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Willard Grant Conspiracy

A Conversation with Robert Fisher of WGC (continued)

PM: I was surprised, on the other hand, that this past Grammys was the first one I've gotten through in I don't know how many years. I actually watched the whole Grammys, even though, as you say, it's a candy bar mentality. But it was fun to see Prince, for instance.

RF: Oh, well, that was great.

PM: He really kicked ass. [laughs]

RF: Yeah, that was really great. And the guy with the lap steel, what's his name--

PM: Oh, Robert Randolph. [see our interview with him]

RF: Man, that was awesome. That was like old style funk the way it should be.

PM: Yeah, now, there's something that's not a candy bar.

RF: No, not at all. Not at all.

PM: To have come out of the sacred steel tradition, right out of the church, and to be kicking ass and taking names at that level...

RF: That was great. On the other hand, it was sort of sad that the director left the microphones for the audience open, and you could hear people talking over the whole Yoko Ono, Olivia Harrison thing. And then when Warren's son got up to accept the award, people were talking over that too.

PM: There were a lot of sound anomalies.

RF: There were.

PM: And then Celine Dion's mic wasn't working, and then...

RF: Alicia Keys, the same thing, it was distorting on her as well.

PM: Right, exactly. There were a whole bunch of very embarrassing sound snafus.

RF: What a nightmare of a production to put together. But I mean, if you're going to do the Grammys, you should be sure you got that covered. [laughs]

PM: My sister is a talent coordinator at the CMAs and stuff like that, so I frequently am backstage with a headset on. The atmosphere is real familiar to me. And with the level of sound guys that you're working with in such a show, it's like, "Come on, you guys, you're way too good for these kind of mishaps on national live TV."

RF: Exactly, yeah.

But I don't think I really answered your historical question.

PM: I was circling back around, yeah.

RF: The start of the band was, as I said, sort of accidental. We didn't really mean to start a band. And we recorded the first record under those same circumstances. We didn't know we were recording a record, we were just sort of helping a friend test run his home studio.

PM: And what was he testing out at that time, do you recall?

RF: I think it was an ADAT setup that he had put together at home. He's a very good recording engineer, and he had wired up his own basement. He said, "Come out for a weekend, and we'll try it out." It was the sweet corn season, so we stopped at a farm stand, got a bunch of sweet corn, went out and had a picnic and made some music.

PM: Wow.

RF: By the end of the weekend, we had sort of structured up the framework of a record. And it took a few more weeks to finish it. We had to decide that that's what we wanted to do. That was a record called 3:00 a.m. Sunday at Fortune Otto's. And I put that out on my label, and Glitterhouse Records in Germany picked it up and sold it, which is how we got to Europe the first time.

Willard Grant Conspiracy

When I did the second record, I was actually playing a lot--in Boston, I tried to put shows together with a community spirit. I'd try to work together with similar minded bands, or different bands with similar intentions. George Howard was the president of Slow River and later became the president of Rykodisc. He had a band called Lincoln '65, so we had been doing a bunch of stuff together. And he would play with us, and vice versa. When I finished the second record, I asked him, "Do you know anybody that I could send this to, maybe get this record out?" And he said, "Well, yeah. I know tons of people that would be interested, but I'm not going to give you any names because I want to put it out myself."

PM: Wow.

RF: And I said, "Well, okay. That's fine."

PM: What a dream.

RF: Yeah, it was kind of amazing. I mean, for years Paul and I had had these big electric bands, and very good rock bands, and just struggled and struggled and struggled. And then here was this thing that we had done by accident [laughs] that all of a sudden just had no struggle to it. It was sort of like pick it up and run with it. We ended up doing three records with Rykodisc. We did Flying Low, Mojave, and Everything's Fine with them.

PM: Right. What does George play?

RF: George plays guitar and mandolin, a little piano. He plays a lot of different things.

PM: What's he like as a person?

RF: He's a very intense, very intelligent person. As a musician he just gets completely absorbed and he has a great sense of focus, which I think is probably one of his best attributes. He's just written a book, I think, as well. Cary is working with him on that, I think.

PM: A novel or--

RF: No, I think it's sort of a "how to succeed in the music business" kind of book.

PM: Really, from his point of view?

RF: Yeah, yeah.

PM: Now, that's one I'd like to read.

RF: Yeah. I haven't read it yet, but I know Cary is helping with it, so I'm sure he could get you a copy of it.

PM: Wow. So, was there anything that resembled a parting of the ways with Paul Austin, or was it just a natural evolution--

RF: I think it's more a natural thing. Paul was tired of the road, and there are no shortcuts for this kind of music. You have to go out and play. And he was just tired of being on the road so much. A lot of musicians get to that point: they think they want something, and when they get there, they realize that it's more difficult than they thought it was. And so he moved to Seattle and he got married. He has his own band called Transmissionary Six with his wife, Terri, who also was the drummer in The Walkabouts.

PM: Wow, I bet that's a good band.

RF: It is. And they're putting out their records with FILMguerrero. I don't know if you know that label or not, but it's a Portland label, it's a great label.

PM: No, we don't, but we'll look into that and also check out Transmissionary Six. [The news at the Transmissionary Six website is that they've just finished recording their new CD, with the inimitable Tucker Martine producing.]   continue

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