KRAMER

"Uh Oh..Fans."

Pretty rude considering we had all been hearty followers for many years and like, we're the people that helped pay for your latest vintage car, pal! And the instant we mentioned we were from a local fanzine and would like to do an interview it was all smiles, enthusiasm and ultra-cooperation. What a remarkable transformation! But, you know... we're not gonna draw conclusions from first impressions or anything, I mean we don't wanna get into an argument although there are certain touchy subjects we wanna talk about... and besides...we haven't bought tickets yet...!

The list of bands that Kramer has been involved in is exhaustive. The most well known include Bongwater, Shockabilly, Butthole Surfers, Ween, and B.A.L.L., and collaborations with such pop luminaries as Daniel Johnston, Dogbowl, Jad Fair and Galaxy 500. Most projects end in back stabbing, rumour spreading or court summonses, but a few notable exceptions such as a long standing friendship with the Buttholes and Ween, do exist!

Most Kramer news at the moment comes in the form of production credits on new LP's rather then his own musical accomplishments, which seem to be on the wane, probably because there's no one left that will play with him! So we asked him which he regarded as the most important, the music he's produced or the music he's made:

"Gee! I've never even thought of it like that... I can't even fathom thinking about that, it's two different things.It's kinda like a guy who doesn't play sports and saying to him why is playing baseball on Saturday more important than playing football on Sunday! I've no idea. They're both equal to me. I make a living from producing; I certainly don't make a living from the records or anything like that, and that is an important factor. So, I guess in an economic sense, producing is more important. But do you mean artistically?"

It's a hypothetical thing, where you have to choose one or the other...

"Well, if I fell out of a window and wound up in a wheelchair, I'd have to give up performing. I'd certainly have to give up touring, but I wouldn't have to give up working in music: writing, composing, recording or producing. So, it depends on how you want to take the hypothetical. But I would certainly rather sit in a recording studio, and be able to spend every day with my daughter in the studio in the house than to be on the road. Because really guys, and I mean this sincerely, this kind of shit that feels good, (gesticulating to the seafront scenery), where the air is okay, and you've got something to look at, this is really rare. I mean London is not a nice place to live. Maybe you can buy Doc Martens there, but it's horrible. The air is just tepid, full of toxins, the subway costs a fucking fortune...Anyway, I don't like touring..."

Do you not like playing on the continent? Everyone we've talked to seems to feel that people get treated better over there...

"Yeah but, you know...the creature comforts are never really a factor. I never really cared whether we were gonna make enough money to afford to sleep in hotels. I cared whether the promoters and the people interested in putting us on were really into doing it and really wanted us to come. So I would never go on a tour unless you can string together twenty people who just had to have us come to town. Any other situation than that, a week before the tour you wind up having five or six gigs cancelled. You end up staying in hotels two days in a row and you're losing tons of money. This all happens if the promoter only sold ten tickets in advance. That's what has happened over here; the guy in Newcastle is trying desparately to cancel the show because he's sold six tickets. He forgets that when Bongwater played in Newcastle there were crowds of people outside who couldn't get in. There's a certain guarantee that those people aren't gonna show up in droves tonight because this isn't a Bongwater concert. It's hard enough to get on a plane and come over; it's good to feel that you have support from promoters once you're here."

Globetrotting Kramer tours are few and far between so his arrival in Brighton with Dogbowl was a pretty momentous event, even bigger considering that he never plays live in the U.S. at all, except for very occasional appearances with Dean and Gene Ween, with whom he plays bass, as Mean.

"I played once last year at a book release party for the only Shimmydisc book in publication, which is a collection of Maciosce photographs, the guy that does Shimmydisc record covers, all those weird photographs. So I played about fifteen songs from 'The Guilt Trip' with a four piece band. Before that, the last time I played was with Ween."

The Ween, currently one of the coolest and weirdest bands in the U.S., especially so now that Gene got in the last issue of Sassy, a teenygirls mag, as agony aunt, seem to be an interesting topic of conversation, as although Kramer isn't currently playing live with them, they are very close friends and regular fishing partners! Sea fishing, that is...Big game fishing in the Caribbean for tuna, barracuda, sharks...

"Shark fishing off Long Island is heavy. I do that every summer. I have a friend with a boat and we go shark fishing."

Do you use those buckets of big, gory mix and tip it into the sea?

"'Chomp!' It's ground up fish and blood. You puncture the buckets and lower the buckets over. There's this stream of blood and guts going through the water. After a couple of hours the sharks start to show up. It's not like, will they come?...They come! Because of the blood and carnage in the water. Very often they just come and swim around the boat. That's menacing enough, it really is, because you're on a small boat surrounded by sharks. Even though the boat is fine and it's forty years old and you know it's not going to sink! But you're right in the middle of the ocean, it's not like you're right off shore, you can't see anything. Seventy miles offshore to be exact.

"In the beginning of summer, there's usually nothing but Blue sharks. Then the Makoes start to come in, then Whitetips. The Makoes make particularly good eating, but they're less frequently seen now, so there's a bit of controversy about that. One mako shark in your freezer can get you through an entire three month season. It has a couple of times...good fish! Have you ever eaten fish from McDonalds? It's usually all shark, depending on the season. Sometimes it's like ninety percent shark."

So what do you do with the ones you catch?

"Let 'em go. Let 'em all go. Except for one Mako per year. Or anything that gets killed that's been brought in, we keep, because there's no sense in throwing it back. There are a lot of gamefish like dolphin who tear themselves apart. Sometimes Marlin is a good thing to catch, to keep...You can hang Marlin on your wall."

So this is what you do in your leisure time?

You know, I can't really characterise it as leisure. It's kind of a vocation. Not that I earn a penny in doing it, but it's something that I want to do all the time. I'm trying real hard to get a tiny little house, I mean like a tiny little hut somewhere in the tropics. The two islands that are cheap to get to from the U.S.A. are the Caribbean and the Bahamas. The little hut will have running water, and an outhouse and everything, so I can go down there for a month at a time and just go fishing. That should illustrate how much I like fishing."

Time to get down to more utopian matters, anyway. This is what Kramer wants to be doing in five years time, which I didn't really take very seriously at first, but was fairly convinced of by the end. It's always difficult judging words from a mouth that has a lier's reputation, so you should probably make your own mind up! Here it is:

"Living on an island in a state of sublime poverty, a place where I can pick up pappayas from the sand and buy pineapples for fifty cents, and bananas for a penny. And I'm really not kidding!

Are you fed up with city life then?

"I haven't lived in the city for years, and I think it's one of the reasons I'm leaning so much more toward getting out of it altogether. When I left the city, when I was in the process of actually moving, I was wondering 'What am I doing? I must be crazy! The city is where all the energy comes from, all the inspiration!'.I swear to God, within five or six days of having left the city, and sitting in my new house in my very quiet, wooded suburb, I thought I had been crazy for staying in the city. It's like a witch. The idea that a city can provide you with inspiration or brainwaves is such total bullshit. It's not where you are. It's bullshit. It's comforting to be surrounded by people who are trying to do what you're doing, who share your opinions and views, but the idea that you can only make music in the city is as ludicrous as saying you can only paint the desert when you're in the desert. I found that out pretty quickly. So I couldn't care less about the city, I'm happy in the suburbs. I'm getting more and more restful. I find that when I'm on tour I get more and more hyper, racing toward some terrible end, and it's a terrible feeling. I hate it more and more as time goes on, probably because I'm deeper and deeper emeshed in the business. Now it's at the point with Shimmydisc where really unless some kind of real money comes in, like some major label comes along and are stupid enough to give us an immense amount of money to lend themselves some credibility in alternative music. Unless something like that happens, I'm pretty sure it won't last more than another few years. I don't see how it possibly could, because you struggle to sell a few thousand records. You guys don't realise that, you know? The bands that you and all your friends like don't sell quite as much as you think they do." (Take things for granted why don't you?) "I've seen mountains and mountains of Big Black records stacked up at distributorships from returns. You wouldn't think that Big Black is something that is sitting in warehouses, you would think that it's something that sells on a fairly consistent basis, because people are always wanting to pick it up, and it's where that whole genre of music came from, and that Albini is a powerful enough force in the business so his records keep selling. You'd be fooled. Ninety percent of the time you'd be shocked to hear how little things really sell. It's that struggle I'm discouraged from, and would like to remove myself from. I'd rather just be producing and operating on this level in a little recording studio than doing what fifty to sixty employees of mine need to survive. It's an enormous burden and pressure that I've not been able to delegate to the people that work for me. You know, it's the old thing, 'If you want something done, you'd better do it yourself'. That's so terribly true, especially in alternative music. We're the hippies of the nineties, yet we're fuck ups, total fuck ups, because we really can't do anything right. So it's very discouraging if you are trying to function as a business, which you have to to make a living, in the music business today, and still be creative and make records the way you want to. The two have kind of become one in my life. It sucks."

Maybe it's this down to earth view and obsession with money that has earned Kramer his enemies. Through no fault of his own maybe, for running a successful label can be no easy task. But when it comes down to it, Kramer is a man with a bad reputation. We're not talking about, say, a few people disliking the guy, but most of the talented musicians he's worked with over the years. Most notably is our beloved hero of weird pop, Jad Fair, frontman to Half Japanese and ultra collaborator with everybody cool. Last year in the ever impressive 'Hairy Hi-fi' zine, Kramer made extremely provocative suggestions that he'd had a thing going with Jad's wife. Waves were felt both sides of the Atlantic and in the next issue Jad replied with a fierce letter that thoroughly undermined the rumour and attacked Mark Kramer for ripping off his fellow collaborators.

And on the Bongwater front, Anne Magnuson and Kramer are now fighting things out in court. Other people left sour after playing with Kramer include Don Fleming, singer and guitarist with Gumball but who used to play in B.A.L.L. Big upsets happened when the band split with Fleming and Jay Spiegal letting rip with a flurry of anger explaining how Kramer hadn't allowed them enough creative freedom during B.A.L.L.'s four album existance.

As already mentioned, the Buttholes are a rare exception:

"I'm always swearing off working in bands, but when a band like Ween or the Butthole Surfers need another player, the enticement to play some of your favourite songs is really too strong to lie. In a way, being in the Buttholes was like being in The Beatles, because at that time I was playing my favourite songs, stuff from 'Another Man's Sac'. All those songs I thought were incredible, and I was playing those songs, so I was in heaven."

He then mentions how they've really got their thing together right now and how professional they are, so I put it to him that they really haven't done anything worth doing since 1988, but even this failed to make him lose his cool. All we got was an abrupt rejection and a frown. Likewise with Anne Magnuson:

"I ain't gonna talk about that."

"So that's a no-no ?!?!"

(Rueful shake of the head)

What a downer, when all we had really wanted to do was dig our claws in! But Kramer's dogged determination to only talk about what he wanted to talk about was impossible to get around. But whatever the reasons that lay behind his seriously fucked up reputation, one thing remains of humungous importance: not to let these truths (mostly unpaid royalties) influence whether you like the music or not. Because Kramer is still one of the best musicians ever to lay down his soul onto vinyl. He's one of the most creative talents currently in the business and his incredible long running success with his cult Shimmydisc label is in my eyes the most impressive one person feat ever pulled off in the music industry. Shimmydisc's output is truly awesome and if you're not out there already, check it out! All of it!!

New stuff from Kramer to look out for is a second album with David Allen from Gong and Soft Machine, and a collaborative album with Hugh Hopper, Soft Machine's bassist. (Bruce: "A sixties British prog rock revival is on the cards then?") Other (more noteworthy!) stuff is a new solo record called 'The Secret of Comedy', and another solo record after that. The chances are that the solo stuff will be similar to previous output and worth getting hold of, the only real pointer being to expect something more pop and "less trendy and attractive to the 'kids'."