Professor Jef's
The Essential Las Vegas Experience
in Times Square:
An Evening with Paul Wallfisch
by Professor Jef
With such a backdrop, I met with Paul Wallfisch, whose latest album with Botanica, "With All Seven Fingers," has all the nervous energy of life amid the tumult and tension.
No newcomer to the music scene, Wallfisch's bio is testimony to his craft. He's worked with: Stiv Bators (Dead Boys), Sylvain Sylvain (NY Dolls), Daniel Ash (Love and Rockets), Sally Norvell (Congo Norvell), Kid Congo (Congo Norvell, Pink Monkey Birds), and Firewater. A classically-trained pianist, he steps out from behind the keyboard with Botanica, to sing and arrange lushly textured soundscapes about love and death and mysticism in an overpowering world. An electronic invocation to www.botanicaisaband.com will provide instant enlightenment.
Paul brought me to the only place without surveillance cameras on Times Square, an ancient Howard Johnson's, for drink and nervous chatter about music as a shelter from the looming chaos and our lingering fear.
PJ: For the sake of the uninitiated, it might be nice to fill our viewers in on your bio. How is it that a classically-trained pianist gets embroiled in the world of rocknroll intrigue?
PW: I'd barely heard of The Beatles when I was ten. I went to the library and took out some records. I'd heard of The Guess Who, [as well as] Bread, Jose Feliciano, Simon and Garfunkel, and a Stones record, "Goats Head Soup." It was all incredibly tame, but dad broke them, which was intriguing. My dad was a great classical musician. He preferred to pay the library fines than have me listen to that music. The first show I saw was Tom Waits, in 1977. He was opening for Liv Taylor. Growing up in a hippie town in the 70s, my parents thought, "He can go to see James Taylor¹s brother." None of us had ever heard Tom Waits. I still remember what he looked and sounded like. Soon afterwards, I saw The Kinks, and I knew that I wanted to do what Ray Davies was doing. He made me cry. I really did love classical music, and still do, and I thought that The Kinks were doing chamber music
PJ: What can you tell our friends at home about playing with the legendary Stiv Bators?
PW: It was 1987. I was playing in a 50s rnb cover band in Paris at an upscale strip-joint. The singers' name was "Bottom." We did six sets a night. There were magicians, strippers, and the band. We were treated the worst, because, obviously, if they had to cut someone, it was us. The owner would give us drugs if he didn't give us money. He'd come in the dressing room, say, "Hello girls!" and drop a sock full of cocaine. One night, one of the drummer's friends came by and wanted to sit in. He just took a gun out, put it on the snare drum, and said, "I'm playing." It was the after hours place; everyone came in. We jammed with The Stranglers, The Eurythmics, and Stiv Bators. Stiv saw us play and he hired us. That there was a piano in the outfit was ridiculous, but I was too high to care! When Stiv died in 1990, Patrick Eudeline, the critic who broke punk in France, asked me to play at the funeral. He gave me the music to Gregorian chants. It sounded terrible on my organ, although the Lords of the New Church was also played, and sounded great. Stiv was incredibly sweet, gracious, and not very talkative. His girlfriend took care of him. He really sang the shit out of songs!
PJ: Music has brought you all over the world. Could you give us a story about one of the more amusing audience responses?
PW: I went to Chian, China on a forged visa, in 1985-86, to visit a friend who taught English. Once a week they had an assembly for a presentation on life in the west. She enlisted me. I borrowed a guitar. I played in front of six or seven hundred Chinese kids in their Maoist habits. They all looked the same! When I'd asked them, "Who have heard of The Beatles?" Only half of the hands went up. This was in a major Chinese city. Well, I played everything I could play on the guitar: a few covers and a few originals. They went completely insane! Girls came up to me afterwards, squealing. One said, "It's just like on T.V."
PJ: How did Daniel Ash come to play on the first Botanica album?
PW: Daniel was dating a friend of mine, Delphine, who was sharing our house in Los Angeles. Love and Rockets was recording "Sweet F.A." for Rick Rubin at American. They were staying at the house where the Chili Peppers had recorded and burnt it down! They were given some more money and recorded in my garage. I played piano and did backing vocals. It was my first engineering credit. We also did an e.p., "The Glittering Darkness," that was only released in England. We've stayed friends. He's played on some of my songs and has helped mix them.
PJ: What is your involvement with Sylvain Sylvain's "Baby Doll" album? I saw his show at Luxx a few months back and I was blown away! Such charisma!
PW: I played piano on three or four songs. Syl's the sweetest guy on earth. He really means it.
PJ: Your music with Botanica is somewhat Bad Seeds-inspired, although its Latin influences, among others, clearly set it apart. The song, "Pray," however, on "With All Seven Fingers," is a rocker. You've also recently played on a jazz album with Sally Norvell. And your work with Firewater often has an Eastern European bent. Just who are your major musical influences? Which tradition of music do you feel connected to?
PW: Classical chamber music is what I feel most connected to. There's a subtlety and elasticity to chamber music, without its being "noodley," like a lot of jazz. The tuneful, unsentimental romanticism of Bach's Brandenburg Concerti, Mozart's divertimenti or Bartok's third piano concerto is the same thing as the best rocknroll, and it has nothing to do with jazz.
PJ: When I think of good rocknroll, I think of tunes and passion. Chamber music, to my understanding, is not about passion. With Bach, it's all about religious devotion. Mozart is high classical, the triumph of reason over the body. PW: Mozart survived because he transcended that. I think that the passion of a string quartet is the same as what makes a rock band play together.
PJ: Who are your other influences?
PW: My other influences are Lou Reed and Velvet Underground, Tom Waits, The Kinks, Aretha Franklin and Willie Dixon. When I first heard Dixon, I thought, "Whoa! Nick Cave has gotten GOOD!" Nick Cave ripped everything off him. It's O.K., everyone rips everything off.
PJ: Who are your keyboard influences?
PW: Mick Garson, who played the mid-period Bowie stuff. Also, some of John Cale's solo stuff. He's a bit square, and a bad violist, but it's great stuff. He played viola well on "1969." I wish my Dad had played on "1969"! Also, Nicky Hopkins, who played with the Stones, "Champion" Jack Dupree, who I saw at a blues festival in Paris in 1985, and, of course, Ray Charles.
PJ: On "With all Seven Fingers," you are credited with having played "all other instruments." Which instruments do you play?
PW: I can fake almost everything but drums. I can fit in almost any musical setting with a keyboard, but there are, routinely, people that can play rings around me. I'm not against people that can play. There's a prejudice in the indie rock scene against people that can play.
PJ: It's an allergy to the 80s church of the guitar. At a certain point, like in a lot of jazz, virtuosity becomes a fetish and playing is no longer about listening.
PW: Yes, that's a problem, but the converse, the idea that not being able to play is a virtue, is something that I fight against. I try to make my music sound good and big. I have no interest in being thought musically "cute." Being able to play could mean that you choose the right note and sit on it.
PJ: Botanica has a very haunting sound without being "goth," per se. Do you think that we live in times that are haunted or do you wish for such an age?
PW: I don't think that we live in particularly "haunted" times.
PJ: Has mystery been expunged by the binary code?
PW: Not that I'm anti-technology, but if I never see any more zeros and ones, I'll be fine. It's not my field. My field is haunting people. I'm distressed by the end of culture as I've come to think of it. The written and spoken word is disappearing. The ambiguity of thought, patience, and romance, in short, everything I've been raised to equate with civilization, is under attack. The sense people should try to be creative and bring beauty into the world is being lost. The kind of music that I do, the intelligent pop tradition of the last thirty years, is very literate. We're in a period of transition for the human race in culture and politics. I'm old enough to have seen how it was and young enough to witness the next step. Even the finest literature now, with few exceptions, doesn't hold a candle to the ad copy of 1960s Playboys! Literature peaked at the turn of the last century and has been dying since. I'm a goth-tinged romantic. Although I don't live in an irony free zone, I want my art to have passion and conviction. It's not gothic in the sense of having ghouls and goblins running around.
PJ: But your songs have all sorts of strange characters running around, as does your iconography, like on the second Botanica album.
PW: "With All Seven Fingers" is an old Yiddish expression. It means wholeheartedly. Marc Chagall drew rabbis flying through the air with seven fingers.
PJ: That seems gothic to me!
PW: It appears goth because it's déclassé to admit to the strange mystery of our existence and the reality of our impulses. You can't explore the human spirit without exploring religion. I find it both very interesting and very amusing.
PJ: You've provided the score to "Dummy," a big indie film. When is it due out?
PW: Spring 2003. It's got incredibly good press. It was written by Greg Pritikin. He makes good, smart, funny movies. Botanica was hired to be a punk-cum-klezmer outfit, a vehicle for the stars, Milla Jovovich and Ileana Douglas.
PJ: Did writing music for the big screen present new challenges or dangers?
PW: No dangers! There's a lot of freedom in not having to stick to a pop song structure of lyrics and music. Writing for a short, sixteen frame cue is liberating. Music with a Vaudeville aspect is central to the movie. It's about a dysfunctional ventriloquist's relationship with his dummy. The title track to "Maldiction" will also be in a film starring Tom Berenger called "Takedown" that's due out in about three weeks. There's also a film called "Men Cry Bullets," directed by Tamara Hernandez, a great director, with a Botanica song. It's available on video.
PJ: When you say that you believe that fear is the ultimate motivating force in human behavior, what do you mean and does this play out in your music?
PW: I do believe that fear is the prime motivating factor. It's what's behind religions and magic. Magic was the first attempt to control the internal and external forces. Most people are always terrified of themselves, of other people, of God. All the talk shows and sitcoms are all about the fear of getting it wrong. My music is very textured because I want people to get lost in a thick, magical world of music. It's tremendously scary out there and this is how I deal with it.