Hello, My Name Is Curt

IE: Do you keep track of how many albums you’ve put out?
Curt Kirkwood: I don’t know. It’s more than a dozen. Twelve, 13, maybe 14. One solo, Eyes Adrift with Krist [Novoselic] and Bud [Gaugh], then we did Volcano with Bud and Miguel [Happoldt]. It was never released. It was a vanity project; we made a thousand of them and you can get on Miguel’s Web site and he has it posted. We just made it. It was an album, and a pretty cool one.

Appearing: May 30th and 31st at Schubas in Chicago.

IE: Do you ever feel bad that songs you wrote years ago, and probably worked really hard on them, but you can’t easily recall them now?
CK: I don’t remember how to play all of them, and I don’t remember all the songs on each album. It’s always like, “Oh yeah! That one!” I can relearn ‘em – some of them are hard to relearn. I don’t know music real well – I don’t read or write it, I just make the stuff up and know how to play it. Figuring [songs] out again, a lot of the time I’m just not sure. A lot of the stuff is based on something that’s comfortable for my hands to play. I don’t remember a lot of them, honestly.

IE: You couldn’t pull a Robin Zander in concert and say, “This is the seventh song off our sixth album”?
CK: No, not without preparation. There’s just something about the heritage that irks me. I always try to be current. It’s funny because you can have oldies and you can tell like “Chantilly Lace” is an oldie. I was aware of that starting out, so I always tried to write stuff like country music: You can’t date it so well. Just to write stuff where you can’t tell what era it’s from, and I think I did a pretty good job at it. I can still play stuff and it still sounds like an album we made now. It’s not like, “Oh, that’s ’80s.” It’s hard to tell with us. That was the goal, and I like it that way. I never wanted to be dated like that and it’s supposed to be timeless. Who cares when it was written? I like stuff to be that way now. My brother will now-and-then be like, “The first time we played here was 25 years ago,” and that makes my skin crawl. “All right, that’s a real shit in the punchbowl for me.”

IE: I’m surprised to hear that you don’t read music. You play very fluently.
CK: It’s all fake. We’re plastic. People ask, “What is your genre?” We’re plastic rock. We’re Neo-preen. It’s all air guitar put on a real guitar. I just do stuff that feels cool. If it’s too hard to play I’m not gonna do it.

IE: You’re in luck because they have Air Guitar Championships now.
CK: Oh yeah, I’ve seen it. That’s pretty much what it is. I really don’t know. John Dee Graham is my neighbor and he’s been around for years with True Believers here in Austin. John Dee’s a great musician and asked me if I wanted to do a thing he’s doing one with Ray Price, Alejandro Escovedo – John Dee And Friends, we’d do some of his songs, some of mine. Anecdotes and stuff, a thing he just started doing. I said, “I’ll need a couple of days – I gotta get my head around it.” I’m a pretty good musician, I told him, but I’m so used to doing my thing. I was in cover bands in the ’70s and I can learn those songs, but I know my tricks and I know my songs. Musically I think I could play anything, but it’s more like I’ll hit a note and see if it works and if it don’t I’ll slide to the next one. There’s a lot of Miles Davis in there: If you make a mistake, repeat it and people will think you’re a genius.

IE: You’re in Austin now? I’ve always associated you with Phoenix.
CK: I’ve lived in Austin for 12 years, and lived in Venice for two years before that. Cris [Kirkwood, bass] still lives in Phoenix, we recorded this album in Phoenix. It’s a hard place to move back to – it got too big. It’s not supposed to be there. They shouldn’t have built a city there, especially something that size. We’re from Phoenix, but I’m based out of Austin for a long time. Ted [Marcus, drums] lives in New York City, Cris lives in Phoenix, and I’m here. We’re all over the place. All three of us in different states – it’s more plastic that way. We don’t practice, just get away with stuff. There’s enough genres and we’ve always been quick to admit that we’re crap and the joke’s on everybody – on us, too, because we have to purvey this crap. Our hands are dirtier than everybody else’s.

IE: You have to be good at the crap.
CK: Apparently. When I hear a record like this, I’m like “We made that? Shit. How did we do that? If I lay off the weed I’ll figure it out.”