Keith Levene, skateboard kneepads
slung around his ankles, has one leg propped on the board of a Fairlight
computer, balancing a bright red Ibanez guitar strapped to his chest.
"What do you expect from me? Rock ’n’ roll or something?"
he laughs to his engineer after recording a particularly dissonant chord
onto the disc of the CMI. Levene slams out a rapacious rock riff: "Here,
name that program Johnny," he grins slyly, referring to former
associate John Lydon. "After Thunders," he emphasizes, "my
man."
Levene’s collaboration with
Lydon in the eclectic, infamous Public Image Ltd. corporation/band came
to an end a year ago. It was the culmination of a friendship/business
partnership that began after Lydon dumped the Sex Pistols and Levene
jumped ship on the Clash (during the recording of their first LP). PiL
was an explosive, diverse, much-discussed presence on the music scene,
and as they garnered praises (and abuse) Levene was christened the first
"post-punk" guitarist.
Indeed, his two-fisted harmonic
wallop sounded like two guitars—rhythm and lead—played at
the same time. "People joked that there was someone else sitting
behind the amplifier," smiles Levene. His hypnotic style influenced
the Gang of Four, Killing Joke, the Psychedelic Furs, and especially
U2’s guitarist the Edge. "He sounds so much like that sometimes
I think it is me," Levene mutters sarcastically.
About PiL’s fallout, Levene
says, "It couldn’t have carried on because was hated each
other’s guts." There was a year of hassles: "I went through
hell with all the legal ramifications of quitting PiL. I was imprisoned
on their English label Virgin, and there was a total lack of response
from Lydon and PiL—whoever they are now—as to my royalty settlement."
And there was still the question of what to do with the tapes of the
last PiL album. Levene completed and released them on his own label
under the title Commercial Zone, while Elektra issued Lydon’s
version of most of the same songs—with horns filling in for the
distinctive guitar parts—as This Is What You Want, This Is What
You Get.
"I have every right to release
this in American territories," Levene declares on a break from
his beloved Fairlight at a New York studio. "This is not a bootleg.
But I had to get it out of my system," he stresses. "I had
to release Commercial Zone to end the situation and to fight
back, because I was being trodden on by major record companies and repulsive
manager-type people. It has all been very annoying.
"What PiL did for their record
was use the ideas on the original tapes that suited them, but they re-recorded
everything with new musicians.
"I don’t really know why,"
he reflects, "I’ve heard This Is What You Want and
it doesn’t sound better; I don’t know if it was a personal
dig at me, or whether they really thought it sounded like shit,"
Levene shrugs.
He is embittered about the split,
but a year off, with time concentrated on his wife, ex-Pullsalama member
Lori Montana, and their baby son Kirk, has made him a happier man. He
has just undertaken a project for Activision, to design software product
for home computers and video games; he has also returned to recording.
"Producing PiL and producing
myself is one and the same thing," he smirks, "except they
aren’t here so I get a lot more done, and it’s more fun. What
I do is, I make it up as I go along. I don’t write music, I write
everything around a sound. A similar analogy is when you work on a computer,
you can store everything you do to disc and edit it later; that’s
what I do to tape.
"With PiL, our bassist Jah
Wobble couldn’t play, which was brilliant," Levene laughs,
"because he didn’t have any pre-set standards about what rock
’n’ roll was, or what guitarists were, or whatever. Nor did
I, particularly. So we both just stood around and made things up. The
‘PiL Theme’ which is the most structured thing we’d ever
done—it’s got verse, chorus, a lead bit—we made up as
we went along in the studio. We had it on the multi-track—this
was out first 24-track experience—and we had to cut a big slice
out of the actual tape and then glue it together in a certain sequence.
I do that a lot."
The sounds he records, states Levene,
have to "stimulate people." "Like, I’ll bombard
the tune with high frequencies," he explains, "or I’ll
layer it, put low frequency underneath and ultra high frequency on top.
The tune is irrelevant. I want them to write the tune. I want
them to hear it on different levels—like when they play it loud,
or when they play it and they’re doing something else. ‘Blue
Water’—that’s a floor shaker—is designed to be listened
to really loud, and I used very slow, low frequencies. It can exhaust
you, listening to that at a loud volume."
Another tactic Levene favors is
repetition. "I like that circular, jangly thing, which is a guitar
trademark of mine—it is total repetition; it has an overall effect
and an individual effect. For ‘Poptones’ on Second Edition,
each time I play the phrase it has one effect, each note means something
else. It’s like reggae, I was very influenced by reggae, the deep
bass, the repetitiveness.
"If you keep looking at a white
wall—if you look at it for a second, you’ll see a white wall,
if you keep looking at it for five minutes, you’ll see different
colors, you’re going to see different patterns in front of your
eyes—especially if you don’t blink. And your ears don’t
blink."
Levene’s infamous circular
rhythms, he claims, indirectly come from things Yes guitarist Steve
Howe taught him. "When I was fifteen I went to work for my favorite
band as a roadie—which was Yes—and I was a terrible roadie.
Yeah, so even though I play nothing like him, Steve Howe is still my
favorite guitarist. I don’t copy him. I do get a lot of my internal
knowledge, or feeling on guitar, or what you can do and what kinds of
sounds you can make from Steve Howe. I think he is so damned good; he
taught me a lot, when I worked for Yes, but he didn’t know he was
my hero."
When Levene formed the Clash with
Mick Jones, he didn’t even own a guitar: "Yeah, due to my
misspent youth. And Bernard Rhodes, our manager, got me an awful guitar.
With the Clash, I played really fast, what hardcore turned into, but
with 60s rock and roll material—Mick Jones really had the rock
’n’ roll romantic bug. The Ramones album had come out, and
there was no lead on it, and I really loved that, the heavy rhythm.
"My style came out with PiL,
though, and it wasn’t what I played, it was what I didn’t
play. I had this rule, if I made a mistake while I was playing, I’d
repeat it twice, just to check it out. A lot of my best stuff came from
that, it really did. I’m not saying that to be avant-garde of far
out.
"Guitarists always ask me,
‘What effects do you use, do you use an echoplex?’ I’d
say, ‘A guitar, through a twin reverb,’ and they are really
surprised." He points out proudly: "When people say I sound
like two guitarists, they mean because of the amount of sounds and harmonics
that I generate." He shyly adds: "And I like that."
The music he is making right now
he plans to release himself or work out one shot deals with smaller
record companies—he has already turned down contracts from two
major labels. "I know it’s not worth signing the standard
artist deal. The only thing they offer is money—it is like an inverted
loan instead of borrowing from a bank and paying 12 percent interest
on top."
Levene shakes his head, and grabs
his skateboard, on his way out of the studio for some coffee. On the
street, he wavers on the board unsteadily and almost runs over an old
lady with shopping bags. Levene giggles, and confesses that he’s
recording some heavy metal tunes, "Good stuff, if you like that
sort of thing. But mostly I like orchestral things like ‘Radio
Four,’ off Second Edition, or Flowers of Romance’s
‘Hymie’s Hymn.’ You know, I much prefer the 1812 Overture
to the recent Michael Jackson single." |