiful screenprinting and packaging, is really responsible for the re-release of this album. We met years ago in New Bedford and aside from being a good friend he loves my music and has been a strong source of confidence for my continuing to write and record. I’ve been giving him mix-tapes of unreleased material and forgotten albums for some time now. He’s always talked about how great it would be to press an album of mine on vinyl and when he moved to New York and began working with Sacred Bones, this was all of a sudden a tangible thing. I don’t know many other details but I’m really grateful for all the work he has done and to Caleb for taking a chance on this record. I’d love it if I could keep on releasing on Sacred Bones. Keegan and I have talked about pressing my 2001 CD 'Anthology Folkaltone Music' on vinyl.

I love the line “bobby learned the bible, but the bible changed” in ‘Corporation Sunday’, and ‘The Child Delivers The Stone’ sounds like a really beautiful religious song – does religion play a part in the album’s songs?

Thanks, that line was written thinking about the album 'John Wesley Harding', or the way Anthony Scaduto dissects it in his biography of Dylan.

There is something I envy about religious music. I’ve struggled with the concept of performance and ego a lot and I find it so appealing that some people make music in order to please, or show praise to, a supernatural being.

Religion plays a huge part in this album, religion and mythology both. This was, after all, 1999 and I honestly believed there was a strong chance The Apocalypse was going to occur. I think there is a conflict, or I think my spiritual conflict is illustrated in these songs. Looking at the lyrics, there is as much content about bones and evolution and death as there is about reincarnation and redemption. I would dare say, with the benefit of hindsight, that the use of the recordings of my family, from around 1972, is a form of ancestor worship.

The myspace also says that you get together with a band to play live sometimes – how’s that going? I watched some videos on youtube, and it looks like you’ve got a real rockabilly kind of thing going on! Do you do any of the material from ‘Honeysuckle..’, or is it all newer, more rock n’ roll stuff?

Yeah, all the material that me & The Human Orchids play is newer. Sometime, a few years ago, I really began to question why I would write a song and then want to sing it in front of people. I could no longer wrap my head around why I needed to “express myself.” So I stopped writing and performing. Then I started listening to Buddy Holly and Little Richard. It occurred to me that I was overthinking things. I also think I have finally found a harmony with my sense of humor and my music. So I am thoroughly enjoying rockin’ out with my friends as of late and really get a kick out of the bold odd few who can’t help but dance at our shows.

What kind of activity would you like to see your music soundtrack?

Something out of Raymond Roussel’s book “Impressions of Africa,” an unfolding ceremony completely masked in mystery, where nothing is revealed; somewhere where artifice and anthropology meet. Music the way Paradjanov’s “Color of Pomegranates” looks.

What are your plans for the future? Have you got any new creative
type ventures in progress at the moment?

I ‘m finishing up a documentary film I am directing about my brother’s attempt to walk across the United States. I ‘m also doing the soundtrack; a lot of incidental music as well as a handful of songs. I also hope to record with & the Human Orchids, soon - once I can figure out how to record more than one person at a time. I ‘m also trying to piece together a passable Spider-Man costume for as little money as possible.

*******

Many thanks are due to Carl for talking to me, and providing such an intriguing set of answers.

“Honeysuckle Tendrals” can be bought straight from Sacred Bones here.

Labels: Carl Simmons, interviews