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An Interview with Alan Vega
Posted: Sunday, October 07, 2007
By: Ilker Yücel
Editor

When Alan Vega and Martin Reverby formed the no wave band Suicide in the late '70s, nobody could have predicted that they would become a pivotal band in the development of industrial and underground electronic music. After only two albums, the duo went their separate ways, but they had made their mark in the world music, influencing a new generation of music to blend the aggressive energy of punk with the mechanized sounds of electronic. Vega would then embark on a solo career that began with 1980's Juke Box Babe and 1981's Collision Drive, featuring Vega's unique sense of fractured rockabilly, predating what would eventually become psychobilly. Over the years, Vega would produce several albums, both independently and on Elektra Records, tour throughout the world, and release several books and exhibits that displayed his artistic endeavors, including light sculptures, poetry, and photography. Suicide would reform in the '90s, playing shows in London, as well as seeing their first two albums reissued by Mute Records. The duo would release the American Supreme album, which was heavily influenced by the events of 9/11. All the while, Vega would maintain his career as an artist and a solo artist, collaborating with Pan Sonic, creating a soundtrack for the film Sombre, and releasing his last solo album, 1999's 2007. Now, after eight years performing the material to various audiences, Vega's latest album, Station, comes with full industrial force, showcasing the man's unique mix of old-school industrial sound collages and sparse psychobilly atmosphere. ReGen spoke with Mr. Vega about the long construction of his latest album, while also touching on his history, his influence on today's music scene, and his perspectives on the political status quo.

While you've been active in various artistic and musical endeavors since then, your last album as Alan Vega was 1999's 2007. Being that it is now the year 2007, and your new album Station has been released in this year, what would you say is the thematic or conceptual connection between this new album and your last, if there is one?

Vega: I didn't plan for it to be released in 2007. I was hoping that it would be 2001, 2002, 2003...but it just kept going and going and going. I was probably rolling about, and I saw something way back in the mid-'80s in Paris about a disaster that was going to come. For some reason, I saw a calendar that said June or July; I couldn't remember which, but I remembered the year of the calendar, sort of like a flash, that said 2007. I guess it was probably wrong, although the whole world is a fucking disaster, every year. I didn't plan it. It's just...I don't know, I guess it's kind of funny, isn't it? The album kept evolving and evolving, and that's the way that I work. I let things just be free, just letting the album, or art in general. You bring it to a place where it gets two-thirds done, and you start letting it tell you what to do, you know? I work in cycles, so I'd start out with 25 songs, which eventually worked its way down to 11. Every time I go through that cycle of 25 songs, by the time I got from one to 25, by 25 already I'm in another place, so I have to start over again at number one and bring it to where 25 was, and when I get to 25 again, it's the same process over and over again. Eventually, I start weeding out songs, and it took a long time. It took five or six years. It wasn't like I was in the studio every day, because I was doing a lot of touring, so I'm gone two to three times a week, and not for very many hours. I can't work one to four hours a night. I used to go through 12 16-hour sessions and come out with crap; it gets so mind-boggling, so four or five hours is the maximum for me. It just went on and on and on, and then my wife would be like, 'Is it done yet? Is it done yet? Are we there yet?' Basically, I must have written about five or six albums throughout the course of all of this, but I think I got it to a good place. I feel happy with it. I've learned something from this, and I just kept going, even though the album was finished. I just kept working on this new thing I'm working on now, and who the hell knows how long this thing is going to take. I'm hoping a year.

You said you have 25 songs that you scaled down to 11. How do you determine which songs will go on the album, and what other pieces of remaining material you'll save or not include?

Vega: Well, you do the 25 songs, and eventually some of these things just don't work anymore. It's funny, not on this album, but almost every album I've ever done in my life, there's always been that one song that I love the most that's never going to make it. It's like that ugly child, you know? All the songs are like children, and you have 10 to 11 kids, and there's always that one you love the most, but it's never going to work, and you constantly try to make it work, make it work, make it work. It's very hard to let things go. Some of the songs, you can tell, it didn't matter how much you worked on it, they just weren't going anywhere, so I'd say, 'OK, next!' You know, I'm not going to put out 25 songs anyway. I figured 11, or maybe 12 if possible, but there are some things that just start to stand out and you need more time to work on those standout things to make them even better. You just can't waste all that time. You just know. It's an instinctive thing at this point with me where I can probably tell when something's not going to work. It's hard, but it's sort of like Pablo Picasso. He started working on a collage in like the early 1900s, and it was one of those ugly duckling things that he couldn't let go of either, so he just kept piling stuff on top of it. It must've taken him 20 or 30 years of working on this fucking collage. And then one day, he got to a point where he said, 'No more.' He had what he had, and then he ripped all the shit off it, all the layers. The thing he originally started with was still there, and it was exactly what he finished with. So, 30 years to get to the same place, it just wouldn't happen. I kind of remember that thing about Picasso, and if Picasso couldn't do it, I couldn't.

So will anything become of these other tracks that you left off of Station?

Vega: Well, I still have them. On the last album, the song '13 Crosses, 16 Blazin' Skulls' was the 11th song, and it wasn't working. I wanted to definitely have 11 songs on this thing. It just wasn't working, and the rest of the album was done. One night, I was sitting at the keyboard and I was about ready to leave the studio, and I wasn't even looking at the keyboard, I just plopped my hand down on the thing, and all of a sudden, this thing came out and I said, 'Holy shit!' It was another thing already, in another place already, beyond what the rest of the album was. Paul Smith, whom I've worked with for years, flipped out about it, too. That was a really big breakthrough for me. So I finished the album, but like I said, I didn't stop. I did whatever you have to do for a new album, I did my tours, but I kept working on where I left off with that song with some of the songs that were from the remaining 12 or 14 songs, and just started reworking them with the new knowledge that I had. There were some good things on the songs that I let go, like a great drum line or a great keyboard line or a great sample. There was always something on some of these things I was letting go, and sometimes I'd combine two or three songs because I'd take the best out of all of them and combine them into one big song. But there was always stuff leftover, and that's why I kept working on it for so long. I just took the knowledge I gained from working on the album and kept going, because I was on a hot streak anyway, and I didn't want to let it go for another six months and then try to find that thing again. I want to keep that thing rolling. So I'm going to be coming out with some new crazy shit, man. I'm glad I kept going. It's probably beyond Station now in terms of intensity. We'll see where it goes. I hope it doesn't take forever. I hope it's a year, because it's already been six months.

As you've been working on Station since 2000, you've performed some of the newer material to live audiences over the years. How has the audiences' response to the new music affected the outcome of the album?

Vega: From what I've seen from audiences, especially in Europe, the reviews have been over the top. Even the one bad one I got, they kind of said, 'Oh, but it's still a great album.' It's so stupid, they proceeded to rip it down, but they said, 'Oh, but it's still a great album.' Being trashed, except for the last sentence, you know? I remember once a long time ago, and it might've been in the '80s, and Suicide went on tour, and a reporter follows us from town to town. Of course, the one review he writes out of the whole tour is the one bad night we had. Some nights are bad; you can't help it. I think it was in Manchester. He writes this article tearing the shit out of us! In fact, I still have it. It's so venomous. But in the last paragraph, he says, 'But Suicide still is great. It's ahead of it's time. Blah blah blah, the music will be here forever.' After this fucker trashed us! The English are good at this, man. So what're you wasting your time for? But it's just been a lot of five stars. It's been a rave thing. The audiences are loving it. But it's not selling, of course. Well, nothing is anyway, so I don't feel so bad about it. Who the hell knows what's going on in this business anymore? It's on the Internet anyway. The major labels, they'll form one huge label, and then it'll explode, like in that song, which one is it? 'I Am the Walrus,' how the whale or the walrus exploded?

Prior to this album, you released your second collaboration with Pan Sonic in 2004, titled Resurrection River. How did you come to associate with Pan Sonic in the first place, and how do you feel your own music has evolved as a result of your cooperation with them?

Vega: That's a good question. You got some time? It's a long story. Mika Vainio and Ilpo Välsänen live way up north in Finland. One day, Mike was visiting his grandmother on this bus trip, and in the middle of this trip in a tundra, the bus takes a break and stops off in this middle-of-nowhere town, and there was actually a record store there. He walks in and sees a vinyl album of the first Suicide record, and the Finns are into that Suicide stuff, man. He listens to it and he flips out. He compares me with Elvis as far as he's concerned. Paul Smith said, 'These guys want to do an outside-of project, and it's like their dream to work with Alan Vega,' so I listened to the CD. You know, I get tons of shit, but you can tell in the first five or 10 seconds, 'Yes! Finally, something real! These guys are cool,' so we got together to do a single, and we just kept playing and playing and playing, and I'm writing the lyrics in the studio, doing the music like a live gig, right then and there. That was the first one we did, and that single turned into an album. I think we did it in one session and mixed it in another, but it was just hours and hours of it. This was great! They're such unique personalities. Mika never smiles, never talks. I almost got a smile out of him, and everybody freaks, because I was the only person alive ever to get a smile out of Mika. He's so serious. Ilpo's the complete opposite. He's a party man. Of course I learned something from them. I can't specifically say what it is. I've always been into electronics...shit, all my life! They were doing another kind of electronic. We're similar in many ways, but something must've happened. You can't do two albums and a couple of shows and not be affected, and just working with them is a trip and a half, and I can't say specifically what it is, but something must have rubbed off on me. That's why I love collaborations, because every time I do one, I'm always changing as a result of working on it with new ideas.

Some of your more recent works, such as the Collision Drive exhibit you contributed to and Suicide's American Supreme album, have been connected to the socio-political climate surrounding the events of 9/11. How has life in post-9/11 New York affected your artistic/musical outlook?

Vega: I tend to walk away from that. I was right in the middle of it, and it became an occupied area here in the downtown area, full of soldiers and bayonets and tanks and all kinds of shit. They wanted your identification just to find a supermarket and get food, whether it was a passport or a letter, or some form of documentation that says, 'I live in that building.' You had to go through three different people just to get home, and you'd get stopped by soldiers with machine guns, man. Oh, it was lovely! The funny thing is I've been so used to all kinds of drama in my life. Just thinking of Suicide, having gigs as early as we did was like a war zone. Of course, I felt something, but I'm feeling it more now for some reason than I did then. It's the same thing with working with someone. How can it not affect me? I think I was working on something then, and it might've been 2007. It was a different album when I first thought of it, and it had different lyrics alogether, with like love songs or some kind of shit, and after that, I just canned the whole thing, canned the lyrics, because it was ridiculous. I also knew that the world was going to change forever. It's never going to be the same because of it. I don't want to get into conspiracy theories, but someday in the long run, we're going to see things coming out. It was set up, and I'm not going to go into the reasons why, but there's proof, and they let these guys do their things, and they're hired hands. It was to create a sense of fear. We're all living with this fear. Our lives are completely different. I remember that getting on a plane used to be fun. Get a giggle from the detectors, get on the fucking plane, sit down in the back, seatbelts off, light up a cigarette, drink, be merry, and be happy. Usually the smoking section had the best people on the flight anyway because they were always party-goers. Now, it's like being in a fucking flying prison. Stay quiet, don't complain. That's why I'm not doing many shows anymore, because I'm getting older, and it's still fun to play, and I have a kid, but just to get to these places...I wish it was like, 'Beam me up, Scotty,' and it'd be okay. Freedom to travel gave us all an opportunity to see and be with other cultures and see how the rest of the world is. I'm pretty good at French, and if you read the French newspapers about this whole Iraq thing, it's like you're reading about another war! You know what I mean? 'What?! Is this the war that I've been hearing about?' Keep reading, and then you look at the TV in America and you get such a jaded view of what it's all about, and over there you get a whole other kind of view point. It's all over in other countries, not just France, and you start to ask, 'What's happening? Am I getting the truth?' So you get over there and you meet people, and that, to me, was the best part of touring, just working there. You're not a tourist over there, you're working, and you're meeting people there who are working to make your life easier as well. You care for somebody's kids, and you hang around with regular people and get their viewpoint, and there are all these Arabs in France that tell me what's going on, and it's a completely different view. It's the total opposite! We're not caught in the shade here, man. We're talking black and white! We're kept in the dark. I always said that if they found any weapons of mass destruction, they would say 'Made in the USA' on them. We supported him, we gave him arms to fight Iran all those years, the 10-year war over there, and I'm sure we took them all out of there before the U.N. inspectors came in. They didn't find shit! Nothing! I have a kid now, he's nine years-old, so I'm a father now, which has been the greatest experience of my life. I've led a pretty amazing life, considering what I've done, and I've made some amazing friends, and I'm friends with all these great musicians and artists, and I could check out now and say, 'It's been great, see you around!' But my kid, man! What kind of fucking world is he going to grow up in? It's not going to be the world that I grew up in, and that scares the crap out of me, because I also feel like I can't do anything about it. At least with Vietnam, we went out into the streets, protesting, getting tear-gassed, and beaten and all kinds of crap. Finally, it was enough already. The country went from a 90/10 in favor of the war to 50/50, and then eventually it ended. But I see these kids out there now chanting, and they're doing the same thing we did in the '60s, the same slogans, the same songs. It doesn't work anymore! You know Bush is back there, wherever he is, at some ranch in Texas, laughing his ass off! In fact, it was the one knock I got, saying, 'Here's Alan again, talking about the war again,' and I'm going like, 'Yeah, man! I tried to do something else, but I can't!' I feel as if it's my duty to do this shit. Somebody's got to speak out, and that's what an artist is supposed to do: tell the truth! And I get knocked for it. 'Oh, he's back in the same old shit again.' There's nothing but wars all over the fucking place!

You've worked with Liz Lamere on pretty much all of your solo albums, and she is your wife, correct?

Vega: Yes. She's also my manager, although now we've pretty much given it to this guy Paul Smith. He brought Suicide back in '97, and he said he had a plan, and it worked. There are a lot of bands covering us, and it must be hundreds of bands doing Suicide songs now, like Bruce Springsteen, R.E.M., Henry Rollins...

That's right, Henry Rollins did 'Ghost Rider.'

Vega: Yeah, on the soundtrack to The Crow. He was telling me afterwards that he didn't expect it to sell like six million, or I think it was three million copies, and he said to me, 'If I'd known it was going to get that big, I would've used one of my own songs.' So that was our big payday, finally, after all these years. It's still making money, after all these years.

It's still a popular soundtrack, but what I was going to ask was how does working with your wife in a musical and managerial capacity differ from other people that you work with?

Vega: It's a good question. The relationship we have as husband and wife? Ironically, she has more of a pop sensibility than me. She's got a more melodic approach to things. Sometimes, things can get a little dicey, but she's still totally into my stuff. When I first met her, I was doing this way out shit, up in the middle of night, sitting in front of all these machines, and she was loving it. She really knew where I was coming from. But she's got her own sensibility, and I have to applaud it. She's doing great. She's playing a theremin-like thing right now and doing really great stuff on it. But every now and again, sometimes I have to angrily say, 'Fuck it!' It gets tense sometimes, as it gets tense with any two people working together, but it's all okay. Suicide, we decided early on, was going to be a democracy. If Martin wanted to do a song that I don't like, then we're not going to do it, and vice versa, so there's always that kind of thing where we both have to love it, but that's why we both have our solo things, too. He can do what he wants for his thing, and the things that I don't do with Suicide, I can do.

Having been somewhat instrumental in the early development of electronic music and what would ultimately become industrial music, what are your thoughts on the state of music today with respect to these genres?

Vega: To me, it's disappointing that most of them, especially in Europe, seem to come out of one shop or one studio. I know it's not true, but everybody tries to capitalize on what is supposedly hot, the sound of now, and they just churn out the same-sounding things. Nobody's trying to be creative with it. It's the same old shit. Here and there, you've got somebody where you say, 'Wow, this is new. This is different.' But it's rare. Like everything else in music today, everything's so homogenized and downright trashy. Think about it. When we were kids, we couldn't wait for the next Beatles record or the next Stones record, and we'd wait in lines at the store, and the next thing you know, you got scratches. You listened to it so much, the vinyl was melting. You know what I mean? If you looked at the top 10 or the top 100 in those days, it was all these great artists—Otis Redding, The Beatles, The Stones—but if you look at it now, you're like, 'Who the fuck are these people, man?' I like some stuff. I like 50 Cent, I like some rap bands, the more tough-edged stuff. I like some of the beats, and some of the lyrics are amazing. It's street, it's got that culture, and it's the truth. They're always trying to get them not to use the N-word or say 'bitch' and all the anti-feminism, but that's what they're living. That's why I keep doing what I'm doing, because I hope that it's different enough to stand apart. Every year, there's a new thing, a new keyboard, a new drum machine, and you don't even need those anymore, because everything's in the damn computer anyway. Just go to your computer and sample away and take shit that's already been done. Rap guys are doing it, too. Rap is turning into that thing, too, being homogenized and being about what's hot at the moment. In the end, it's not the instruments at all; it's your head, your brain, that's your instrument. Sometimes I like to come out with an old keyboard and some of those old Electro-Harmonix boxes we used to use in Suicide, and it's amazing what you can get out of that stuff. There's an infinite amount of stuff, especially with keyboards they have today, with layers and layers and layers of sound, and you have to go from one level to another. But now, people stay on layer A and say, 'OK, this is the sound we want, like everybody else's sound.' They don't go to B or C, and it'll just go into next year's version of it. Guitar players play the same stinking three chords over and over again. Listen to Green Day. The technology's better, so the sound is better, and the guitars are better, and the amps are better, but you listen to Green Day, and you think, 'Wait a minute! Didn't I hear this three years ago or something?'

On the song 'Station Station,' the sample that shows up in there...is that Jon Secada?

Vega: Holy shit! You fucking got ears, man. It was big secret for crying out loud. Absolutely! That is Jon Secada. That one song, and I forget the name of the song.

'Just Another Day.'

Vega: Yeah! I hang out in this Irish pub, one of these long, long bars, and I hang out there at night, and it has a very eclectic jukebox. And depending on whoever's in the bar is what you'll hear. Every night, if a guy is in there who listens to country/western, you'll hear country/western all night long. If a rap guy came in, you'd hear rap all night long. It's always different every night. Somebody came in one night, and I guess he was a Jon Secada fan, and he played that song. I knew that song, and I hadn't heard that song in a long time, and I'm not a fan of his, but that one particular song blew me away, so I had to get it, just to listen to that one song. I wasn't intending to use it, but I just got it, and then one day in the studio, I said, 'I've got to do something with this song.' I just love it, and I did things with it like sampled effects and whatever I did; I've forgotten already. I love the way it came out. But nobody, nobody has caught onto it except you! Unbelievable!