Johnette Napolitano of Concrete Blonde

By Alex Teitz and Karen Weis

   There are few legends in rock and roll who have changed the landscape as much as Johnette Napolitano. She is the original firebrand of artistic creativity taken to it’s edge, and now, back again. After six long years, the original three members of Concrete Blonde are back together again for a new album, Group Therapy, and tour. Johnette Napolitano, Jim Mankey, and Harry Rushakoff came into this album from a different place. It shows with songs that stretch and manipulate the spectrum of rock. Concrete Blonde

FEMMUSIC interviewed Johnette Napolitano in a candid interview in January.

FEMMUSIC: The first question I have for you is, can you describe your songwriting technique?

JN: It’s channeling. Very much. I’m consistently amazed and yeah, it really is, no lie. It could start with a lick, a guitar, it could start with a keyboard lick, it could start with a groove. But with this record it was very much we really all went in and just freeformed it during the month of June. We all just jammed and then when we’d get stale on a jam we’d just switch instruments, and maybe I’d be on drums and Harry would be on keyboards, and then we kept doing that for the month of June. During July we went through all the tapes-there were about 18 tapes, an hour long each-and picked out the things that we thought would lend themselves to something that was cohesive. And then I started writing words to everything, which would basically pop out of the songs themselves. Whenever I’m jamming vocally along with something that we’re making up, or I’m making up or whatever, it’s generally the vowel sounds will jump out themselves as to what fits well in the track. And then I’ll stay with those vowel sounds, so if this means-like “Angel” on the record is a good example-“Angel” I was singing the first day we jammed that song. So I really wanted to stay with that, because the whole sound of the piece really made sense. So in that case the challenge was to use that for the title and then work a song around it somehow. So it’s a process I enjoy very much, which is I guess why I do it, but it really is a certain amount of, “Wow, what are we going to pick out of the air this time?” So it’s really an adventure to me. It never ceases to amaze me. And then something unique, when something comes out of left field, like when we switch instruments maybe, and stick Jim on bass, or whatever, it’s a lot of fun and you just trust what’s going to come through, basically.

FEMMUSIC: That’s wonderful.

JN: Yeah, it’s pretty cool. It was pretty interesting writing this one. It was a lot different than anything we’d done before.

FEMMUSIC: When you say “different”, how so?

JN: Well I didn’t just lug some songs in and go, “Here’s some songs, let’s do them.” It was very much a creative process involving the three of us. I mean, some of these jams on tape were-I’d just put the cassette machine in the middle of the floor and then we’d have a long lunch and then just take off and do what we wanted to do. And some of these jams are 20 minutes, half hour, 45 minutes long. So when it came July, it was like, “OK, let’s listen to all this stuff now and see what pops out. What do we want to take to the next level and really make something out of it?” So it was a real distilling sort of process. And that was different. I mean, I always have a couple of things I’ll bring in, but consciously, deliberately wanted this to truly be a group record. And it was. It was much, much different. We’ve never really done things like that before. I mean, Jim would always, you know Jim and I are always recording, we’ve got our ProTools, and our computers and stuff, so there’s always ideas and bringing in a tape, and then you know, I’m finishing words on a track Jim wrote, or I’ve got songs that are done and it’s just a matter of learning them, but it wasn’t like that with this.

FEMMUSIC: What was the biggest challenge of this album, Group Therapy?

JN: The biggest challenge with this album, and it still is, is to enjoy it and get along. As basic as that sounds, I mean, if you know probably a lot of people who do this, it’s so easy to take it too seriously. It’s so easy to turn it into a pressure situation. It’s so easy to let your entire life hinge on whether your record happens or not. The challenge is really to get along and to really have a good time, to enjoy it. And I’ve really got to keep that in focus myself, cause I’ll tend to get nervous and start to just-I’m a perfectionist, there’s no doubt about that. And I’m not ashamed of that at all. But I just really want to have a good time with it. We booked 10 days to record the record, and there was a specific reason for that. It was very fresh, because we’d just written it in June and July, and in August we went in for 10 days.
And we wanted, having had the luxury of having a studio at home, which Jim and I both have, you could sit around for a year and dick around with things. But it was a matter of there was a sense of abandon and immersion that I really wanted with this stuff, to keep it fresh. I didn’t want to get into, “Ok, now we’re gonna work for 6 months on this.” It wasn’t like that. It was very much an urgency. And when we got in there…so the schedule was so tight, because I’ve done production things with Jim and with other people before, and it was very much an objective approach to your own band down to every little part, with room. There was a certain structure that you allow to happen, but you know you have 10 days. So let’s say you know you’ll get a drum track done a day, and possibly two. And the come back to it and go, “Well OK, now we have a little room for…” None of us are lame. Jim plays pretty quick, Harry plays pretty quick. We don’t take a lot of time and we were pretty well rehearsed when we got in there. So it was, ‘This is sounding good now. Let me try a keyboard part on it’ or ‘Let me try a percussion part on it.’ So it was an excellent piece of time really, an excellent balance. And if you don’t get it in the first or second take, you shouldn’t be doing it anyway. So its like, ‘Well that’s great. It’s not perfect, but the spirit was there.’ There’s a couple of songs that are pretty much live, one take things. And so it was a matter of ‘Well, that’s not perfect, but the spirit was there and the performance was there.’
“Memory”, at the end of the record, was very difficult to do because it could only be done in one take, and it could only be done once a day. Because the feel of that is very “New York, it’s 4 in the morning in a jazz club” kind of a thing, and there’s no way you can rehearse that. Once you know the song, it has to be done ONCE, and it has to be done straight through. There was no way to do that more than once. So you think, ‘Well we’ll try something like that every day until we get it right, but we’re not going to sit and slog it, because that’s not the point.’ So it was a very conscious, every step of the way it was very organized chaos, I have to say.

FEMMUSIC: What was the best experience doing this?

JN: The best experience? Lunch. (laughs) It was! That’s totally serious. We hadn’t seen each other in a long time and so we had a lot of catching up to do. So every day before we’d get in and rehearse, we’d go to this French restaurant near where Harry was staying and we’d just have a long lunch, and drink a lot of wine-I would, anyway, the guys don’t drink-but I’d drink a lot of wine and then we’d get in and just talk about everything and anything. Anything you know besides ourselves, what was going on, religion-a lot of that, because Harry was studying the Torah at the time-and something that I was really interested in, and we would just talk about everything. And then get in the studio and it seemed to be, once we got in to play, it seemed like it was a natural extension of whatever mood we’d set up for ourselves. So it was really no lie, it was the most important part of the whole thing. (laughs) And that was very important because we didn’t know each other. We hadn’t seen each other in a long time, and it was very important to try to figure out…we didn’t really know why we were doing it, but we knew why we WEREN’T doing it. When we got in there and went, ‘Well, do you think we can do this?’ ‘Yeah, but here’s what we don’t want to do. We don’t want to get involved with a million producers who are going to get in and pick everything apart.
We don’t want to spend 3 months recording, cause life is too short for that. We don’t want to get into a big what label are we going with/ and then sit around for 6 months as we miss the moment, you know, mood-wise and otherwise. So we knew what we didn’t want to do. So that was a real important part of that. Conceptually, you’ve got to have your shit happening conceptually, or you can try to do anything and it’s not clear. We knew from all the discussions and the various philosophies that we’ve developed and looked at what’s in our lives so far and our experiences that we’d shared, because we hadn’t really seen each other, and then it gradually came about that we’d all been going through some pretty intense stuff in our personal lives, it pretty much wrote itself.

FEMMUSIC: I think you’ve answered most of my next question, which was what motivated you to come together for both the album and the tour?

JN: What’s motivating the tour is the album, basically, cause we wouldn’t have got out if it were just, “let’s go out and play everything we played in the 80s.” We’re not like that, we don’t care. But we’re touring because we really believe in this record. What motivated the record coming out was very much an accident. I’d started having some bad dreams in May and a real sense of doom, like something was going to really go horribly wrong, and I’d have these nightmares about bombs. About families running away from bombs, and bombs dropping on peoples’ houses and mothers, children running, and it was horrifying. And the only person that I know wouldn’t think I was crazy really was Jim. And I found myself over at Jim’s, literally at 3 in the morning, crying at his kitchen table with a Bible in front of me, saying, “I think I’m gonna die.” And he put up with that for a couple of days, and then I was driving him so crazy, and his wife so crazy, that he made me go to the doctor and go to a psychiatrist, and I couldn’t understand what was happening. I was getting a lot of strange mental pictures and things. And so out of nowhere, I just said, one day we were sitting around, “Let’s drive out and see Harry. Where’s Harry?” And Harry had been in rehab for a year.
So we drove out to rehab and visited Harry, and then said-we were once again at lunch-‘Do you think we can do this? I mean, here we all 3 are sitting here; it’s a minor miracle in and of itself. We’re all still alive, which is a minor miracle in and of itself. None of us have any kids, we’re all kind of floating, and let’s do this. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t do this.’ And so it was hard. It was hard because there were a lot of old patterns that needed breaking. We had to approach it completely differently. We appreciated each other more for the individual musicians and artists that we were, instead of trying to force something. That’s what made the writing of this one so different. It was like, you know, you can write a song and bring it to a band, but if it’s not what the band naturally does, then there’s no point in doing it. So it was a matter of saying, ‘Well, what does Harry do? What does Jim naturally do? And what do I naturally do?’ And it was all very natural. But it was hard to get out of a lot of the old patterns.
For one thing, we weren’t stoned like we used to always be. Jim at one point wanted to call the record “Without Pot”. (laughs) We’d just finished this incredible jam, like 45 minutes, and Jim just went and turned the tape machine off and went, “Without pot!” It was really funny. But it was strange, so it was all very much serendipitous events. And then of course we go into the studio in August for 10 days and then of course in September, the shit hits the fan. So whatever force was driving us in there to do that…I seriously felt like there was no time. I felt, we’ve got to do this. A lot of the lyrics on the record, like if you listen to “True Part 3” or “Angel”, sound like somebody that has their last chance to do something. And I’ve felt that. I felt very much like if I left the planet tomorrow, have I left the statement that I want to make? Will people know who I was? And there was a lot of morality surrounding the record, a lot of mortality issues, rather. Because Harry had been in rehab and he’d been through some shit, and lost a few people in the last few years. And I don’t know what that doom thing was but I really do think that it was some sort of a physical premonition of what was going to happen on the 11th. So after that happened on the 11th, I went, “Oh, so THAT’S what that was all about.” Strangely enough. So it was a real paranormal reunion, to tell you the truth. (laughs)

FEMMUSIC: What are you looking forward to in touring now?

JN: Well for one thing, it’s amazing that I’m looking forward to it at all, because it’s structured very differently to how we’ve toured. It’s very physical business for me, touring, and I’ve had a lot of hard time in the past keeping it together. But it’s two weeks on and two weeks off all year. So it’s just enough time where everybody enjoys it, and then you get to come home and have your personal life so that the band doesn’t completely run your whole universe. And it’s balanced. You know, you get read a book. I study flamenco, so I try to keep up on that a couple times a week and then every day at home.
But you know there’s different things to be doing. I like my art, everybody has a personal life. And we appreciate each other a lot more; we appreciate the situation a lot more when it’s not the be-all and end-all of our universe. So I’m looking forward to that. I’m also looking forward to—the set was tough to put together, cause we have so much shit now. We have to go back and say, ‘Well geez, we’ve got to try to cover something from every record for people’ and so it’s been reaching all the way back from the first record all the way through this one, and we’re doing 4 or 5 tracks off the new one. So we could go out and -we didn’t even play an old song until after we recorded the record. We played all through June and July and never even touched an old tune until after the record was done, cause we knew we’d have to sooner or later, and it wasn’t like we didn’t want to. It was like we’d just been playing them for years. So I’m looking forward to the set. On the West Coast here my teachers are opening up, the first flamenco opening set, and I work with them, and that’s very cool. I’m looking forward to the whole evening as something that is quality, you know? We work really hard when we rehearse and that’s been a whole new approach too, because I think we used to over-rehearse before. I think we’ve actually achieved a balance. Once again, it’s that structured chaos where we know it, but let’s leave enough room to be inspired every night by the vibe and let it take its own shape.
And I’m very looking forward to getting out and seeing people. There’s got to be a reason why this is all happening now. We did a benefit at a club in LA for the Red Cross-it was the first time we’d gotten together in 8 years to play-and the vibe was incredible. It was totally different. It wasn’t like it was back in the day. All the bands on the bill were cool and supportive of each other, and everybody paid to get in, and everybody got off on time, and it was a very-it was a vibe of unity. And if that’s what’s going on now in this country, I’d like to go out and see what that’s all about. And we’re going back to Australia, we’re going all over the world, actually. We might even go places we don’t need to go. That’s another thing that I would really personally look forward to, is going-we were talking about going to Russia and China, and I would love very much to go to either one or both of those places. It would be a new experience and I would like to take the band places we haven’t been.

FEMMUSIC: Do you have any fears returning?

JN: Fears? I had a wash last night-you know, I’ll wake up at 4 in the morning and get a panic attack. Yeah, I do have fears. It’s just a free floater, as my friend used to call it. A free-floating anxiety attack. Yeah, I do. I’m afraid of things like I won’t remember words, like the stuff will desert me, but it never does. That’s probably the place I’m most comfortable in the world. Once I get up there I feel like I know where I am and why I’m there. But until then, yeah. I used to be so scared on tour, I wouldn’t sleep or eat for weeks. But it’s okay if it’s only 2 weeks on and 2 weeks off.
I’m afraid of my life getting away from me because before, it got away from me. It all ran away with me very fast, and it was just too much. It was great and we did well–I think I can handle it better this time, if something happened at that level. When Bloodletting took off, we really weren’t that prepared for it. I wasn’t. And it was just overwhelming. Well Jim had no problem, he enjoyed every minute of it (laughs) but I…there were issues that I’d had that I needed to deal with before I could deal with something as absolutely overwhelming as that sort of exposure. I wouldn’t even use the word “success” necessarily, because success doesn’t mean anything unless you’re enjoying yourself. And I really wasn’t enjoying myself. Physically I was so fucked up by the time that happened that I was too tired to deal with it. I’d been having back problems from my bass being too heavy and all kinds of things. But that exposure, that dynamic of your life that changes when you have no privacy, when you can’t trust people, and you don’t know what they want out of you, and everybody wants to be your best friend…all of that stuff I find very unattractive. But I think I’m centered enough now in myself where I know who my friends are, I know what I’m about, and I don’t have to take it all so seriously. So that’s the only thing I get nervous about, is “God, what’s going to happen if it all goes crazy, and then pressure comes back?”, and then you have to worry about the next thing you do, which I’m not right now. So I think I can handle things pretty well this time.

FEMMUSIC: What one thing would you like to change about the music industry itself?

JN: I gotta tell you, I don’t care that much. It’s always been the way it is, it’s never NOT been this way. It’s never been a pretty thing, and it just is what it is. If you work in the oil industry, I’m sure that has some problems too. Work in the stock market, that’s a beast. So I don’t even give it that much thought and don’t care that much about it. I care more about doing my work. I think things change on their own. What I love right now is the fact that there’s so much technology available to artists to do so much themselves. You can afford all the production equipment that they use, that anybody uses, even more so. You’ve got ProTools and you’ve got ways to record that sound amazing. You can actually learn something about your own records. You don’t have to sit and have a producer tell you what to do, if you ever did. Or have an A&R man tell you what to do if you don’t want to. You can make your own. It’s a different level of being. You probably won’t sell 17 million records, but you’ll make a good steady living and you’ll get to do what you want to do. So I think a lot of artists need to examine why they’re doing it too and then it’s really a lot easier. But if you sat down a band in their early stages and asked all 4 of them, “Where do you see yourself in 10 years? What do you expect out of this?” you’ll probably get 4 different answers. So that’s where the problem comes in. Somebody’s in it for the chicks and the beer and the party, the other guy’s in it for the money, and the other guy’s in it just cause he wants to write songs and doesn’t really care. So you’ve got to have that down yourself. But I don’t really care that much about the business changing. I don’t really keep up on it.

FEMMUSIC: As a woman in the music industry, have you been discriminated against?

JN: Not in the ways you would think. In the ways that people call you “difficult” when men would do the same damn thing and be called “visionary” and “progressive” and “inventive” and all those great words they use when they describe men. I think artists in general are discriminated against in America. We’re considered, like “when are you going to get a real job?” kind of people. (laughs) And how worthy are we to a culture, to society? I’ve come to believe that we’re absolutely essential and you can’t do without us. There’s bad art and good art and all that but you can’t do that. As an artist across the board, you’re discriminated against. But as a woman, that’s the only time I really get annoyed. When dammit, this isn’t going right, this is wrong, this mix needs to be changed, and I have ears. Whether they’re male or female ears, I have ears and they work fine, and this isn’t right. Jim–there was an interview in the L.A. Times yesterday and Jim was a little bummed because they picked out something he said, and he was upset what they picked out. They picked out that he’d called me “difficult”. And Jim of all people trusts me, so I imagine sometimes I was, back in the day. But the band also has complete confidence in where I want to go and how I want to do things. And I’ve never fucked up in terms that we have our integrity intact. No matter who you are, your career is going to take ups and downs and curves and trends change and things come and go, but we’re still here. The reason we’re still here is we stayed with ourselves. We really didn’t run with anything that didn’t seem natural to us. And so that’s the only thing I really feel. Somebody says, “she’s a bitch.” I think I’ve got quite a reputation for being the bitch. But you know something? There are people in this business who really aren’t on the up and up, and you’ve got to look out for yourself. I don’t want to be homeless when I’m 60 and 70 years old, so I need to look out for myself. To do that without fucking anybody else over is all you have to live with. You have to be honest, you have to be moral, you have to be clean, and that’s my personal religious belief with myself, so I know I’m OK. But I don’t mind, it’s almost a compliment to be called a “bitch” and “difficult” if you’re a woman in this business, so that I don’t care about anymore. I know I’m a good person and that’s all that matters, so that doesn’t bother me anymore. It did a lot, though.

FEMMUSIC: I agree with you, that is a good thing. I’ve heard it from other artists before.

JN: Really, have you? That just seems unfair. A guy can be the biggest asshole on earth, and he’s a tyrant and a genius, but the minute you don’t agree with whoever’s supposed to be working for you, number one, then all of a sudden you’re the biggest bitch on earth, or you’re on the rag or something. I love that. I actually got to the point where I wouldn’t tell anybody if I was on my period, because I couldn’t get mad without somebody going, “well she’s on the rag”. I used to actually lie and say, “yeah, I got my period this week” when I didn’t, just because I needed to throw ’em. (laughs) It really was bad in the old days. Especially with crew, because they tend to get very macho, and you’re like, No, this isn’t the way it’s done. I’ve been doing this now for 30 years, and this is the way it’s done. And now we’ve got really good people, and they know better now. They know ‘she knows what she wants, and it’s probably right, so let’s just do what she wants to do’. If you demand your own way, you’ve been given enough rope to hang yourself on things. You want to do the right thing for everybody. So it’s not like even an ego thing at all. It’s just, we’ve been doing it for 30 years, you know? (laughs) So that’s good. I’m glad you hear that from other people, because it’s definitely true.

FEMMUSIC: What advice would you give to someone wanting to start in this business?

JN: I’d have a hard time with it. I’ve thought of that, you know, ‘what would you say to girls?’ I’d say, this is a very hard thing to do. This demands not just being in the music business–because I’m an artist as well, and paint and do all that other stuff, and I write, I consider myself a recording artist and songwriter primarily-and it’s my entire life. I spend a lot of time by myself, by choice. I would rather do this than anything. On Thanksgiving when other people are with their families, I’m experimenting with some track that I just got off radio or editing some speech or editing stuff. I want to wake up and do this all the time, and if I’m not, I’m reading or I’m creatively feeding my head with something that’s inspiring to me so that I can in turn express something from that. I’d say you have to be able to take rejection really well and not be phased by it.
You have to be always true to yourself. There’s no room for compromise at all. There are in certain things when you have to work with other people, but there isn’t when it comes to art. And that’s when you’ll get into fights when you say, “No, wait. This is staying this way.” You have to do things the way you hear them, and learn all you can. Whereas I knew back in the early 90s that what was happening was the computer technology. Instead of being afraid of that and thinking the way people were afraid of Dylan playing an electric guitar, instead of being afraid of that I was like, “Well gosh, this is great! How can I use this? Now I’ll never have to fight with an engineer again. Or wait for somebody to be able to record. I can record every day if I want to. I don’t have to sit and wait for people to have meetings about a budget and then pick a studio and the do all the shit. I don’t have to do that anymore.”
A lot of people who were my contemporaries were resentful and missed that boat big time. You should be wanting to know all—you don’t have to, I want to personally-but there’s nothing wrong with sitting and drinking wine and writing poetry, that’s where it all happens. But it’s just a freeing thing to have hands on control and be able to do things and learn more about it and experiment with different amps and mics and get crazy sounds that maybe somebody else would consider eccentric or whatever. There’s so much great stuff. Listen to Eno’s old stuff, or Parliament, or Funkadelic old stuff. There’s some genius recording going on there, experimentation. And I have always worked in recording studios and I’ve always liked the art of recording, and I don’t even use the technology in the same way other people use it. I’m more instinctive with it and don’t necessarily lock myself into what it CAN do or it wants to do. It’s what it does for me. So it makes writing a dream, and playing a dream. I just have to say, learn as much about technology that you can, because then you’ll know more about the process that you’re paying for when you get in there. Somebody turns around and charges you a $300,000 studio bill, you’d better be able to turn around and ask the right questions, figure out, “how can we do this?” The more you learn, the less you’ll get screwed when it comes to the bottom line. And also how to communicate.
When I worked in a studio with the band in the old days, the band would come in and say, “I want it to sound like this, like, you know, fuzzy.” Well, what’s “fuzzy”? How do you get “fuzzy”? It’s a lot easier if you can explain to an engineer what “fuzzy” is. So it makes it easier for people who want to help you fulfill your creative concept and idea, vision. It makes it easier for them. Once again, it’s not necessarily your job but it makes it interesting. It’s another job description you’re creating for yourself. You can engineer other people, work with other people. It’s one more aspect of music in your life. I can’t understand somebody not wanting to know everything that’s going on around them. I think that’s a very valuable thing to do. And you can just start off making your own records and releasing them yourself like we did, and build up to where someone finally notices and says, “Hey! They can make us some money!” (laughs) I have to say also that you don’t have to be sleazy.
I see a lot of people who got into this get swept away by that too, where you’ve got to fuck the other guy before he fucks you. You don’t have to do that. You don’t have to use drugs if people give them to you. You don’t have to spend time with people you don’t want to. Your first primary duty is to your work, and that speaks for itself. It’s not all that “who you know” bullshit. It’s doing good work and being the best you can be at what you do. That is all that it’s about. It’s not anything else, and anyone who tells you that is full of shit. I’ve had some pretty amazing people-legendary people-in the business say, “Look, you know something? Stick to the way you are and what you do.” And that went a long way with me. It’s all the other wannabes that’ll drop names and tell you what you should be doing and who you should be doing it with, this and that. Just do what you do in its pure form and listen to yourself and trust yourself. That’s probably, I think, the best advice in life anyone can give you.