Over the last fifteen or so years, few artists have toured so constantly and so widely as native New Yorker Jeffrey Lewis. One of the leading lights of the antifolk scene in the nineties (although he does concede to not necessarily knowing what that means), he has a full history of record shop in stores. Drift is one of many over the years and as we caught up with him in Shanghai he was on his way to play live at Uptown Records. He’s a record store connoisseur.
For issue seven of Deluxe - September 2015 - We caught up with Jeffery Lewis to talk shops, he also illustrated our comic book cover for that issue. His new album (with The Voltage) 'Bad Wiring' (2019) has a track called LPs, it's a killer track and covers a lot of this world.Deluxe: What was the recording process this time around? Where, with who and how did it go?
Jeffrey Lewis: First I played a gig in Ramsgate UK and this guy Dan Lucas offered me some free recording time in his studio, Anchor Baby, in Kent. So the next time I was touring in the UK I added an extra week of time, to take him up on this generous offer. We didn't end up using a whole lot from those sessions but that was the start of the record. It got me into a mental state of "I'm making an album." So when my band got back home to New York City after the tour, I booked a couple days at my friend Brian's place in Brooklyn, SpeakerSonic, and we banged out like 22 songs in two days. But then I spent about 5 or 6 months working with Brian in NYC to sift through the songs, re-recording some stuff. Not working steadily on it but getting together once or twice a month, plenty of time to think, just slowly puttering around until I felt like I had about 45 minutes worth of really good material. After all of that nice prolonged relaxed gestation period I eventually felt like I was sitting on the best album I’d ever made, plus I realized I could sort of pick and choose and curate the song-selection to basically make it into a concept album about New York, or Manhattan specifically. At that point I thought I was done. Then I sort of let myself be talked into taking the recordings to John Agnello for a "professional" mix. I felt like I had already made the best album I could make, but I was willing to admit there are people who know how to mix and EQ and pan and all that stuff far better than I do. I'm not sure it was the right decision, because I was totally happy with the album before the fancy re-mix and mastering stuff, so to me it just sounds "different" now, but not what I'd call "better" than the album I started out with. I'm not so trustworthy when it comes to that stuff though, because my tendency is to ignore the "nice" qualities that a "real" album has, in terms of a "professional" EQ, or a "fully polished" amount of panning or whatever. Anyway, at least I'm glad I did the best I could, from the initial work of writing a big pile of about 37 songs, to paring it down to about 10 of the better ones, to making the best recordings that I could make, and even to take the step to have it finished off by "real" mixing and mastering folks. I feel like I took as much time on it as I wanted, the opposite of making an album as quickly as possible, which is how I've made my last few albums. This new one is the first time since 2008 that I let myself take as much time as I wanted for the writing and for the recording.
D: With regards to the new LP, who are “Los Bolts”
JL: Short answer: At the moment it's Heather Wagner on drums and Mem Pahl on bass. Long answer: I've gone through so many different bass players and different drummers over the past 15 years of doing this, I could wish I had one solid band but I can't control people's lives so they just come and go. People move to different cities, people get other jobs, I can't expect anybody to stick with my "project" with the tenacity that I bring to it myself - it's not an easy life, this kind of touring and existing. You have to really love it or else it becomes a drain rather than an invigorating thing. Personally I still love the challenge of it, the artistic challenge and the travel and organizational and financial challenge. I get a sense of accomplishment and a sense of adventure out of it, and every new concert and every new song is a chance to maybe do something really great; but of course it's probably easier for me to tackle the challenges of devoting my life to playing Jeffrey Lewis songs than it is for anybody else to devote their life to playing Jeffrey Lewis songs. Anyway, like I say, the new album started out with a week of recording in England. My drummer Heather couldn't be there for any of that week, so my old drummer Dave who now lives in England came over and drummed on a few songs, and my bass player Caitlin could only be there for one day of the recording week, so I got Franic of the Wave Pictures to play bass on the stuff that Caitlin couldn't be there for. Then I got Jonny of the Wave Pictures to play drums on the stuff that neither Heather nor Dave could be there for. Then when I got back to NYC and continued recording, the foundation of the other tracks was all me and Heather and Caitlin. We'd been touring as a trio for about a year and a half and sounding great together, but then Caitlin got too busy touring with another band, so by the time the album was getting finished I had another bass player, and at this point I'm on tour in Asia with Heather on drums and Mem on bass. Mem's fantastic and I hope she sticks around for a while. By the time the album comes out Heather will be busy with other stuff so I'll be touring with a new drummer, it seems. It's a pain, because I've got so many songs to teach people, it's like three steps back for every one step forward every time the band gets reshuffled. But on the other hand, each new band lineup gets forged into a really great unit with a particular personality and particular strengths, which affects how the new songs come out, and also affects which songs from the back catalog work their way into the live sets night by night. You know, one person might be a really great keyboard player and bass player but too timid on stage to fully rock out as much as another person. So I just let each person do what they're into doing and each lineup takes things in a new direction with different strengths. It's like any relationship, it gets deeper the more you stick with it, but when you find yourself single you can't let yourself get depressed about it, you just keep looking forward to the better situation that might develop unexpectedly around the next corner. I feel like each time the band has reshuffled I've ultimately ended up better off for it. It becomes one more form of artistic challenge - like, first, what can you draw using this marker? Then just when you've gotten good at making art with that marker the marker goes away and you have to start working with a paint brush. On the first day it seems impossible, but soon you find yourself making incredible new stuff you could never have done with the marker. Then the paintbrush goes away and you have no choice but to start making art with a crayon, but after a little while you're making such cool stuff with the crayon you can't believe you were ever limiting yourself to a marker, or a paintbrush. Not to be dismissive of any of the markers or paintbrushes or crayons or bandmates I've worked with in the past, but it's amazing how each time the level of challenge has changed, the new creative rewards have always been worth it.
D: I also thought ‘Manhattan’ was a great title. It’s a place you know well right… so what story are you telling
JL: I like the fact that it is confusingly un-hip, as if it ought to be some kind of badge of pride but by putting it right out in front like that, it sort of makes people realize that wait a minute, there really isn't anything cool about Manhattan at this point. I happen to still be living in Manhattan, but everybody knows that all the cool young artists live in Brooklyn. There's basically no NYC band that you can name who's not a Brooklyn band, and I was getting sort of tired of everybody assuming that I'm Brooklyn-based. I've been a life-long New Yorker but I've never fitted in with the music scene in NYC. The music scene is 99% comprised of people who have moved from other parts of America to Brooklyn. That's really the NYC dream, that's the 21st Century NYC adventure. I'm like this weird piece of furniture, I'm just there, these other bands pop up and disappear around me, but I've accidentally got a different NYC identity than all of that. I just figured I'd try to own that and figure out what that meant for me, to be tied to a place that has not been cool for a long long time. In fact, the only place on earth not in danger of becoming gentrified into the new hip East Village is the East Village itself. It's sort of just over and dead and forgotten, hiding in plain sight. But it's my life. It's like a petrified forest and I'm a bit of moss. Also, there's no real voice for that part of New York anymore, Lou Reed is gone, Tuli Kupferberg is gone. There's no new voices because there's no real contemporary need for that voice necessarily, but at this point I'm that remaining neighborhood voice anyway, even if it doesn't represent any relevant contemporary cultural aspiration for anybody. You can still see Patti Smith and Suicide and Television, but they are all performing songs that they wrote like 35 years ago,. There aren't really any bands carrying on the poet-punk Lower East Side thing as a contemporary voice.
D: As someone who has such a strong history of touring, do you enjoying the recording process? Do you think of it more as documenting or are you consciously creating something different to your live show?
JL: Different albums are different in that regard; the Jeffrey Lewis & the Jrams record that we made in 2014 was a one-day recording process. Walk into the studio in the morning, record it all live, mix, master, add a few home-demos, and walk out at the end of the day with a new album. From zero to finished in about eight hours, and we took it on tour with us the next week. A 40 minute album shouldn't necessarily take any longer than that to make. But there's also a nice thing that happens when you make an album with more time to think about it. I feel like the best albums I've made were the ones that took the least time, or the ones that took the most time. You either make a perfectly off-the-cuff album, or a perfectly thought-out album, but either way it needs to be perfect. It's actually harder nowadays to make a perfectly off-the-cuff album, everybody has way too much opportunity to re-think things. It's very hard to find an album that has not been thought about too much. That's why it's great to make records that are essentially a live performance in the studio. You capture the real sound of the songs, of the room, of the spirit of it all. The concept of lo-fi and hi-fi are inverted, really - a "high fidelity" recording is supposed to have the highest "fidelity" or truthfulness, to a crystal-clear presentation of reality, but usually the more "hi-fi" somebody's album is, it just means the less of an honest portrayal it is of the way it really sounds when those people just plug in and play those songs all together in a room. A "lo-fi" recording, where you just hit the record button and play the song in one take, that's actually the highest fidelity, the closest you can get to a snapshot of the exact place and time and space and heart of the performance.
“it all started because there was this kid in my school who would steal tapes from Tower Records for a fee of $2 each, quite a good deal. I’d pay him a couple bucks to steal me the cassette of the first Led Zeppelin album, and a cassette of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, stuff like that. ”
D: As you have gotten older you seem to be more interested in documenting folk, roots, traditional music (alongside punk) - Has this progressively become something you are more and more interested in?
JL: I don't think I'm a particular documenter of folk or punk music, though I'm definitely a record nerd, and with an interest in digging through the music of my neighborhood in New York, which encompasses folk and punk and weird stuff, but in a particular way that seemed like a blind spot for most people. It's like people usually know about the existence of the early 60s NYC folk scene, and people of course know about the mid-late 70s punk scene and the rap that came after, but the whole period of bands from about 1965-1975 in NYC was kind of a fascinating mystery to me for years. It's a period of time in which people were paying attention to music from California, and paying attention to music from England, but NYC was left out of the spotlight, to develop all these unique strains of music from the Fugs to the Silver Apples to David Peel to the Last Poets, and all of that stuff. But that period is suddenly not quite as much of a total mystery - in just the past couple years there's been the Richard Hell autobiography, the Patti Smith autobiography, the Ed Sanders book "Fug You" and the Will Hermes book "Love Goes to Buildings on Fire", all four of which really fill in a huge amount of that historical blank space.
D: Do you think of yourself as a documentarian or librarian alongside an artist and performer? Maybe just a passionate fan?
JL: Passionate fan I guess. You get excited about stuff and you want other people to get excited about it too, for some reason.
D: What was your first record store experience? was it a good one?
JL: I'm not sure if I can really remember a first record store experience., but when I was around 13 or 14 years old, and just starting to actively get into music, and actively getting into wanting to own classic rock albums, it all started because there was this kid in my school who would steal tapes from Tower Records for a fee of $2 each, quite a good deal. I'd pay him a couple bucks to steal me the cassette of the first Led Zeppelin album, and a cassette of Pink Floyd's The Wall, stuff like that. So, yes, I guess that was a good experience! Then I learned how to steal them myself, which worked okay until I got busted. And most of the music I was discovering was via taping other people's records, mostly. I'd make tapes of my parents' Bob Dylan albums, and make tapes of my friends' Black Sabbath and Grateful Dead albums. Taping was the cheapest way to go, definitely. Then I could draw my own covers on them, too. Then at some point I started getting into buying used records, which were also very cheap at that time. In the 90s, everybody was getting rid of their vinyl so it was a lucky and perfect time for a broke teenager to be getting into classic rock.
D: Do you remember your very first purchase and on what format?
JL: It was either "Scarecrow" by John Cougar Mellencamp, or "Escape" by Whodini, those were the first tapes I bought, probably from Tower Records, and maybe I was 12 or something. "Escape" is a great and overlooked early rap album, it's full of hits and great songs that were popular at the time but are now mostly forgotten for some reason. I still love that tape!
D: Which are the best record stores you have found on your World travels?
JL: It's hard to say, because so many disappear, I don't know what still exists! Rockin' Rudy's in Missoula Montana was a great discovery when I stumbled on it while on a road-trip in 1997, and every time I've been on a tour that passes through Montana I try to go back there. It was still there the last time I went, but I haven't been there since about 2012, so who knows. I recently found a little place in Salt Lake City called Diabolical Records. I went there to play a gig and discovered that it's a very cool record shop. I also like the one that's in my neighborhood in NYC, on East 12th St, - is it Academy Records? I haven't had as much luck finding used stuff to buy there but they've got a very good section of vinyl reissues of 60s psychedelic/garage stuff at the most affordable prices I've ever seen. I also really like Other Music, also near there, on East 4th St. I haven't found any good used vinyl there in years but I always find good used CDs there. There's a record shop in Hamburg Germany that I've been to a couple times that I like, but I forget the name. I absolutely love the tiny prog/psychedelic CD shop in Hebden Bridge UK. It's such a weird and tiny and specialized shop, in an unlikely location, I always find interesting stuff to buy there, but actually I think maybe they don't exist anymore. I remember some great used record shops in Manchester UK too, but not sure where they were or if they're still there.
Armadillo Disques, Toulouse
“Armadillo Records in Toulouse, France is also a really cool little shop, and they’ve been putting out a zine for decades. The more I think about it, the more good record shops come to mind.”
D: And following on, why? What makes for a good shop?
JL: Good psychedelic records at cheap prices! That's basically my criteria. I have a personal rule never to spend more than $15 on a record, so I have to find things cheap if I'm going to buy anything. But sometimes even if the stuff is expensive and out of my price range, it's still really cool just to see a good collection of records, it's like being at a museum. I love going to those rare record shops on Portobello Road in London, like Love Minus Zero, or another one whose name I forget… they've got original Monks 45s on the wall for like £600 GBP, or the original Fapardokly album. I remember once seeing an original COB "Spirit of Love" LP at a shop on Berwick St in London for £100. It's just a thrill for me to see that stuff in the flesh, and any other outrageously rare and expensive pieces of vinyl, I love to just gape at that stuff. Sometimes it's even cooler when it's stuff that I have no idea what it even is… just to see an insanely expensive and weird looking LP, it fills me with a sense of mystery and desire. I just have to know what that record sounds like, and it's just not as satisfying to hear an MP3 re-issue, you want to hear the original scratchy disc,. It's like a radio signal beamed from a lost universe.
Photo: Tom Cops
D: I feel as if you have been playing in-store shows for pretty much all of your career. Without suggesting you necessarily invented them, it seems to be a structure that people understand a great deal more and are very much more common now. Do you feel like a pioneer in that way? What appealed to you originally about playing such initimate or micro shows?
JL: There's no way I'm any kind of pioneer in that field, but I'm lucky in the sense that I do have plenty of songs that can work just fine as unplugged solo acoustic performances. Even some of my illustrated songs, all of that stuff can work perfectly well or even better in the kind of intimate environment of an unplugged house gig or an in-store appearance. It's also hard for people outside of America to understand how pervasive and restrictive the 21+ rules are in America. The majority of regular rock clubs are 21-and-up only, for entry. So the only chance you ever have to play to anybody under the age of 21 is if you're playing house gigs or underground gigs, like barns and basements and in-stores and stuff like that. But of course the conditions of those sorts of gigs make it impossible for complicated bands to do them. So that's where it really pays to be able to be flexible and to be able to play in any environment.
D: What are you favourite memories of playing in shops?
JL: Sometimes they give you a discount! I think I did some kind of art talk in the Rough Trade East shop in London when A Turn in the Dream-Songs came out, and they gave me a really good discount, so I bought a bunch of stuff, like the Pebbles box set… Actually one of my best-ever shop memories was a gig in the great comic book shop Jim Hanley's Universe in New York City. There was a small but appreciative crowd, including a couple of great artists like Gabrielle Belle and Michel Gondry and Jon Lewis, and the store did give me a great discount price, which I used the heck out of . It was my opportunity to buy the big hardcover collection of Alan Moore's Lost Girls at an affordable price, one of those now-or-never situations.
D: Have you had any real disasters?
JL: Of course, but it depends what you mean! Record buying disasters?
D: Well I meant more playing disasters, but I want to hear about your accidental purchases now…
JL: I've learned that you only really regret the records that you don't buy… Like, that first time I was in Rockin' Rudy's Records in Missoula Montana in 1997, I bought a bunch of great 60s albums for great prices, like the first HP Lovecraft LP for only $3.99, incredible! But they had the first two Chocolate Watch Band LPs for $25 each, and I didn't buy them - it was out of my price range, for one thing, and also this was pre-internet and I had absolutely no idea how rare these albums were, or what prices they would go for. I really thought "oh, I'll just wait until I find them again for $15 or less, it'll happen someday", and there's no way that's ever going to happen, those albums sell for hundreds of dollars. Also I could have bought original copies of the second and third Godz LPs for $16 each, at Bleecker Street Records in NYC in the late 90s, but it was one dollar higher than my personal price-limit so I figured I'd wait till I saw them again for a bit cheaper - good luck!! And there are other albums that I wish I had taken a chance on but didn't, it really burns me out to think about it. You never have those opportunities again, you create a lifetime of regret just for the sake of saving $10! However, I never really have disasters with the records that I DO buy, because I just buy cheap stuff. Yes, sometimes you get albums that are horrible, but it's not like I ever spent $50 on a record that was terrible, it's more like $5 here or $10 there.
D: Across your career, the role of the record shop has changed quite drastically; do you feel that record shops are still important?
JL: Record shops are completely important to me, but I'm an old man and I'm out of the loop! I'm in my late 30s! What the hell do kids these days care about record shops? When I was a teenager the record shops happened to be the absolute cheapest and most accessible way to learn about music and to get to hear and own all these records, especially as a teenager into 60s music. For like $2-$7 each you could slowly acquire every Rolling Stones album, every Animals album, every Simon & Garfunkel album, every Jefferson Airplane album, all of that stuff, even slightly rarer albums like the Incredible String Band or Syd Barrett. It was all right there and it was all at prices that a kid could afford. Now all those same records are more expensive, and the whole LP thing is more for collectors than for broke kids. There are cheaper ways to hear music just by listening with Youtube or stuff like that. But record shops are still great places, and there are still great record shops around. It's not like the complete genocide of movie-rental shops, THAT is a culture that has been completely erased from the map, and that's a real loss. I don't even know how to watch movies anymore. I was never a big movie buff, certainly not like my love of records, but still, why the hell can't I just go out and rent a movie? I live in the heart of NYC, and you'd think that wouldn't be too much to ask. The great comic book shops and the great record shops have all dwindled quite a lot in number, but they have not been totally wiped out the way the movie-rental places have been. I had an idea for a business - somebody could open a shop that's just a download shop. You wouldn't have to stock any physical merchandise, you would just need like laminated cards for all of the albums or all of the movies. But you would have that "shop" interface. You'd have employees to talk to, you'd have the kind of cool personalised decour of those shops, and you'd have the experience of browsing through shelves or through binders of some sort, stumbling on interesting-looking things. When you find something you want, you just bring it to the counter and you can download it, and the shop would get a percentage of the sales money just like any retailer. I think this should exist. The experience of "browsing" on the internet just does not compare to the experience of browsing at a weird cool local shop, even if the end result is not the physical taking-home of a CD or DVD. I think a brick-and-mortar "download store" could really be a cool thing, and the proprietors wouldn't even need to rent very much space because there wouldn't be physical items to keep in stock, just sort of binders full of cue-card type things.