Gene Bowen Interview, May 2007
*How did you start your music (influence)?I had two older brothers, one was a sometime "beatnik" in the 50's, who sat around and played bongo drums to the radio for hours on end. The other taught me the rudiments of guitar and trumpet. I went on to play trumpet in school band and guitar in a surf band, later turning to folk, blues and country music. I fell in love with classical music and went on to study music composition at California Institute of the Arts studying with very serious masters such as Mel Powell, Leonard Stein, Morton Subotnick. While at CalArts I became fast friends with Harold Budd who taught there for about four years. We were working in a circle of artists like James Tenney, Daniel Lentz (California Time Machine), Wolfgang Stoerchle and John Baldessari. Harold was writing very mysterious "vignettes" in different styles, a sort of reaction to large compositions. This fit my sense of "song form" as in folk music, art song etc. I was writing in a "miniaturist" vein setting poems of other cultures to music, Lorca, Tagore, Mallarme, ancient Aztec translations and electronically manipulating poets such as Allen Ginsburg singing and playing harmonium. Together, we performed one of the first electronic music concerts ever to happen in Mexico at the Universidad de Guadalajara in 1971. *How was this album made with Harold Budd? Harold had begun his collaboration with Brain Eno (Pavilion of Dreams) in the late seventies. I had been composing electronic music during my CalArts days and had access to recording situations. We recorded much of Ambient #2: The Plateaux of Mirror in a college recording studio that I was teaching at. We also made a lot of recordings in my barn/studio that became the Abandoned Cities album. I wrote in a letter to Eno (he was experimenting with fragrances at the time, and I mailed him a bag of fresh orange blossoms from the barn/studio in Fillmore Ca.) explaining that the Old Rugged Cross Studios was a concept of sneaking into recording studios during "off time" with favors from engineers who were happy to do something out of the ordinary commercial record date. The thanks to Merwin Belin had everything to do with this, he and Doug Schwartz helped me enormously. The Old Rugged Cross was also my mother's favorite hymn. After the success of Ambient #2, I suggested to Harold we start a record label and release a series of our own music. I had just produced a recording for the National Endowment for the Arts on local folk music(Folk Music Of Ventura County), creating the record from start to finish and knew the entire process. I proposed borrowing enough money to produce about ten records, but Harold, never wanting to owe anyone anything, decided we would make one at a time, paying for them ourselves. Thus began the Cantil label. Harold came up with the name from a town in the Mojave desert . We released The Serpent in Quicksilver and Bourgeois Magnetic as our first run. Harold followed with Abandoned Cities and because we were funding them ourselves, we never released another ! *What is the theme of this album? Bourgeois Magnetic, as an album, was an expression of wrapping my musical and poetic experiences into a beautiful package, a sculpture, reflecting sound, words and even cinema. The opening and ending pieces were the "settings" as of a piece of jewelry; Tourmaline and Amethyst. I was very much under the influence of ethnic music, French poetry, film, philosophical concepts of Eric Satie and the Dadaists. I was lucky to have met the poet Emmett Williams(member of Pulsa) who opened a world of European vision/art to me. A Bride and Her Bachelor is a reference to Duchamp's "Large Glass" and the thematic tune is taken from the soundtrack of a Truffaut film, a bouncy piano groove brought to a slow extreme. 4 p.m. e. L.A. is a cryptic dedication to Pamela Sheridan (who took the photo on the back of the cover). The original 12" vinyl EP of Bourgeois Magnetic was made to run at 45 RPM for a much better sound quality. Many people inadvertently played the record at 33RPM and never knew the difference, until the vocal appeared, making the disc itself a sort of performance art/sculpture. Bourgeois Magnetic, the poem/composition, was an absurdist rambling of images having to do with the collapse of art and culture into the "bourgeois" ( one of my favorite songs is Leadbelly's Bourgeois Blues). "In the phase of a dynasty" I coined to represent Western culture's obsession with spreading the greed of selling art and especially music to the rest of the world. This was the demise of rock music since the 60's, when the large companies figured out they could manipulate the art and the listener for the sole reason of selling records. We are only seeing the breakdown of this huge machine with the advent of the internet, allowing independent thinkers to enter the landscape of the art and music world. It was also an appeal "concrete analysis, concrete reality" (references to musique concrete, concrete poetry) for a smarter direction. *Basically you play guitar and sing. How do you feel this style for you? I learned guitar from one of my brothers. I was born in Biloxi, Mississippi in 1950 and grew up in a military family which meant moving all over the United Statesc. Nevada, Colorado, South Dakota, Illinois, South Carolina. When I was 11 years old we lived in northern Japan. My brother bought a Teisco electric guitar and I thought it was the "cat's meow". He taught me rockabilly riffs and basic folk songs. When we left Japan we ended up in California where I formed a surf band and ended up playing folk/blues and eventually country music. Playing guitar and writing songs was just a given. I was always involved in a band and wrote songs in the folk/rock idiom. I had a country and western band called the Chesterfield Kings and an off shoot rock band called The Mechanics that released an album in France entitled "parts and labor". I played electric guitar on much of Harold's records and collaborated with John Densmore, the drummer from the Doors, on a song I had written protesting the Afghanistan War, which we performed at a rally for the RAWA in Los Angeles and recorded on the Hen House Studios label. Guitar has been an integral part of most of my recordings. I featured guitar on The Vermilion Sea for the African tune "Tears". I own a few very wonderful old guitars. I have an album of children's music, Organic Soup, that I produced with John Densmore playing drums and my wife Dominique Alexandre singing with myself doing lots of guitar work. *What is the importance for making & playing music for you? . The musical process is one I don't pretend to understand. I am simply grateful when it happens. |