A couple weeks ago I met with a local writer who happened to mention
Richard Lloyd, someone we've both interviewed in the past. Later, I had an amazing article sent my way. The story was by Charles M. Young and was an incredible story of being on the road with Richard.
It made me want to revisit the time I'd spent with Richard back in 2007. I've posted the original story and Q&A again below.
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When Richard Lloyd was recently in Hamilton to do a session at Grant Avenue, I headed out there to interview him. What I was expecting would be a twenty-minute interview, followed by some music and a couple of gigs, turned into three very strange days, indeed.
Day One
First, before I even set foot on Grant Avenue’s property, Lloyd was already yelling at me as he saw me coming down the street: “Hey! Excuse me! Would you vote for me if I ran for something?”
I don’t know what he thought as I started walking towards him – maybe he just figured I was really enthusiastic about giving him my vote – but he was completely unfazed as I took a seat beside him on the bench by Grant’s front door. Chris Houston is out there, as well as Lloyd’s bassist, Keith WHO?, who should have been a `90s poster boy.
Lloyd immediately struck me as Very New York: Verbose, physical, uninhibited, and very straightforward.
“Am I ever glad they sent you,” he says. “Oh yeah, you’re easy on the eyes. I saw the list of people who are coming here today and it’s, like, nineteen guys.”
He started pulling shit out of his pockets: Crumpled papers, a cell phone, wallet, a bottle of scripts – it all keeps flowing out until he stops at a little pill box.
“You’re not squeamish, are you?” He asks.
“Not really – why?” I answer, but he’s already opening the box and revealing a few stained teeth, and judging by the gaps in his mouth they’re all presumably his.
“See this one?” He asks, holding a molar between his fingers. “This tooth has Shamanic powers.”
He holds it there for me to see, a huge piece of bone with a small silver crater on one side and a deep yellow that sets in where the root begins.
It’s here that Lloyd explains that he’s a hypnotist, and as he’s telling me the methodology behind it he’s even trying to convince me that I’ve just been put in a trance. Then he gets back to the tooth, which he says he had extracted with no anesthetic by using his hypnotic powers. As he sat there in the chair, he tells me, he could feel every movement the dentist’s arm made to pull that tooth out; he could feel the anatomy of the tooth up there in his flesh, all because he did it without any anesthetic. So now, he proclaims, he knows how to extract teeth, and he also has a tooth to carry around that has Shamanic powers because of the ordeal that went along with getting it taken out.
This is all before the interview had even started, so after about twenty minutes have passed I start pressing Lloyd to get started. Suggesting we sit on the grass, he agrees and goes inside to get something.
A few minutes pass before he comes back outside again. He lays down a mat and plops down a bag from which he pulls three brass idols, two of the Indian god Ganesh, and one Buddha. The strands of beads and rosaries and other charms that hang around his neck clink together has he sets the idols down and lights a stick of incense, which he explains is his own special blend.
As we start talking, there’s something about his eyes that’s slightly unnerving, but they’re electric blue magnetic orbs: You always end up looking back into them. He has a way of looking at you right on, although sometimes it’s hard to tell what he’s really seeing.
There were a few snags in doing this interview. One was, as you’ll notice, I hardly ever got to fully phrase a question, and so Lloyd would often just run with something before he knew what I was hoping to touch on.
There was also a rule, which was laid down from the start. Right away, I was told that the title of his new album, The Radiant Monkey, is not be mentioned anymore. Instead, it’s RM from here on in.
RL: If the title is kept hermetically sealed, then when I open the can, it’ll be fresher. Instead of this person knows about it, that person knows about it, it’s like weak, dilute – I want it to be bam, bam, strong, powerful. I have an ad campaign planned out that I designed myself that’s so structurally sound and so powerful that I will be a household name in a year. Not just in the world of music.
You know what Q is, right? Q is the fame quotient. Like Jessica Simpson has good Q, but Bush has better Q. Everybody knows who Bush is. That has nothing to do with whether you like him or not. It’s whether or not I said his name, you know. Like Hercules has good Q and he’s dead a long time. Einstein’s dead. They made name. You know the name of Spartacus, right? He was nothing but a Gladiator, but he made name. You don’t know the name of the woman in Pompeii who was a maid. The ordinary people didn’t make name. In the ancient world it was more important to make name than it was to live. If you could make name, dying was like nothing. Like the Jihadists, in their world, they’re making name. Not big name. Not name for all of mankind.
You know, it’s Richard Lloyd and the Sufi Monkeys, and the Sufi Monkeys is more than the band. It’s the production company and the record company. Parasol is releasing the record, but it’s on Sufi Monkey Records on Parasol Label Group. It’s on Parasol, and then underneath in tiny it’s Sufi Monkey Records. I asked for, and was given, my own imprinter. He didn’t have to do that, but I have a good relationship with the record company and I want to have my own label, you know?
I’m too far from you, you get closer, or I get closer. I’m not good at sitting like this. I need to switch my inner leg because I had some knee surgery. I twisted my knee playing, what was it? I was playing racquetball with my son. He’s fifteen.
LW: So part of this tour is to support the re-release of Field of Fire –
RL: I’d like to sell a few copies of that. But no, it’s not, this tour is utilizing the re-release of Field of Fire to support the preview of the new record. It’s as though it’s nothing but a set up. One big set up for the fall and whenever the new record comes out. So that you know, so my name and fame spreads far and wide before the fact so I get a better reception; more people get my station on their radio. I’m a bigger blip on the radar next time I come up. So therefore, we’re going to leave behind performances that are going to make me a star. It’s sort of like when you about Jimi Hendrix at Monterey, or Woodstock, or what else? Iggy at Max’s Kansas City, or the Doors at the Whiskey A Go Go, it’s in that quality of performance.
I mean, I know I’m being audacious and outrageous and outlandish and making preposterously bold and what otherwise might be thought of as egocentrical statements, you know, bravado, and actually if I didn’t have the goods to back it up, I’d be a real moron. But I’m not, so I wouldn’t be talking like this if I wasn’t guided from above.
You know how most people have a guardian angel? Some people have two. I have a phalange. Do you know what a phalange is? A phalange is a V-shaped group of Roman soldiers that as they charge forward they shorten the angle of the triangle, becoming sharper and sharper, until they penetrate through the defenses. It’s an extremely powerful and effective methodology of warfare. And since I’m engaged in warfare, I’ve had to be assigned a phalange of angels, as well as a plethora of devils, all at my command. You know Beelzebub? He’s the Lord of the Flies. The life of the fly, do you know what it consists of? It’s like five or six things. (Lights his pipe.) Shall I tell you?
LW: If you feel it’s necessary.
RL: If you want me to tell you I will. You have to ask me to tell you, or ask me something else.
LW: Well, maybe I should ask you some other things, first.
RL: Okay, well have all the time in the world, Liz.
LW: How have your relationships with the songs on Field of Fire changed since you revisited them?
RL: Some of them, when I got the tapes, I said to myself, “Crap, what could I have been thinking? That songs sucks.” And so the ones that are changed the most, from disc one to disc two, especially “Loving Man,” which I thought was poorly executed originally, I revamped completely and now it’s super hot sexy deep mystical and grinding. It’s like fucking. I mean the riff itself, it’s like a fucking riff, whereas before it was like an insecure boy.
And “Losing Anna,” which was kind of a ghostly-like slide, it was originally written on slide in 1972 during the Led Zeppelin visit to New Orleans at which I was present. The girl’s name was Margaret, but I couldn’t get any good rhymes, so she became Anna. It was a girl I met in New Orleans during the Led Zeppelin tour of ’72, no, ’73, because I was on my way back to New York from Los Angeles, on my way back because I’d heard about the Dolls and that there was a scene in New York and that’s my hometown and I had left it, gone to Los Angeles, studied, you know, college level partying in rock n’ roll, at big rock n’ roll soirees which used to be the norm. I saw David Bowie in San Francisco at the Fillmore or the Winterland and it can hold about twenty-four hundred and there were like three hundred and fifty people there and half of them walked out in the middle. You know, when he was in the striped pajamas going down on Ronson. You know how he used to mimic fellatio on Mick Ronson on the Ziggy Stardust tour? And then three months – THREE MONTHS – later, I saw him in Los Angeles were movie stars were licking his shoes and he was surrounded by the hype machine. Main Man had turned him into a superstar overnight. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. And that’s what’s happening here.
Does that answer the question? What was the question?
LW: It was how your relationships with your songs has changed. RL: Oh, I told you. Of course I have relationships with my songs, and of course it changes over time. One of the great things for instance about this is that today I have this awful cold. So you’re gonna hear the record, the new record, which we will be called RM, the initials RM, you’re gonna hear it, and then you’re gonna hear us play live. And you’ve heard Field of Fire and then you’re gonna hear us play live and you’re gonna hear how different they are.
Like, I went to see the Cars and their records are well crafted. In fact, the first record was sent to us, we were on tour, they were on a Elektra and we were on Elektra, and we were on our first tour of England, which was two-thousand seat theatres sold out. And on the tour bus between Manchester and Leeds or something, Elektra had sent us a package and in it was the Cars, the preview of the Cars new record, and we put it on and we went, “Oh shit, it’s a Television they can get on the radio.” In other words, it sounds like us, but it was commercial, and we thought oh, we’re fuckin’ screwed now. Because now they have a Television they can type in, they can sell, and it’ll be a success, and we won’t be first priority. Which is of course was exactly what happened.
LW: Okay so – what are you doing?
(At this point Lloyd has put his hand on my calf and he’s running it up my leg. Fittingly, my mind flips back to something Chris Houston had asked, me not too long before while Lloyd wasn’t around, “Are you going to be okay with Richard?” And I’d said, “Yeah, sure.” But at this point I was thinking that Chris was on to something. Lloyd’s hand slides higher up my thigh.)
RL: I’m experiencing you, a different part of you. I’m examining you. Oooooooooooohhhh….
LW: (Scooting over, out of reach – it’s not like it’s the first time this has happened, and it won’t be the last, so I’m thinking that I’ll just tough it out until I get some usable quotes Unfortunately, it’ll be a while before they come.)
Okay, we should get back to the questions. I’ve read that you said that RM will be as good as Marquee Moon?
RL: (Or) a Coltrane record, a Bob Dylan record, a Neil Young record, a Stones record, a Hendrix record, a Purple Harem record, a White Stripes record, a Strokes record, a Nirvana record, a Pearl Jam record. Anyway, it doesn’t matter…It’s a perfect record.
There’s a word called sincere, and it comes from the Latin sincera. That means without was – cera is wax. Sin is without. Like in Spanish, you go tortilla con cheso, which means with cheese, or you say tostada sin tomate, without tomato. So this meant without wax. Back in imperial Rome, as long as you worshipped Jupiter or at least paid fuckin’ mouth to him, you could worship whoever the hell you wanted. It was like Hinduism. And so, there were a lot idol makers.
Like my idols (points to his brass idols on the grass); I’ll tell you about `em in a minute. This is Ganesh dancing. This is Ganesh, the elephant headed god, sitting in his majesty, and he’s also my incense holder, and this is the laughing Buddha.
So in any case, you’d have these guys making these idols and if there was an imperfection in the idol, or a crack in the wood or something, you know, they’d put a lot of work into this, so they would fill the crack with wax, like a woman with makeup on. So you didn’t get what you paid for. It’s wax. Then say you took your idol out next summer. The goddamn wax melts and you see oh shit, I’ve been jipped. This is chipped. I’ve been jipped. Then you’d go to try to find the idol seller and he’s of course rolled up his carpet and moved on.
So without sincerity meant without that, or fakeness; without makeup, that naked truth, naked pores, authenticity. That’s sincera, and we are sincere. It’s something real, and there hasn’t been anything real. I would say the White Stripes are real. I don’t know if they still are. And the Strokes, their singer sounds just like Ray Davies and their bass player’s brilliant, playing all the ostanato. And the guitarists are pretty okay, and the lyrics are fabulous, so there’s something real there. And there was something real with Nirvana. That was sincere.
He, by the way, he hated the mix of Nevermind because he didn’t think it was sincere. They had fluffed it up. Andy Wallace had mixed it so it was slick, and he hated that. It made him more depressed. But he would have committed suicide no matter what because he had a lot of relatives that committed suicide. It’s in the genes, as well as circumstance. I’ve talked people out of suicide. That’s not hard.
“Spanish Castle Magic,” that’s a Jimi Hendrix title. I learned magic from Jimi. His student and adopted little brother friend, he was the mentor of a man named Velvert Turner who was my best friend as a teenager. Because I was the only person that when I took a look at him knew that he actually did know Jimi Hendrix. Everybody else laughed at him and made him cry and feel ostracized and I looked at him and I just looked at him and I knew, because I have super powers.
Anyway, I looked at him and I said, “Of course he knows Jimi Hendrix. Jimi Hendrix doesn’t live on Mars. Jimi Hendrix must know somebody, and without a single fuckin’ doubt in the world, he knows Jimi Hendrix and you people are all fuckin’ pieces of shit for treating him like that, for making an audacious statement that you personally don’t believe because you’re jealous, envious, and you’re not being nice to him, and that’s fucked up, so you can all go fuck your fuckin’ selves. I’m with him.” And Velvert said, “Oh, wait a minute, Jimi’s in town. I’ll call him at his hotel. He’s got a show tonight.”
At about three-thirty after school we were waiting for some hash. We went to the kitchen of Zeke Burman’s house in the West Village and Velvert called. There was a phone on the wall but you could take it off and put it on the kitchen table and Velvert dialed the number, and it was either the Drake or the Warwick, which were Jimi’s hotels, and asked for somebody but it wasn’t Hendrix. You know, “Mr. Mixel Pixel.”
And they pointed at him again and laughed and said, “You’re not even asking for Jimi Hendrix, you know, you’re so full of shit.” He said, “Do you think he’s in a hotel under his own name? People would be bothering him night and day, you know. He’s under and assumed name and I know it. It’s a secret. You don’t know it. You’ve forgotten the man’s name that I asked because you were thinking so strongly about how it wasn’t Hendrix that you didn’t pay attention to what I actually said, nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah.”
Then the phone rang about six times while Velvert held it and he said, “I guess he’s not there. I tried, I did my best, I called him,” and he handed the phone to Zeke, who was the host. And Zeke listened to it ringing and handed it to the next guy, and he listened and he handed it to me and I listened to it ring once, and then on the second ring somebody picked up, and I heard that voice: “Yo, yo, hey man, what’s happening, who is this?” It was Jimi. He had woken up from a deep sleep.
So I thought well if I say, “It’s Richard Lloyd, Jimi,” that would be moronic and idiotic because he’d be like, “Well who the hell are you” – I don’t think he’d ever use the world hell – but he would have said, “Do I know you,” or something. So I said, “It’s Velvert,” and I thought I hope he doesn’t recognize that that’s not Velvert’s voice, and I handed the phone to Velvert. And all the kids turned to me like, “Was it really Hendrix?” And I was like, “You snots don’t even deserve to know. After all that, go fuck yourselves.” I wasn’t quite that verbally French, but you know basically I said, “You don’t need to know.”
Anyway, Velvert talked to Jimi for a while, took the phone away, everybody was trying to listen in. So Velvert gets off the phone and he says, “Well, Jimi’s invited me to the show tonight,” and he put his finger up like this, “And he told me I can take one person.” And then they all went like, “Me, me, me! I’m your best friend, you owe me,” and he said, “I’m taking,” and he did a pirouette and he went, “Boing!” And pointed at me. And I went, “Right. Right.”
And Velvert and I became best friends and we hung out, chasing rock stars around and that’s how I got to meet Jimi, who later, in November of ’69 at a party, punched me for trying to cheer him up and telling him to lay off the fuckin’ self pity because people really appreciated what he did.
But we were drunk on Mateus and that other Portuguese wine, Lancers. When the lights came on for the party to end and he got up and he turned his back to me to put his jacket on and he spun around clockwise, ‘cause he’s a lefty, and he hit me in the face with his left fist, stomach with his right fist, and left again, a combination, you know, face-stomach-face. And I sat down and I thought he’s got a good punch for a scrawny guy. I felt that power, and I felt good, because in China, if you got beat up, if you hurt somebody who was a great martial artist, you went and fought them and you lost, that was better than wining. Because if you won, you didn’t learn anything. But if you lost, you picked up some tips, you see?
So when he punched me, I learned a lot. But then I heard people screaming, “Somebody tried to beat up Jimi. We’ll kill him.” And I thought oh fuck. Now I was trembling because I thought they’re talking about me and I’ve already been beat up by Jimi’s roadie, Eric, the first night we went to see them for arguing that we did belong backstage when the security guard was trying to stop us. Eric the roadie went fuckin’ berserk on me, had to be pulled off me. So anyway, now Jimi is punching me. I was a human fuckin’ punching bag. Keith Richards once cut my tie off. I made a mistake, I wore a nice tie – I never a wear a tie, never wore a tie before in my fuckin’ life – so I go to Keith’s birthday party and I’m wearing a tie and he says, “Oh my, take that fucking tie off. I spend all day around those.” I said, “Well why don’t you get a pair of scissors and cut the fuckin’ thing off,” and he did. So he cut my tie off.
So anyway, back to Jimi. So I figured my best defense was to sit there quietly and not do anything, so I did. And after about an hour, the janitor asked me to leave, and everybody else was gone. So I left, and in front of the club was a parking lot and Jimi had waited the whole time, like an hour, in one of his Corvettes, painted drum sparkle. I forget the colour. He used to have, you know the Ludwig drum sets? My drum kit was pink champagne sparkle. Anyway, he had his Corvettes drum sparkle painted, which was outrageous. I think it was a blue one. And he kept cracking them up because he didn’t wear glasses. He needed glasses but he didn’t drive with glasses, and Corvettes are designed so they crumple so he, you know, made a mess of several of them.
But anyway, he was right in front of me and he rolled down the window and he waited for me to come over so I thought oh fuck, aye aye aye. So I went over and he took my hands like this and he started crying and saying “I’m sorry,” and with his two thumbs was wiping his tears – drop the pen (takes my hands and starts rubbing his thumbs into them) – and he’s crying and rubbing his hands and going, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” And I’m saying, “It’s all right, you know, get a grip, it’s okay.” I’m now his fuckin’ therapist. And after about ten or fifteen minutes of this I said, “I’ve gotta go,” and he’s going, “No,” and crying, and doing this, crying and rubbing his tears into the back of my hands.
So when I finally manage to pull loose and he’s apologizing, apologizing, you know how that is with a drunken person, maudlin and, so, then I began walking home thinking that was the best evening of my life. That was the best guitar lesson I’ll ever have. If I can just transmute that, not lose any of that as I walk home. If I can only just not do anything: Don’t think about it, don’t try to change it, just walk home with it. And I was so happy, you know? And Jimi got to wait for me and he got to cry so I’m sure he felt better, and his apology was sincere. And sometimes when you shake a man’s hand, you learn more about him or less. Like a businessman, you might not learn anything, but a friend you know immediately. You shake the hand and there’s something in between.
Make a prayer pose – (gets me to press my hands together) and I’m gonna ask you a question. Push as hard as you can. Now, in the middle, does the entire palm touch, or is there an empty space, like a little hole, where the palms don’t meet? Because there is. Your palms are not architecturally able to press the skin of the entire palm in that position. There’s always a little teeny hole. That hole has a name, it’s a Buddhist term, a technical term. It’s shinada – it means emptiness, in Hinduism, too. So there’s an emptiness there, and when you shake hands with somebody the transaction happens in the emptiness.
I’ve shaken the hands of three heavy weight champions of the world, and they each gave me the same handshake, and I’ll give it to you in a minute. George Forman, because I was on a TV show with, Rocky Marciano – now that’s the most impressive, because he’s a little Italian fuck and I walked in and I bought a slice of pizza and he was the goddamn pizza man. He owned a pizza shop and he was workin’ in there, fuckin’ throwin’ pizzas. I’m like, “ROCKY MARCIANO!” I started to cry, I said, “Man, let me shake your hand,” and he did this (offers a limp handshake). He didn’t give me nothin’, but then he gave me nothin’, you see? His hand is a lethal weapon. Every schmuck on earth wants to fight the gunslinger. So he gives it to you, but it’s full of nothing. And same with Forman and the same with the third guy, I can’t remember his name. It wasn’t Ali, three heavyweight champions of the world.
So I spent fifteen or twenty minutes with Jimi’s hands, and I learned a great deal about him personally, mentally, in every way, and we established a friendship that remains. So partially what I’m doing is paying him back and continuing his work. Because if you listen to some of his interviews, he talks about peace and love and prosperity and hope and a spiritual electric sky church and all that. Unfortunately he also cast a few bad spells and I know how his spells work; he taught me some of them and Velvert taught me some of them. Velvert more, because Velvert was my best friend. Jimi I only saw very infrequently. I was in the studio with him. They used to let people in the in the beginning, well when they were doing tape alignment and listening back to the previous days’ work they’d allow people to be in. So I heard “Isabella” backwards, the whole thing, like a really long version.
Anyway, why don’t you ask more questions, otherwise I’ll talk forever about the past.
Liz: So you have stated before that you didn’t always have a desire to sing –
Richard: Right, early, but that’s wrong. That was me protecting my neurotic self. I always wanted to sing. I saw the Beatles on TV and I thought to myself I’m probably the only person in America that when I saw them, I thought how can I analyze the sociological phenomenon of hypnosis that’s occurring here. Because the impact they had, and the hysteria and the surrounding cultural changes, I mean, it was an earth event, you know? The little critters that crawl along the cool, thin shell of the incredibly hot fecund mother earth who’s really liquid rock and metal with a large mass of molten iron and ten per cent nickel in the middle, the yolk of the egg, is a magnet.
(At this point he reaches for my head and tries to kiss me, out of nowhere.)
Ha ha ha, you’re in my power. Even if you’re out of my power, you’re in it.
(I move away, again)
Hey, wait a minute, there’s no reason for that.
Liz: No reason for what?
Richard: You’re moving away. So you perceived this vertical movement, and I’ve perceived this horizontal movement.
Liz: Would the Richard Lloyd of the `70s be surprised if he met the Richard Lloyd of today?
Richard: No, because the Richard Lloyd of the `70s and the Richard Lloyd of 2007 and the Richard Lloyd of 1951 are identical, because I was born conscious and never lost consciousness. There’s a man named Rene Dumal, a French poet. He wrote “A Night of Serious Drinking,” and his better book, which is unfinished because he died of tuberculosis in ’42, it’s called Mt. Analogue, and he was a poet and scholar of Sanskrit and a follower of my teacher, as well. And when he was young he used to take drugs so he could fight them at the edge of consciousness. He used to see if he could maintain consciousness as he took drugs that were in amounts copious, like ether, that were designed to take consciousness from you. So he would take them and fight that and that built up the strength of his consciousness, so that when he met his teacher he was worthy to be a student.
There was a man named Alexander Saltzman who was a follower and had come from Russia with Gurdjeef; Gurdjeef is my teacher, even though he had died in 1949, two years before my birth. Alexander Saltzman was a brilliant stage designer who was traveling with Gurdjeef and Dumal and his poet friends, and they entered into a conversation with Alexander Saltzman, who, by the way was a lot like me, knew everything about everything, could converse in every subject, and everybody liked to talk to them and he made everybody feel good around him, like some sort of magic. Because that’s true. I’m asking you now, is that true, or are you an ordinary person sitting here?
Liz: No, I don’t think you’re an ordinary person.
Richard: Alexander Saltzman overheard Dumal and his poet friends talking and they started a conversation, as people are wont to do in Paris cafes, and Andre de Salzman asked them to do something for him as an experiment, which was to hold their arms out to their sides just like that, so they all did that, including de Salzman, and then they continued their conversation. Of course they couldn’t drink any coffee or anything, so they just talked, and one by one people brought down their arms until only de Salzman was left, and Rene Dumal.
And then they stayed that way for a while and then DeSaltzman said, “You, I can use.” And that’s how come he became a student of de Salzman’s, and then when Andre died, of his wife, Genie de Salzman or Madame de Salzman, and then Gurdjeef himself.
Now when Sir Edmund Hillary was auditioning men like I audition people for my band, he was auditioning people to go to the top of Mount Everest. The first thing he asked them was the following: “Hold your breath till you pass out.” Now, you can hold your breath for a while. Try. Try to hold your breath till you pass out. Now, you can’t die from doing it because as soon as you pass out you’ll start breathing again, but could you hold your breath till you pass out?
Liz: No.
Richard: You’re saying that prior to investigation, but I’ll accept it. But that proved willpower. In other words, he was saying you need that, and he wasn’t willing to take a man who didn’t have that kind of willpower. So did you ever make a New Year’s resolution?
Liz: Maybe, I have a long time ago. I don’t know.
Richard: Ever make a promise to yourself and keep it?
Liz: I think so.
Richard: That’s good.
Liz: I don’t really think back to those kinds of things.
Richard: Do you ever make a wish on birthday candles when you were little?
Liz: Yeah.
Richard: What did you wish for?
Liz: I would wish for a cat.
Richard: Cool. Did you get one?
Liz: Eventually, but I just got it for myself when I was old enough.
Richard: Oh, I see, that’s too bad.
Liz: I was actually going to ask you about wishes.
Richard: Oh, good, because that’s important. I’m getting a little cold. Can we go inside?
(We go upstairs to the kitchen. You can hear the band setting up downstairs.)
Liz: So we were going to talk about wishes.
Richard: Wishes, yeah, I even made a study of wishes. I used to ask people what they wished for when they were little, and I used to ask them if they had wish money, like if they knew that there was a limit and if maybe they knew there was more than one limit. Like coins could buy one thing and bills could buy another and maybe there were larger, you know, like wish was a material you got, like money. So if somebody gave you a hundred dollar bill, fifty, twenty, etcetera, or coins. So people would tell me, and then I would say, “Now was there ever a wish you wished for when you were little that you knew was impossible? That you made the wish anyway, but it was impossible?”
My former drummer, Vinnie Dinunzio, we were on tour with the Health and Happiness show and he said, “Yeah, now I remember. I used to wish I was on a rocket ship to the moon.” And when he said it, I saw a transformation in him physiologically. He’d relaxed. He smiled. He looked like he lost fifteen years off his, you know. It was astonishing, and that made me realize that that wish was the one with the most value. That’s the one you should make, the one that you think is so out.
You know, what does Jesus say? Ask and ye shall receive. If you believe that, what you ask for, it ought to be miraculous. It ought not t be for a hamburger and a Harley Davidson. But the real reason that I ask people about wish is because, aside from my third birthday when I got this blue car that I was, you know a pedal car, a little pedal car with a wheel, oh I was crazy about that. But when my fourth birthday came, there was a birthday cake and candles and they asked me to make a wish and I thought to myself, well there’s nothing I want. I mean I’m breathing, I have food, I’m in a house and people love me. What else would I want? I mean, I don’t want anything that I don’t already have.
So they kept saying, “But honey, come on, make a wish,” and I was like, “I don’t have anything to wish for mom, or grandma,” and they said, “Come on, make it anyway, make a wish,” so I thought oh, okay, I got one, and I don’t tell anybody. So when I blew out the candles, my wish was that everybody else there got their wish. And I thought cool, you know, that takes care of it, now I’m done. They don’t have to bug me anymore. I know what to wish for, and that way it puts the pressure off of me because I don’t have to deal with having spent any of my wishes on myself, which is usually not a good idea. Try reading some fairy tales and you’ll find it usually turns out poorly when you make a wish, when the genie comes out.
My genie is big, is a big, big, big genie. The Djinn, the Muslims call it the Djinn. Kidder is the big Djinn, the Green Man. I’ve met him, along with Gabriel, that’s the archangel that spoke to Mohammed and made him write down the Koran. I know him, too.
Uh, in any case, where were we, with wish? I was blowing out the candles in the fourth and the fifth and the sixth year, wishing that everybody else would get their wish and I thought, well I might benefit from that, too, because they’re watching me blow out the candles on my birthday, so they’re probably making wishes of goodwill towards me. So if I wish that they get their wish, I’m getting collateral good things, and I don’t know what they are. So they’re surprises, like I’ll find them under my Christmas tree or something.
And then I began having religious instruction, born Roman Catholic, and I thought oh dear, if the saviour came two thousand years ago, I had the empirical evidence that it hadn’t worked. Cause you know, you just look around, people aren’t nice to one another. I don’t understand. I never understood it. I was so naïve that I thought everyone was completely honest and I believed everything that everybody said, until I was, like, scolded by my mother one day about being so naïve. And I said, “You mean that’s a flaw?” And she said, “Honey, in this world, I’m afraid so.” But I was like, “But that’s messed up.”
Anyway, I started wishing that everybody in the world would get their wish, but then I realized, well, I was told from, you know, one of the upper levels, “Don’t do that! Don’t do that, don’t do that, don’t do that, don’t do that. Don’t. Do. That.” See, because I’ve been granted certain powers anyway, and doing that, you know, because people are not supposed to have that. They’re just not ready for it. They’ll mess things up worse.
Liz: What did you believe that the future held for you when you were younger?
Exactly this. When I was in fourth grade, I was in geography class and it just came to me like, you’re gonna go around the world. And I thought well that doesn’t make any sense. Well, what I said was, “I wonder how, or why,” and then I thought oh, but if I keep thinking about it, it will stop. In other words, I needed to stop thinking about it and put it away until it happened. So I stopped thinking about it. I only thought about for about a minute, or a minute and ten seconds, and then I stopped thinking about it and never thought about it again.
I was on the plane, we went from New York to London, then from London to Sydney, Australia, from Sydney, Australia to Los Angeles, and then from Los Angeles to New York. So I circumvented the globe by airplane on tour. So I was going from London with a stopover in Singapore to Sydney when I realized, I think I was flying over Afghanistan or India, and I sat there and thought oh, this is what saw in fourth grade. Ahaaaa, cool.
Liz: How do you want to be remembered?
You know, there are so many subdivisions of that that I can’t even answer it, you know? I want to be remembered as a person whose motto was, “Everything for the benefit of mankind,” and who practiced what he preached, whose conscience was clear, and whose intentions were absolutely generous and helpful, that my entire life force I’d laid down for man because he’s in very deep and serious trouble. And that my role, or mandate or task, has been given me, I didn’t choose it, although I did with the committee.
When you die you don’t go to the Pearly Gates. You go to a kind of committee, you know, like case workers, social workers, that have been assigned to you, and they ask you to make a review of your previous life and then to give them suggestions as to what you think would be helpful for you next. And so you do that and then you go to them and you tell them, “I need to be born as a cripple, because, uh,” you could say, “I need to make reparations,” or you could say, “I’m feeling particularly strong.” Like Stephen Hawking, whatever he has that puts him in a wheelchair and he can only, like, blow, that’s not a misfortune. That’s because he was already an old soul and said to the committee, even I think he has access to above the committee, but he said, “You know, I really need a lot of resistance.”
You see, he’s a physicist. He knows what work is, so he thought I could do a lot of work and benefit mankind and the more quiet we can get the body then the more I can concentrate, because I don’t have to worry about, in other words, like things captivate people. You know, they turn and look and the TV’s on they’re gone, so with Hawking that’s not the case, so he can actually think like Einstein did.
The problem is that mankind doesn’t think. They compute and react and unfortunately a few people do think which requires thinking in other languages that aren’t words, you know, thinking in pictures is the easiest way to put it. See, Einstein thought in pictures, like I do. Actually, I think in metaphors. I think by metaphor and then I think by analogy and then I have to translate it into a language that happens to be English, so that I can convey the meaning of what I’m talking about. Which is why sometimes my sentences seem to be run-on sentences, because I speak technically.
You know how people are voted most likely to succeed? I was voted person with the best enunciation of English. I’m not kidding you. And one day I wrote a short story in creative writing in the fourth grade and I was given a sealed letter to take home to my mother and father and I was like, “Oh no, what trouble am I in? I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything.” But I was a nervous nelly. And I wanted to open it and I didn’t. I took it home and they opened it and it just said, “We need to see you immediately.” And so I was more scared than ever and I didn’t know what the fuck was gonna happen to me, and we went to the meeting into which I was privy and the parents and the superintendent of schools and the principal and the teacher, for whom I’d written the short story, were all there with my parents and me and they said, “Based on the recommendation of his teacher and the fact that we just got the results that tell us he has the highest IQ in the school and we really don’t know what to do with him, we’re gonna place him in the IGC program.”
I was like, “What’s that?” It used to be called Intellectually Gifted Children. So I went from being in a classroom full of, like, monkeys, like, that played with one another and played prepubescent sex where boys and girls hit each other and shit like that, you know what I’m talking about, was taken, plucked out of that, and placed in a classroom where the children were dead silent, sitting at their desks, pursuing academia with all the earnestness at their command, either for themselves or for their parents or whatever, but I mean people of my ilk, you know, with IQ’s above one-forty, etcetera.
So that was quite a shock for me, a culture shock. It took a while to adjust to the change of world, but I did. I loved school and I’ve never stopped learning. And I read a wonderful article once about people of my intelligence level. They don’t amount to anything. They get menial jobs and they have house full of, like, intellectual materials and clutter and I was like, “Woah, that’s me,” because they don’t have the patience. I mean, the day I realized none of the teachers were as intelligent as any of the students in the IGC class, because people that intelligent don’t become teachers. That’s not true, there’s exceptions to the rule, but by and large, so you’re being taught by a person who’s not as sharp as you and it’s just, like, painful.
Anyway, what’s next, hun?
Liz: But do you believe that you haven’t amounted to anything?
Richard: Oh god no, I said that as, no, no, no – they never get a diploma, because they learn the subject matter in three months to the depth of being able to pass, but maybe it’s a two-year course. Like, I know enough to be a medical doctor. I know enough to be, like, ten careers, but I’m not licensed to practice any of them. I know acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine. I apprenticed with a Chinese doctor. I know enough about acupuncture that I drive a total of six hours to see mine. I mean, how many acupuncturists do you think are in New York and would any of them turn me down if I called them for an appointment? Instead I drive three hours to see a man in Massachusetts and then I drive three hours back. That tells you the esteem in which I hold him, because I read his books on acupuncture. There’s two of them. I read one. It was so magnificent that I made him my acupuncturist.
Liz: I think we’re going to wrap up for now –
(Tries to kiss me again and says)
Richard: Now I get to touch you.
Liz: No, you can’t.
Richard: I’m not gonna force you to, because it’s not like that, ever. I’m disappointed, though.
From there I was off to Steve Mahon’s place to look at some photos from a fated Toronto punk weekend. He probably has no idea how completely amazing it was right at that moment for me to be able to go and hang out in a nice, normal place with a nice, normal person.
After a couple hours there I headed out to take care of a couple more things before heading back to Grant Avenue for the listening party. When I got there, for all of Lloyd’s mysticisms, there was a story floating around about he was demanding filet mignon. But then again, maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised, as I’ve always perceived Lloyd to be someone who exists in contradictions.
An esteemed showing of the Hamilton music scene was there, including Edgar Breau, Bob Bryden, Chris Houston, and Daniel Lanois. Once inside, a chatty crowd was quickly silenced with the chiming of a bell.
Lloyd soon went into reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic, and it was a sobering, almost eerie experience.
And then, as the music kicked in, it seemed as though Lloyd really does have the power to get into your head. It’s interesting how an artist can seem perpetually out of sorts, and then you hand them their tools and they’re suddenly in absolute control. Lloyd is, without argument, an incredible guitarist. The title track off the new album is probably the best, especially live when Lloyd groans out, “I’m a junkie,” and juts his scarred arms out in the open. It’s the kind of song where you can feel more that there’s more than just music driving it.
And for much of the time, Lloyd, when he was making his guitar scream, really did seem to have a hold over the audience. But a session that was supposed to be an hour long was stretched into two as Lloyd played the perfectionist, continually criticizing his band, which made for a jarringly broken spell. His band mates must be very patient people.
Afterwards, as people milled around, Lloyd, no longer stuck in ghosts of mainline suffocations is left seeming unsteady, a sweating, peaked knot of commotion. He approaches me in the hallway and asks if I’ll come upstairs to the kitchen with. Not sure what to expect, and knowing that I should know better, I go with him, just to see what it’s all about. Curiosity will always get the best of me.
The proposition goes like this: Basically, he asks if I’ll spend the next six days with him.
“But why?” I ask.
“Because I want to get to know you better.”
“No, sorry, I can’t do that.”
At this point I know there was more said, but really, I think what’s being implied here is enough to go on.
And so, again, I tell him that it won’t be happening.
“Okay, well at least kiss me goodnight,” he says, and leans in fast. I pull away.
He’s mad and tells me to get going. Fine with me.
Bob Bryden offers to drive me back to where I’m staying. On the way out, Chris Houston asks how the interview went.
“It was really fuckin’ weird.”
Day Two
So Lloyd’s playing the Horseshoe in Toronto and before I even get near the Horseshoe’s door he sees me and comes up so fast and close that we’re standing there chest to chest.
“I’m really happy that you’re here,” he says, and pulls me inside, leading me all the way to the dressing room. Keith, the bass player, is sitting there quietly.
Lloyd starts chanting. He tells me to make a wish and he chants. He chants and he chants and he chants and I sit there, quietly, not knowing what to do. When it’s over, I tell him about a friend I left waiting outside who I should go and get, and I hurry off.
I grab my friend Aaron and we head over and sit with Chris Houston and Edgar Breau and Bruce Mowat. Edgar’s kicking things off with an acoustic set. Him and Bruce leave so quickly afterwards that I don’t even notice that they’re gone.
And then Chris Houston comes on, who I was excited about because I’d never seen him live before. Everything goes great and everyone’s really into what Chris is doing. But then, as he’s closing with “Surfin’ On Heroin,” Lloyd comes right up to the edge of the stage and all Aaron and I can hear is, “And I want you to give me all fuckin’ fourteen of those right now.” It was one of those moments where you’re not really sure what’s going on because it’s so out of context.
Chris actually stopped the song and proceeded to hand over drink tickets – drink tickets – to Lloyd, telling him that he can count them all right then and there if he wants them to. Who interrupts someone in the middle of a song for drink tickets, especially when they don’t even drink? It was so uncool. Chris handled it really well and ended up finishing the song.
With RM playing in the bar before he was to go on, Lloyd shuffled around handing out drink tickets and talking to the sparse crowd. Then he found his way over to where I was sitting. Aaron took off to get a beer. Lloyd sat down and started singing his album to me, his eyes growing wide to emphasize certain words or phrases. This went on for three, four, maybe five songs.
And then he got back onto the topic of me spending time with him until he was set to leave Ontario.
“You know, I can protect you from me,” he said.
“Oh? How?” I asked, having no idea what he was getting at.
“I can make sure you don’t fall in love with me so that it doesn’t hurt when I leave,” he said.
How generous.
After hearing no again, Lloyd shuffled off again.
There was more chanting on stage before the show kicked off, which led to some heckling from a table near me: “Play some fuckin’ music already!” Get over it, buddy, as if Richard Lloyd is going to listen to you. As if he has to. It’s his show. And really, it was a show again: Lloyd was soon transformed into a tight, frenetic being full of taught, rigid energy.
I headed out before he got off stage.
Day Three
So I headed out to Richard Lloyd’s show at the Absinthe in Hamilton, but more for the point of seeing Bob Bryden and Edgar Breau. As soon as I got there, there were disparaging comments of disillusionment coming from those who had been working with Lloyd that day. Actually, the whole day had been buzzing with such stories, so I wasn’t really surprised.
Again, Lloyd was shuffling around the bar, shuffling, shuffling, shuffling, a never- ending dry stride. Eventually, after the opening acts had finished up, he came over and tapped me on the shoulder.
“Can I talk to you for a minute?” He asked.
“Sure,” I said, and we went downstairs.
At this point, a lot of people would probably be wondering why I wouldn’t just tell him to fuck off from the get go. It’s funny, men and women who act this way probably think that they’re the ones in complete control, but I never once felt like this could spin out of my control. In this case, I really couldn’t, and still can’t, tell where he’s really coming from in terms of how aware he is of his actions. If he is as lost as comes across at times, then being rude isn’t going to help anything. In the end, I think it was the right approach to take.
Downstairs Lloyd took a different tone; there was something almost childlike in the way he emitted his words.
“Nothing’s going to happen between, is it?” He asked.
“No, Richard, it isn’t,” I told him.
“Oh, okay,” he said. “Well, I’m really glad I got to meet you anyway,” he said.
“I’m really glad I got to meet you, too,” I said, and meant it, despite everything. Right then, there seemed to be a new level of clarity, and sincerity, coming across.
“So can we hug?” He asked. And we did.
