Without a doubt the most recognizable brand in the insurance industry is care of GEICO, a vehicle insurer that has courted customers with a wide variety of clever characters and gimmicks. The most popular of them is undoubtedly The Gecko, a computer-animated lizard with an English accent whose congeniality and enthusiasm for GEICO have brought scads of customers to the company. Recently, The Gecko has been at the front of a new social networking push with GEICO, including a press tour during which the elusive character has been granting interviews with various media outlets.  I arrived at the historic Sorrento Hotel in Seattle, Washington to conduct my own interview with The Gecko on behalf of Popdose. Though I can’t say I went in with informed expectations for interviewing a fictional marketing mascot, the experience was nonetheless not what I signed up for.

The room, an elegantly appointed suite, was dimly lit. I had been escorted from the lobby to the suite by what can best be described as a nigh-fantastical sufferer of excessive pituitary function. The human hulk, hairless but for a fuzz on his pate, loomed behind me with the gentle menace of an early scene in an Expressionist silent film. We entered the suite where The Gecko sat in a wood-and-leather chair, a blonde-haired man in a tan suit at his right.

“Ah, Mr. Sarko. Good to see you,” the man in the tan suit said, “I see you’ve met Mr. Gecko’s publicist.”

I nodded in time with a leap of doubt in my heartbeat. The towering publicist took his place at The Gecko’s left and I sat in the chair across from the mascot, proceeding with the interview.

Popdose: Mr. Gecko, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. It’s not every day we at Popdose get to chat with a nationally recognized icon such as yourself. That fame in mind, do you get as much attention in foreign nations as you do in the States?

GECKO: GEICO commercials only run in America, so I guess everywhere else, I’m just your average gecko.

P: I understand you’re currently on a journey across America. What is the most interesting thing you’ve seen so far?

G: When I was in New York, I met a man who called himself the Naked Cowboy. Although he wasn’t really naked. He wore a guitar, underpants and a cowboy hat. I can’t say I’ve ever seen anything quite like that. I shot a video with my Gecko Cam to introduce him to my Facebook friends. Sometimes being 6.9 inches tall is a rather unfortunate vantage point.

P: How do you decide where you’ll go next on your journey?

G: There are some places I’ve always wanted to visit, like the Stockyards in Ft. Worth, Texas and well, Vegas. But I also count on my Facebook friends to suggest places for me to go. I never would have known about Magnolia Bakery in New York or Foamhenge in Virginia.

P: A lot of your long-time fans have been perplexed about your accent. You’ve been in America for so long now, have you noticed any shift in the way you speak?

G: When I first started doing commercials, I took a more classical Shakespearean approach to my delivery. But then me mum suggested I just be myself. I think she was right. She usually is.

P: GEICO, your employer, has implemented a variety of marketing concepts over the years. These days, the stage is pretty crowded. In addition to your own TV, Internet and radio spots, the company has its “Adages Taken Literally” commercials and the “That’s Amazing” campaign. Do you enjoy the collaboration with other marketing concepts or do you fear that you are, to coin a phrase, “going the way of the caveman?”

At this point, the man in the tan suit stepped forward.

“The Gecko doesn’t have the authority to speak on behalf of the company’s marketing department. He will not be taking this question,” he said. I was a bit put off by how much he bristled at the question, but I kept myself composed. I can clock a lawyer for what he is by the way he speaks. I decided to let the question go. Moving on, I swallowed a knot of fear and turned the page of my notebook.

P: You’ve spent a lot of time in the United States. You no doubt have absorbed the ubiquitous political content pervading our media. What are your thoughts on the upcoming presidential election? Any opinions on the Republican nomination race or President Obama’s chances of re-election?

The Gecko stammered and his eyes widened. Being unable to sweat or internally regulate his body temperature, he began pouring a small glass of water over his head. The publicist beast lurched forward, twisting my arm behind my back at an angle I never imagined was possible.

“That was not an appropriate question, Mr. Sarko,” he growled, “Perhaps you would consider discussing the country music stars The Gecko can’t stop listening to…”

Being a man of journalistic integrity and apparently little self-preservation instinct, I continued in my original line of questioning, even as the pain in my shoulder entered a new realm of excruciating agony.

P: How about your thoughts on the ongoing global economic crisis? One of GEICO’s main marketing thrusts is the idea of saving people money. As a long-time spokeslizard, does that mean you stand with America’s at-risk middle and working classes? Are we one day going to hear your distinct cockney lilt echoed in an Occupy demonstration?

As my shoulder loosed from its socket with a sickening pop, I began to doubt that the man behind me had sufficient legitimate experience in the field of public relations.

“Talk about the Facebook page!” he snarled, “Tell your readers to Like it! Like the ever-living hell out of it!”

I tasted blood well up from my cheek as I bit into it by instinct. The pain and the visceral panic were taking over. I wouldn’t be conscious much longer.

“I’m sorry. It wasn’t supposed to be this way…” The Gecko muttered shakily. I managed to croak out one last question, though I don’t know if it was my own or something the lawyer in the tan suit whispered into my ear.

P: Lastly and perhaps most importantly, Popdose readers understand that music is the language of the soul. What are the top albums that express your innermost sense of self?

G: Oh goodness, that’s a tough one. Let’s see…basically, anything that you can shake your tail to. Like…Wrinkle Neck Mules (I have a cameo in their music video on YouTube.  Just sayin’.

The sweet oblivion of unconsciousness took me and when I awoke, hours later in a gutter somewhere on the south side of Seattle, I counted myself lucky to both be alive and still in possession of my digital audio recorder, secreted away in a hidden pocket on my person. Though I wouldn’t advise any aspiring journalist to cross the PR division of a multinational corporation, those intrepid and foolish enough to pursue the truth at all costs should at least know what this life entails.

Cassie Jaye is a young filmmaker whose work has included the award-winning documentaries Daddy I Do and Faces Overlooked.  She started in the film industry at the age of 16 and has worked as an actress in film and TV and had appeared in The O.C., Alias, Entourage, and much more.  In 2008, Jaye wanted to explore the topic of marriage in the United State when voters in California passed Proposition 8 that amended the state constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry. Being single, straight, and raised as an evangelical Christian, Jaye became fascinated with the issue and set her sights on making a film that would enlighten many folks in the straight community whose views of gays are often framed by cultural stereotypes, religious dogma, and fear of difference.

I had a chance to interview Cassie about the film, the family she chose to focus upon, the upcoming premiere at the Castro Theatre, and how Popdose readers in the Bay Area can win ticket to see The Right to Love:  An American Family on February 6^th.

Ted:  Thanks for taking time to talk about your film The Right to Love: An American Family.

Cassie:  Absolutely.  Thanks for your interest in the film.

Ted: The subjects of your film are Jay and Bryan Leffew –a gay couple with two kids living in the Bay Area. So what drew you to their story?

Cassie: Well, at the time, I was making my first documentary Daddy I Do.  We started thinking about our second film, because we enjoy filmmaking so much. When I say “we” I’m talking about my family. Because we are a family production company – which consists of me, my mom, my sister, my step dad and my uncle. During post-production work for Daddy I Do, we came up with the idea to make our next documentary about marriage, which was a natural extension of our first film [that centered on] sex education and the debate between abstinence only programs and comprehensive sex education which says you can wait until marriage if you want, but if you don’t, here’s how to protect yourself.  And when we starting working on the next film on marriage, Proposition 8 happened, and it was impossible not to look at the issue of same-sex marriage – and that really fascinated us.

I think for The Right To Love, no one involved on the production end of the film was gay or lesbian.  So, we’re all straight and my whole family never had any first hand experience knowing anyone who was a gay.  So we came to the movie as a kind of blank canvass – because we didn’t know a lot about the issues. And we wanted to take on this topic from this perspective of being straight all of our lives — and having a background of being evangelical Christian.  We all grew up very strict, Bible-believing Christians and were taught that homosexuality was wrong. And with The Right to Love … well, we are all for the right of same-sex marriage, but we (my family)  all come from that point of view of knowing the opposing views of same-sex marriage.  We used a lot of footage in the film that really affected us, and made us believe that equality for all is what’s right.

Ted:  How did you connect with Jay and Bryan?

Cassie:  It was originally my sister, Christina Clack, who was researching marriage and same-sex marriage, and she found the Leffew’s You Tube channel called Gay Family Values. And at this point, they only had  two or three videos on their You Tube channel as a kind of indirect protest in response to Proposition 8 passing.  They wanted to show the humanity of their family, and how they are like any other family… very loving, normal, and nothing to fear. And the You Tube channel really took off. There was a lot of support from the LGBT community for showing a loving, committed family. There were a lot of opposing comments (about their videos) that said their life was wrong and they were an abomination. We contacted them right away, and asked if we could interview them for our film. Jay and Bryan were a little hesitant at first because Jaye Bird productions didn’t have anything on the map like a resume of films that they could search for.

Ted:  They must have thought “Oh great.  It’s a student film maker who wants to talk to us.”

Cassie:  Exactly.  They didn’t think much of us at first.  So we went to meet with them in Santa Rosa, and when we left the meeting, we gave them a copy of our film, Daddy I Do, and that was when their attitude to us changed because they saw our filmmaking style – which is very much fly on the wall. We don’t tell the audience what to think. We just show the story and the people and let the audience make their own opinions.  We’re not like a Michael Moore type of filmmaker…

Ted:  Right… advocacy documentaries.

When the movie trailer premiered, there was some hubbub over a scene where the entire family was shown praying at the kitchen table.  Can you elaborate on what got people’s dander up about this?

Cassie: Yeah, that was such an odd thing to arise. I think it happened last October or November.  We included the shot of the family sitting at the table for breakfast — where they hold hands and pray – on the trailer.  As the one who edited the trailer, I never thought that scene would have been as controversial as it became. What happened was that we actually filmed that shot at the table on the very last day, and they (the Leffews) didn’t know that we were rolling sound on that.  They just thought we were getting B roll – which is the imagery of the family getting ready to go to school.  And looking through that footage, I thought the prayer was…from my background growing up in a evangelical household, you always thought that the LGBT community was anti-religion…anti-Christ, you know, something like that. But there was so much love and humility in their prayer and…I just love that scene so much that I thought putting it in the trailer would be a nice way to open the trailer as a kind of non-threatening thing. Ironically enough, that was the most threatening thing to some people who watched it.

Ted:  The controversy kind of came from an unusual source.  These were some LGBT folks who were not thrilled by the depiction of this family as having religious views, and incorporating it in their family ritual before eating a meal.  Like I said, it seemed like an odd source of criticism to me.  You know, when gays and lesbians are put in the spotlight in front of a mainstream audience, there’s a kind of expected criticism from the more culturally conservative parts of the country.  But this came from individuals who would most likely self-identify as progressives – which surprised me.

Cassie:  I agree.  I think some people in the LGBT community were kind of damning them (the Leffews) for still being part of the church that attacks their community. So, why would you want to be part of a religion that doesn’t support the LGBT community?  That’s a pretty bold statement to make from a 30 second clip in the trailer.  They don’t know where the Leffew’s prayer comes from, or what kind of spirituality they subscribe to. So, like I said, it was a pretty bold statement from part of LGBT community to say that they don’t support the Leffews because they are religious.

Ted: Do you explore Jay and Bryan’s religious views in the film?

Cassie:  We do, but not in a big way. We do mention that one of the dads (Bryan) did grow up very religious and is still Christian. And with Jay – the other husband — we don’t really explore it in the film, but he is more open to spirituality, but he doesn’t consider himself a member of any one religion, nor does he pray to any one god.  With the prayer at the table, it’s really just more of a tradition of uniting the family together – which is kind of sweet.  There aren’t many families that have breakfast together or say grace before their meals.  I think that’s one thing about the Leffew family …they are a kind of bridge between [parts of] the straight community – who are very traditional, and wanting to protect the tradition of marriage.  The Leffews are very traditional. They are very much about family and being together for dinner and doing everything together.  And that’s hard to find in a lot of families today.

Ted:  What would you say you’ve learned in process of making this film?

Cassie:  Before I started The Right to Love, I supported marriage equality in the voting booth, but I wasn’t vocal about it to my family or strangers.  And now after making the film, I realize the importance of speaking out –and especially for the straight community to stand with the LGBT community to say “we support you.”  They (the LGBT community) are not going to get equal rights ‘til the majority stands with the minority.  I think that’s been the biggest change through this process…you know, the importance of speaking up and standing up for marriage equality.

Ted: The question of the constitutionality of Prop 8 is now in the federal courts.  As the constitutional question of marriage equality goes through the justice system and will ultimately reach a conclusion, do you think you’ll need make a “part 2” to your film?

Cassie:  I would love to make a part 2.  I’d really like to show the kids because I think a lot people raise questions about how kids will be raised with two dads or moms.  That would be a great part 2 to the film…show how Daniel and Selena (the Leffew’s kids) grow up. And hopefully at that point, there will be equal rights for everyone and they are one of the families that helped make that happen.

Ted: I had a chance to look at a number of videos that Jay and Bryan posted on their You Tube channel, and they are pretty compelling.  The Leffews decided that they were going to show the world how normal and loving a gay couple with kids could be.  But I gotta tell you, the Alice in Wonderland birthday party they threw for their daughter was way more than any birthday party I’ve either thrown for my daughter or have been to.  If anything, these guys are making poor, schlub parents like me look bad!

Cassie: (Laughs)  Jay and Bryan go above and beyond expectations on how to raise kids.  Their kids are their world…and I don’t know how much you know about Daniel and Selena, but Daniel was deemed unadoptable by the adoption agency.  The reason why is that he as a medical condition called Goldenhar syndrome – which causes half of the body to develop at a slower rate than the other half.  I believe he was in foster homes for the first six years of his life.  And no straight family wanted to take on the responsibility for his medical care.  When Selena was born – who is his (Daniel’s) biological sibling – she was placed with him in foster care.  They tried to keep them together for two years. But once the two-year mark was reached, and the kids weren’t adopted, they split up the children to better their chances of getting adopted. So Selena had parents on the waiting list wanting to adopt her when she was separated from Daniel. And the adoption agency actually called Jay and Bryan (who had filed adoption forms with the agency) and told them that they had two siblings who were about to be broken up, and would they be willing to adopt them both so they could stay together.  And that’s how their family came together…

Ted: That’s a great story!

Cassie: Yeah, it’s really heart-warming. And that’s the one thing that really touched me was the need for great adoptive parents.  And another thing is that when I was growing up evangelical one of the big arguments against gay adopting children was that kids need a mother and a father.  And I learned through the making of The Right to Love that a great number of single parents can adopt kids, and I’ve never heard the argument that single parents shouldn’t be able to adopt.  And to have two dads – and one is a stay at home dad – who are loving and adore their family… why shouldn’t they have the same rights as straight couples?

Ted: Absolutely.  I was reading Jay and Bryan’s blog, and there’s a great graphic of what makes a family, and there were stick images of a man and woman holding a hand of a child, and two women holding the hand of a child, two men doing the same, and individual adults of various genders holding the hand of a child.  And then there’s just a child alone with the caption “Batman” over him.

Cassie:  (Laughs)

Ted: And in that graphic it just sums up that what makes a family is support from someone who loves you.  And if a child doesn’t have that support, they may end up like The Dark Knight.

So let’s talk about the premiere that’s going to be at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco…You have a whole day’s worth of events planned, so tell us the details.

Cassie:  Well, we’re going to premiere the film on Monday February 6^th and we have three screenings. We have a box lunch mixer starting at 11:30am – with the screening at noon.

And then we have a 4pm screening aimed at high school students — who can get in free with their student ID. Then we have our big red carpet premier at 7:30pm – with the red carpet opening at 6:30pm.  After the film, we’ll do a short Q&A, and then we go to the after party with live music with some of the musicians whose music is featured in the film.  Oh, and we’ll have hors d’oeuvres and swag bags as well.  And one of honored guests is Zach Wahls (who was raised by two women and whose family opposed House Joint Resolution 6 in Iowa House of Representatives that would end civil unions in Iowa). Zach became an Internet phenomenon when the video of him speaking in front of the Iowa House of Representatives went viral.  The video is about Zach speaking about his lesbian moms and how the sexual orientation of his parents has had zero effect on the content of his character – which was the final quote in his really compelling speech.  So he’ll be flying out from Iowa for the premiere.

Ted: And we’re giving Popdose readers in the Bay Area a chance to go to the premier on Monday February 6^th at 7:30pm. All they have to do is email me at Ted @ Popdose dot com.  I’ll pick two winners in a random drawing, and notify them by email they have won the prize pack.  What will the winners get?

Cassie:  The winners will receive two tickets to the 7:30pm red carpet screening at the Castro Theatre, and they will also receive a copy of the soundtrack to The Right to Love: An American Family.  The winners just have to go to will call at the theatre to get their tickets and CD anytime after 6:30pm… and then they can enjoy the film, meet the film makers, and have a good time.

Ted: Cassie, all the best on the film and thanks for taking time to talk to me about your film on Popdose.

Cassie:  Thanks so much, Ted.

All good sitcom episodes have happy endings. So it stands to reason that the uncertainty over whether there would ever be a DVD release of the seldom-seen fourth season of The Donna Reed Show resolved itself like an episode of the show – cheerfully. The Donna Reed Show: Season Four – The Lost Episodes will be released through MPI Home Video Dec. 20, after having been originally slated for a Mother’s Day release earlier in the year.

One reason for the release is the enthusiasm of the show’s fans, which include two generations of viewers: those who followed it during its initial airing (1958-66) and those who discovered it in its decade-long run on Nick at Nite (1985-94). Both generations lobbied for the release of the fourth season, voicing their complaints on message boards and launching a campaign called “Bring The Donna Reed Show Season Four to DVD” on Facebook (the page is now deleted, but a related YouTube video survives).

Had this been an episode of the show, Reed’s fictional daughter, Mary Stone, would have probably played into the plot. But in this real life drama, it was Reed’s actual daughter, Mary Owen, who saved the day by making it her priority to make sure the fourth season of the show got released.

“It’s been a huge learning curve for me,” Owen says by phone from her home in New York. “But I feel it’s really important — I consider the show part of our American heritage and think it’s really important to keep the DVD releases going.”

To understand why the fourth season’s DVD release was delayed for over a year, some back story is in order.

First, it’s been up to Owen and her siblings to see that the show made it to DVD, since the rights to the show (or at least the first five seasons) are owned by them personally, not a media conglomerate. Owen’s mother and father (Tony Owen), who co-produced the show, had entered into a distribution agreement with the show’s production company, Screen Gems, way back in the 1960s. Since this was before DVDs or even VCR tapes were invented, there was no thought that there would be much of a market for the show in the distant future, so Screen Gems gave the show’s rights back to the family starting in 2003.

“When my parents died, we found out the show’s rights reverted back to us (children),” Owen explains. “I’m sure in their minds not only had they moved on, but probably never thought The Donna Reed Show would ever see the light of day again.”

For the first three seasons, Owen chose Allied Arts Alliance America (which became Virgil Films Entertainment) to put out the DVDs. “We signed up with them and we were really excited and the president is a huge fan of my mother’s career,” she says.

But she found she needed to change companies when producing the fourth season on DVD posed a challenge. Since the season had never been syndicated as part of the Nick at Night package, the episodes were disorganized and sometimes had to be pieced back together. Of course, it was the very fact that this season hadn’t been broadcast since the early 1970s that had fans of the show wanting to see it.

Why did Nick at Nite decide never to broadcast the fourth season (as well as the sixth and seventh)?

“I think because the show had a total of 275 episodes, they just didn’t want that much volume,” Owen says. “So somebody just made a decision to snip here and there and chose to broadcast mostly seasons 1, 2, 3, 5 and 8.”

After the release of the shows’ third season on DVD in 2009, “the market started tumbling down and putting out the fourth season was going to prove to be expensive because of the lack of syndication,” Owen says. So she chose to go with MPI Home Video which, she says, “has more experience with classic television.

“Season Four was never transferred to tape, so the digitizing is all from the original 35 millimeter stock,” Owen explains. “And there were a lot of missing end credits because of the way the original show ran. Originally it had a lot of sponsors and there were product placements in the end credits as well as in the intros. So it’s been a matter of finding the pieces and putting them all back together.”

Matching the various end credits to the right episodes became, she says, “kind of like a Sherlock Holmes investigation but luckily everything was found. MPI was incredible at finding everything. We’re so lucky — a lot of older shows weren’t that well cared for and a lot of stuff is missing.”

According to Owen, a DVD set for the show’s fifth season is already being planned and should be much easier to assemble since most of those episodes were syndicated. Sony holds the rights to the final three seasons of the show and Owen isn’t certain about whether those will come out on DVD.

But the fourth season DVD set, which contains 39 episodes spread over five discs, should be enough to keep fans occupied for a while. The episode that is likely to receive the most attention is Donna’s Prima Donna, which has Mary Stone forsaking college to start a singing career and debuting the song “Johnny Angel” on national television. The song, as released on the Colpix Records label, became a number one hit for Shelley Fabares, who starred as Mary.

The season four DVD package, Owen says, is also the first to feature bonus material, which will come in the form of interviews with both Fabares and Stu Phillips, the latter of whom founded the Colpix label, produced “Johnny Angel,” and then went on to work on another show that heavily featured pop music, “The Monkees.”

The season also featured a plethora of guest stars, including James Darren (another Colpix artist), Cloris Leachman, John Astin, Swoozie Kurtz and baseball great Don Drysdale.

To celebrate the launch of the new DVD set, MPI organized a reunion and tribute program featuring some of the show’s surviving actors (Reed passed away in 1986). The event was held Dec. 6 in Los Angeles’ Paley Center and was attended by Fabares, co-star Paul Petersen, Darren and Phillips.

Watching the “lost” episodes again on DVD left a big impression on Owen. “There are some poignant and subtly dramatic moments that are impressive and just make me think that it’s time again for ‘The Donna Reed Show,’” she says. “There are so many gentle lessons and great images about the American family, which I feel is not currently in the best condition.”

The Donna Reed Show’s depiction of the American family is what it’s best remembered for, and likely the reason viewers from two separate generations made it a hit. When the show started, it centered around the adventures of the four-member Stone family, which included Donna (played by Reed), her physician husband Alex (Carl Betz), their teenage daughter Mary and their precocious pre-adolescent son Jeff (Paul Petersen).

As the show progressed, that formula would be altered, with Paul Petersen’s younger sister Patty becoming a cast member when Fabares left the show. But it was the family-centric thrust of the show that attracted its initial flurry of viewers, who probably saw it was a reflection of their own lives when it originally aired.

Scroll ahead twenty years to the Generation Xers who rediscovered it in reruns, and you’d probably find they saw the show as an expression of what they would have liked their family lives to be like: harmonious, with an intact family unit and parents that actually cared and gave good advice to the kids.

The show’s purported “wholesomeness” drew its share of criticism over the years, as Donna Reed came to symbolize the stereotypical 1950s suburban housewife, with all the cultural baggage that comes with that image. Although there’s some truth to that, the show was never that simplistic. The dynamic between the characters was more believable than that of most other shows of its era, and it sometimes dealt with real life issues, albeit gently. Once in a while the show even tackled risky subjects like drug abuse, which was the central theme of the eighth season episode The Big League Shock.

The show was actually proto-feminist in some respects. Not only did it bear the name of its star, it was partly developed by Reed and invariably showed Reed’s character as being the backbone of the family – solving the problems, keeping things running. And while the show’s initial opening segment did picture Reed’s character as the standard “happy housewife” seeing her family off as they go out the door in the morning, later seasons showed her leaving for work as well.

That sounds like subversion of the norm of the 1950s and 1960s rather than the norm itself. All of which may have endeared it to its second generation audience, which was able to see the show as nostalgic, but not embarrassingly so.

“It’s been frustrating for me, especially when I was in college because the ’70s wave of feminism considered what she represented in the show to be pretty bad,” Owen says. “I felt like they were missing the fact that she was way ahead of her time. They had it completely wrong.

“My mother grew up on a farm,” she continues, “and in those days the work was equally divided between men and women. I don’t think my mother was consciously a feminist, but I think she naturally felt having worked early in her life and been part of the MGM film system that women were just as capable as men.”

By the time the show started, Reed was also a veteran film actress who had won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her role in “From Here to Eternity.” She and producer/husband Tony Owen had heavy input into the creative process of the show throughout the show’s run.

“Her creative input can be seen by the way the show was run,” Owen says. “Ida Lupino directed a couple of episodes and Barbara Avedon cut her teeth there, writing and directing episodes, and she went on to create (the 1980s female detective show) ‘Cagney & Lacey.’”

Some of the above issues might be familiar to viewers of more modern television, since they were raised in an early “Gilmore Girls” episode, That Damn Donna Reed. In fact, the small town world of Hilldale depicted on “The Donna Reed Show” isn’t so far removed from the town of Stars Hollow where “Gilmore Girls” took place – only there’s less irony and fewer references to pop culture.

“I think Donna Stone was a very modern character,” Owen says. “Within each episode she kind of went outside the boundaries of being a 1950s stay at home mom. And by the end of each episode she kind of comes back to that role. But I think she’s got a very modern quality, which is why it was so popular on Nick at Nite.”

It’s easy to misunderstand the Bangles—or underestimate their talent. After forming in the early ‘80s, the quartet became part of L.A.’s Paisley Underground scene, which was indebted to California’s garage and psych-pop acts of the ‘60s. Early live and recorded footage—especially a 1984 live performances of “Hero Takes A Fall” from Late Night With David Letterman

But just a few years into their career, the Bangles experienced something very familiar to other bands of that era: overproduction. And while gloss and keyboards oppressed their rawer influences, playing nice with the day’s fads ensured they were soon a staple of the pop charts. Two songs hit No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart—the Prince-penned “Manic Monday” and Paul Simon-written “Hazy Shade Of Winter”—and two more hit No. 1: the slow dance “Eternal Flame” and, of course, “Walk Like An Egyptian.”

Despite this success, the Bangles remain quite underrated; they’ve never received their proper due perhaps because their frivolous-pop reputation overshadows their talents. And make no mistake: Vocalist/guitarist Susanna Hoffs, and sisters Vicki (vocalist/guitarist) and Debbi Peterson (vocalist/drummer) were (and are) all ferocious players and vocalists—just ask anyone who’s been lucky enough to catch them live in recent years.

Down to the core trio of Hoffs and the Peterson sisters since long-time bassist Michael Steele parted ways with the band in 2005, the Bangles have also continued to record. The band’s long-awaited new album, Sweetheart Of The Sun, is a loving homage to the ‘60s rock they’ve embraced since day one; the music brings with picture-perfect harmonies, jangly guitars with hints of psych-pop and warm, honeyed textures. There’s not a trace of kitsch or nostalgia, however; as always, the Bangles are adept at making retro influences feel modern.

In late summer, Popdose and Vicki Peterson chatted about Sweetheart Of The Sun, the Bangles’ status as role models for women and her memories of filming videos for MTV.

Lay out the challenges and scheduling obstacles you faced when recording the album.

Yeah, it did take us way too long—or all things happen when they’re supposed to, so maybe it wasn’t too long, but it seemed like it was too long. [Laughs.] We did work on the record for almost two years, and it definitely was scheduling issues for a lot of it. Debbi still has young kids, so we literally had this very tight window to work in on a daily basis, and it was hard to sort of get a flow. Even the last record we did, Doll Revolution, we rented a house and we didn’t work 18-hour days but we definitely would do a full day of work, stop and have dinner at the house and it was that kind of a flow. But this was much more difficult; Debbi had to be out of there by 2:30 to get the kids, you know what I mean? So it was a bit fragmented, in a way, and it was kind of hard to get momentum going. The surprise for me—and I think probably for all of us—was when we stepped back and saw what we had as a collection of songs. They kind of hung together in this nice way that I didn’t really expect!

That’s what I was just going to say, that the album was very, very cohesive. The sound and the aesthetic—you’d never know it was fragmented at all.

I think a lot of that just has to do with the fact that we were so in tune with each other as far as what we wanted things to sound like. It’s kind of mysterious to me and I’m very happy about it. We didn’t record it in the same place; we recorded it in three different studios at various times. Toward the end, I just took myself down into my own home studio and put guitars on, or did a lot of my guitars by myself. I just engineered it myself or Debbi would come over and we’d go through it. It’s crazy that it sounds as cohesive as it does.

Every studio has its own character, history, ghosts and things like that. What did all of the different studios then bring to the process?

These were all home studios. We started the whole thing at Matthew Sweet’s home studio, and that really kind of kicked everything off for us, because there is a vibe there. Matthew has a really specific way of working that we would fall into when we were working with him. He has a very positive outlook and is really enthusiastic, and that was just a great way to start the whole process. From there, we moved over to Susanna’s home studio, which she was kind of building up during this whole thing; she actually started it a couple of years ago. So that was really nice and lovely and had a whole different feel. But again, it just seems crazy—there were just these moments when someone would go, “You know what, on the bridge we should have bagpipes!” and then somebody else would go “Oh my God, I was just going to say that!” Just crazy stuff.

That’s the kind of band chemistry you can’t just create. That’s just the function of being in a band for so many years.

Yeah, we’ve known each other for this long—and because it’s the foundation of the band. The music that inspired us to play in the first place when we were kids is the music of the ’60s, for the most part, and it’s just all over this record. I laugh when I hear some of the [references]; there are so many musical references, it’s almost like we’re not wearing it on our sleeve, we’re broadcasting it across our chests. It’s just a love affair to all these bands we love. You definitely can hear it throughout the whole record, and that’s just something that we’ve shared from day one. It’s very easy to throw out even obscure musical references, and the other guy will get it.

I saw you guys live in St. Louis last year, and you covered Nazz’s “Open Your Eyes.” I was so excited to hear a studio version of that song, because it was so great live then. Why did you gravitate towards that song?

Believe it or not, we started playing that in the early ’80s. It was one of the many covers that we liked to do, and it’s something that we kind of stopped doing for a while, but we started doing it in the early ’80s, and it’s just so fun. It’s such a wacky song—that bridge is what? What? But it’s so fun to play, and it was so fun to record that.

“Ball & Chain” has also been kicking around for a while, since the early ’90s, is that correct? So why record it now?

Why now? Why not now is sort of the reason! We really just were collecting songs and recordings in the early days of the recording [process]. I think at one point we were just like, “We could really use another kickass rock & roll kind of song,” and Debbi goes, “Well, I do have this one,” and it was a hilarious demo on a cassette tape that she played us. It was like, “Oh, wow, that is so ’80s!” It was like, “Woo!” I think we kept some of that feel, but hopefully not all of it. [Laughs.] It was this great, tongue-in-cheek, snotty song that we liked. It’s funny, some of the songs date back to the ’90s, believe it or not. One of my songs, “Lay Yourself Down,” I wrote in the ’90s. It’s just a song that I never had a chance to record—and somehow it felt like now was the time.

I interviewed Tori Amos once and she was talking about songwriting, and she was like, “You know, the songs just kind of come to me and some are right and some are not.” It’s all in the timing.

And sometimes they’re right at one point where they weren’t before. The song “Through Your Eyes” and “One of Two” especially started out when we were writing songs for Doll Revolution. We wrote a version of that song—it’s not the same, we changed it and tweaked the approach to it, etc. but we really wanted that to sound like a three-part harmony, [with] a Crosby, Stills and Nash approach to it. That was [always] the inspiration—let’s write a song like that. Again, it wasn’t right for Doll Revolution for whatever reason, and we didn’t even track it, so it’s just been waiting for its moment.

All of the harmonies on this record are just gorgeous. Having seen you guys live, it sounds effortless—and you know that it’s totally not. But I’m a sucker for a good harmony.

Oh, me too! [Laughs.] That’s one of the best sounds on the planet, really. Just human voices and harmony to me is great. It does something… it’s like some physics thing involved with the vibrations and how it affects us; I don’t know. But it can get to your core and for us, it’s always been a huge part of what we do and for me, [it’s] one of my favorite things about the band, definitely. And again, it’s sort of a chemistry blend—and the sibling thing helps and it is kinda easy! [Laughs.] Maybe it’s because it’s the right people, you know? That stuff is always one of my favorite things to record and to work on and to arrange, but that’s not the hard part.

Tell me a little bit more about the label you’re on, Model Music Group. How did you guys get on their radar?

They kind of found us, and I’m not even sure how. We had a bit of a listening party, while we were mixing the record. We were mixing it with Jim Scott and he has this great, amazing space that he works in and we had a party and we invited some people who had been sort of sniffing around and interested. And Tony [Valenziano] from Model was just like a terrier—he wouldn’t let go. He heard the record and he said, “Yes, I’m going to have it.” He was calling our manager every single day [and] he just had this great enthusiasm for it—and that, to me, goes a long way. You can’t make somebody feel that way about your music, so that was a lot of it. And it just worked out with how they’re set up; they’re basically working through Universal, so we have the advantage of that machinery behind us.

Earlier this year, you guys participated in the Small Town Sound contest with clothing store maurices. And then you partnered with Daisy Rock Girl, the guitar company, for a sponsorship. For you, what does it mean to help out younger female musicians like this?

It’s really inspiring, and I’ve been coming across more and more of them. And part of it is through my association with Daisy Rock. I love it when a girl comes up and says, “You know, I play guitar because of you.” What? To me, that’s so inspiring and humbling and exciting. I get really excited about that, because that’s what it’s all about. I mean, if you can actually get to somebody and make an emotional change in them in some way—that makes them want to do something as challenging on a lot of levels as learning to play an instrument— that’s amazing! And plus, I just want more girls playing guitars.

I’m always railing about the lack of women on rock radio. I always tell people, “I grew up in the ’90s and I could name you 10-15 artists that were on alternative rock radio, not a problem at all.” And now, it’s like, where are the girls? It makes me mad. I wonder what girls growing up now, what kind of role models they have?

They’re all over in pop.

I know! You know, some them are good role models and some of them aren’t, it depends on the day and the song.

Well, here’s the weird thing—and it’s the mystery of the ages that we talk about all the time. We don’t really understand why there aren’t more all-girl bands. Why there aren’t more girls banding together and wanting to play, because it’s so fun and it’s this great club mentality that you get to share. It’s highly recommended, I’d say. [Laughs.] There are a lot of female musicians out there; they just aren’t getting heard.

I mean, I personally know two really good, very different—I know more than two, but off the top of my head—all-girl bands who are very young. They started out when they were 16. I know another all-girl band that started out when the drummer was 11 and she’s now 17 and really, really good. But they’re out there. As easy as it is to get your music on the internet—and therefore, theoretically out to the entire world—it’s really hard to get heard, I think. So it’s a bit of a paradox. It used to be you had to go through the channels and then you had to go through a very pre-described way to get your music heard. That’s all blown up and now it’s kind of a free-for-all, and there’s a million ways to get your music out to the world. But to actually get anyone’s ears, I don’t know how you do it. It’s tough; there’s so much out there.

It’s overwhelming, just the amount of music.

Yeah, but they’re out there, believe me, I see them—they’re just not on what is left of radio. [Laughs.]

What can we do? How can we change this?

I don’t know. It’s almost like watching to see how the industry settles into itself. What’s going to come next? Because it seems to me that it’s still in such a state of flux that everyone’s kind of looking around, trying to see what the other guy is going to come up with next. Labels—are they completely antiquated? I don’t know. It seems to me like it does help to have some way to channel the music to a certain set of ears, you know? I was just telling another journalist that I listen to public radio a lot and I find that a lot of times, I’ll discover new music through one of the music programs, because I guess I’m a target demographic for NPR. [Laughs.] Which is fine! Because I love it, and that’s the first place I heard Adele and that’s the first place I heard Florence and the Machine. If I really knew the answer, I’d be a manager and make a lot of money!

The Continental Drifters reunited a little bit in 2009. Do you have any more plans to do things with them? I know you’re busy doing other stuff. Are there any other plans in the works?

No, nothing concrete. But it doesn’t take that much. It was really somebody asked the question, “What would it take to get the Continental Drifters to play my party for Jazzfest?” And that’s [all it took]—the question had to get said out loud and then repeated enough times that we managed to make it happen. It was really great; it was amazing. I’ve always said—and I will continue to say—that Continental Drifters is a band that we’ll be in our eighties, and we’ll be on somebody’s front porch playing, absolutely. We still exist, even though we don’t perform. You know, we’re not a dynamic band; we don’t perform consistently or record or anything, other than the fact that I will always be a Continental Drifter, and that’s how that is.

It’s pretty unique in identity and personality. I like that.

Yeah, it absolutely is. I mean, that band saved my life in a lot of ways, and it’s near and dear to my heart, that music.

I know you guys got on stage with Elvis Costello not long ago. How much fun was that?

Oh, could there be any more fun? Could there be any more fun than go-go dancing next to Elvis Costello with that band that he has and getting in the cage? [Laughs.] Which is a personal favorite of mine to do. I must be a go-go dancer in a previous life! It was so much fun. We were really happy he asked us back too; we did that [previously] back in ’86 with him in Los Angeles, the first time he did the Spinning Wheel concert. So when he decided to revive it, we were so happy he asked us to come and sing again.

He just has so much fun on tour. And doing the spinning wheel thing, it’s just so awesome to see a musician enjoying himself so much.

He’s kind of ridiculously talented, and one of his gifts is that he’s a great master of ceremonies. He really does that well, and he knows his music; he’s like a musicologist, practically, and he just has so much fun. And that band, they’ve known each other for decades. It just couldn’t have been more fun.

As I said, I saw you guys last year. And then I saw you opening for Heart in Illinois a couple of years ago, and it was just so awesome, seeing really talented musicians on stage having so much fun. You just leave those shows so happy.

Yeah, we have fun and we love playing with Heart too, that’s always one of my favorite pairings, because they’re one of my influences. Because I was in high school and learning to play electric guitar, it was like, Nancy Wilson, excuse me? Are you allowed to be that beautiful and that talented? It’s really not fair. [Laughs.]

I think she’s one of the more underrated guitarists, too.

I totally agree. Especially her acoustic work, I mean, she’s really good and innovative. When she plays, she’s not playing folk 12-string—she’s playing rock guitar, but on an acoustic.

With MTV celebrating it’s 30^th birthday this year, looking back, how do you think the channel has affected the Bangles’ career?

They did a lot for us in a lot of ways. And it’s funny, because we started as a band almost around the same time, so it was such new technology…or it wasn’t even considered technology, it was just this thing that a lot of people thought was invasive and non-creative. Sort of like I guess how radio people felt when television really kind of took over.

And there was some skepticism about it when it first arrived, but it very quickly established itself. It was a non-question: Of course you made a video when you put out your first single—and then if you could afford it, you did another one! So many of them were like little mini-films and not that different from the “promotional films” that the Beatles and some bands did in the ’60s. They did short films for things like “I Am The Walrus,” “Strawberry Fields Forever” and that kind of thing. So it wasn’t that different from that for me. I always had fun doing them. It’s a lot of work—more work than you think, unless you’re a film actor and you’re used to that. After about 12 to 14 hours, you’re going, “I just want a shower!” [Laughs.]

Which video required the most work?

Mmm, it depends on what you meant by “work.” Probably “If She Knew What She Wants,” which we actually shot twice—once in London and then a different version in Los Angeles. I don’t know, maybe they’re not my faves. Being double the work I guess, that one gets to be the most work. Weirdly enough to me, probably one of our most popular videos was the least amount of work and that’s “Walk Like An Egyptian.” That was just playing in front of the audience that we pulled in off the streets of New York City, while we were on the road. We fit it into our tour schedule, and it was just a blast. And then Gary [video director Weis] went out with a camera and started shooting people on the street, getting reactions and stuff.

Anything else that you want to cover?

We’re really happy that the record is coming out. Other than my parents—who just love it, and they’re completely unbiased—I’m looking forward to see what sort of reaction it garners.

Do they come out to your shows?

Yeah. They do when they can. My father is a bit of an audiophile and he has this surround sound system in his house and Debbi and I were both out there because my mother just had a birthday and they literally forced us to sit down and listen to our record with Dad’s sound system. [Laughs]

Wow.

I know, adorable—and slightly torturous! But actually, also an interesting experiment to hear it. You work so hard to make things sound a certain way to really try to get the best sounds that you can, and you definitely really slave over the mix and really try to create an ambience and a mood and a feel. And then people download it on a downgraded MP3 and then put earbuds in their ears and that’s how they listen to it. [Laughs.]

Sad but true. This album, it feels like it needs to be listened to on vinyl, because it’s so warm. It feels like you need the vinyl crackling as you’re listening to it.

I will look forward to that moment when we get to hear the vinyl crackle.

So you didn’t have the vinyl crackle for dad’s sound system? What did you have, like the master tape?

We had a master CD, so it was still digital, but it was okay.

It passed muster.

It did, yeah!

Valentine’s Day 2012 will mark 35 years since the new wave band the B-52′s performed their first live show in their hometown of Athens, GA. But in a humorous twist keeping with the band’s sense of the absurd, the group decided to instead commemorate their 34th anniversary by recording their first-ever live CD on that date in Feb. 2011. The result is With the Wild Crowd! – Live in Athens, GA., getting an Oct. 11 release by Eagle Rock Entertainment (a DVD version of the concert will follow in early 2012). The group’s penchant for silliness, wig-wearing and retro-styled music got them pegged by some as lightweight entertainment when they emerged nationally. But in retrospect, their more outré, ironic and gender-inclusive approach to pop was arguably more pioneering than some of their band’s 1980s peers who were taken much more seriously. We spoke with Cindy Wilson, who has fronted the band since its inception.

What inspired you to want to put out a live CD after all these years?

Well, you know, we felt it was time. We haven’t actually put one out before and we always wanted to do it. We filmed it at an anniversary concert in our hometown, Athens, for our 34th anniversary. It’s our 35th anniversary next year. But it was a huge event, held at the Athens’ Classic Center, so we decided it was a good place to film. It turned out great and we mixed it in L.A. and it’s being released Oct. 11. It’s going to be very exciting to see it come out. I think fans and everybody will love it.

Did having so many fan-filmed videos of the band playing live on YouTube prompt fans to request the B-52′s finally put out a live release?

Yes. We’ve had a lot of requests for that. I watch YouTube daily and it’s like art — the camera’s moving around and everything. But having a professionally-filmed show, we’ve never had that before. So it really is an exceptional thing.

There’s been sort of an uptick in interest in ’80s retro culture amongst twentysomethings recently. Do you find you’re getting younger fans at your shows?

Well, we’ve always had a wide array of people of all ages come to our shows. The people that came to see us in the old days have kids. So it’s really amazing that it keeps being passed around. We get a great crowd — all ages. And its still one of the great fun shows to go to.

How difficult was it for you coming up in the music industry being a band that played music that was different from what was on the radio and had two women as members?

In one way, it was very easy for us because we were a group of friends. It wasn’t like being a hired performer to come in and be in a group. It was a bunch of friends getting together — artists and free thinkers. We’re from a college town, Athens, which was a great place to grow up because it wasn’t conservative. It was a very artistic scene there. So we came up through a more open-minded feeling, and had the sense of having fun and being outrageous and making each other laugh. We were lucky that we kind of came up through an organic situation like that.

What happened when you left Athens to play for a bigger audience?

Well, when we came to New York and people started coming to see us, I’m sure we looked like we were from a different planet. But we started getting an audience there and definitely hit a nerve, so it just became bigger and bigger after that. We were kind of our own thing.

These days, do you hear from artists or bands who tell you that you’ve been an influence on them?

Absolutely. That’s the natural way with music. Your take influences and make them your own. And you bring something that you have to it because of the way it speaks to you. And so, yeah, artists build upon a theme and God bless them, that’s just the way it is. I get artists on my Facebook page from different levels of success that say we’ve influenced them and it’s really wonderful to see. And there are also B52′s cover bands that are really fun too.

He’s never exactly been a household name, but Stanley Jordan has always commanded a certain amount of attention and respect in the jazz community, particularly among guitarists. To understand why, all you need to do is spend a few minutes watching him play; his use of the eight-fingered tapping style he calls the touch technique is not only visually spellbinding, it’s enabled him to do some fairly amazing things, including playing two guitars at once (as he did on his 1994 album, Bolero) and playing guitar and piano simultaneously.

But Jordan’s music isn’t all flash — in fact, quite often, his exceptional dexterity doesn’t even translate to the songs, which have always been crafted around emotion, sometimes to the frustration of fans who just want him to put on a show. He’s always stayed resolutely true to his muse, even when it meant taking a nine-year break from recording — and then returning in the early aughts with a pair of esoteric albums inspired by his studies in music therapy.

Over the last few years, Jordan has edged back toward the broader jazz marketplace, and his most recent release, Friends, offers perhaps his broadest commercial overture since Bolero. On it, he’s joined by a stellar cast of guests, including Charlie Hunter, Mike Stern, and Kenny Garrett; together, Jordan and his Friends run through an inspired set of originals, covers (including, yes, Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl”), and a nod to one of his classical favorites, Béla Bartók.

I’ve loved Stanley Jordan’s music since stumbling across his cameo in Blake Edwards’ Blind Date almost 25 years ago, so getting to talk to him about Friends was a real personal thrill, and in conversation, he was just as thoughtful and honest as his playing. Read on.

Your technique has obviously gotten a lot of attention — more, I’d argue, than most artists, even in the jazz sphere. Do you ever feel like that’s put an undue burden on expectations for your music? There’s always this tension between melody and chops in jazz, and someone in your position is always in danger of being accused of straying too far on either side of the line.

I think there are general issues in the aesthetics of music that were always there before me. I kind of stepped into that world, and I’d like to see musical aesthetics evolve — I’d like to see people taking it a little more seriously. A lot of people, rather than thinking their opinions through clearly, will just express judgments that reflect their aesthetic beliefs, and an assumption that that’s the way things should be. When someone comes along and does something that’s difficult to categorize, the reactions can be all over the map.

In my case, I’ve had people who say “he’s all chops, he’s just showing off his technique,” and then other people who complain because they hear a lot of melody, and they don’t think I’m doing enough heavy, deep stuff. So what am I? Am I overdoing it, am I underdoing it?

I also like a lot of different types of music. I don’t think I’m all that unusual in that regard, but I’ve always had that attitude. When I was getting around New York in the beginning of my career, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, I met musicians who gave me career advice, and one of the things I heard a lot was “You have to pick a style. It doesn’t work like that. You can’t play all these different things.” I think they were right, at least to the extent that it has been kind of difficult to carve out a niche. But I feel like it’s been worth it, because at the end of the day, we have to be true to ourselves.

It’s funny in jazz. I stopped going to a lot of these jam sessions. It’s a shame, but I often felt like it was just one big cutting contest, and if I’m playing with someone, I like everyone to sound good together. That was one of the goals with the Friends album — obviously, there’s a sense of competition in that we’re all pushing each other, but there was so much love in the studio, and I really went out of my way to make people feel comfortable, and sit back and let them shine. The album was really more about them than it was about me.

And I did worry a little that people might think I should step up more. But really, when I’m playing with the touch technique, I don’t even think about that. I’ve been playing that way for so long that I forget. I can go two, three, four shows in a row, and the whole time it doesn’t occur to me that I have an unusual technique, because that’s just me playing the guitar.

Stanley Jordan – Friends – EPK from Mack Avenue on Vimeo.

Right, and I think that comes across watching you play. Even when you’re doing something amazing, like playing guitar and piano simultaneously, that isn’t necessarily reflected in the music itself. There’s nothing in the song that sounds like you’re winking at the audience.

Well, even that, I mean…okay, I’ve been doing it more seriously in the last few years. But even in the beginning, when I started working with the touch technique, it occurred to me that I could play guitar and piano. One of the reasons I shied away from it was that I didn’t want people to think it was a gimmicky thing, but after awhile, I started to feel like I was cheating myself. It was something musically that I really wanted to do. When I play guitar and piano together, it’s like one instrument, but it’s one instrument with a broader range of colors. I love the musical possibilities in that.

When you normally hear guitar and piano together, there’s obviously more that two players can do than I can when it’s just me, but they…blend into one. People have asked me if doing that turns my trio into a quartet. [Laughter] The answer is that it’s definitely a trio. That’s how I want it to come across — one person playing one instrument with some unique, amazing possibilities.

When I picked up my copy of Friends for the first time, I was thrilled to see that you played with Mike Stern and Charlie Hunter on the album. You make a sort of G3 for hardcore guitar geeks — you know, guys who have a lot of respect in the field, but haven’t achieved Metheny-size sales success.

Right, but it’s amazing how many people love their music. And I’m glad you mentioned that, because — maybe more in Mike’s case — they’re great guitarists that guitar players know and love, and they need to be heard more. And also Kenwood Dennard on drums — again, drummers know he’s amazing. I’ve been playing with him for years, and inside the musicians’ community, everyone loves him, but more people need to hear him, so I wanted him to be the only drummer on the album. And then there’s Russell Malone and Bucky Pizzarelli — those guys could make up part of another G3.

We might actually do some shows in that format, although it’s hard to get everyone together. I’d love to do a Friends reunion where we all play live together, but I don’t think it’s possible.

From the outside, you seem like a guy who was supposed to really grab that brass ring in terms of sales — you even got Arista to enter the jazz market — but then you walked away from all that and started making really deeply personal music. So a project like Friends, that includes some big names and includes, you know, a Katy Perry cover, might seem like a commercial concession. I’m guessing that wasn’t the motivation at all.

These are among my favorite artists. The fact that they have a high profile does help sales of the album, and I think it’s good to make a record that sells. You know, we were talking about aesthetics, and that’s one of the areas where the jazz community shoots itself in the foot — we have this bias against success, and then we sit around and wonder why the world isn’t beating a path to our door. There’s some bitterness against players who have achieved success in the rock world with music that doesn’t have the depth of some jazz.

And yet they’ve been able to be so successful marketing themselves. If we took a page from that book, we’d do so much better. We want people to like jazz, but we aren’t willing to do what it takes to get the word out. I don’t agree with that approach. So yeah, I expected that high-profile artists would help the record do well. But really, they were chosen primarily for their skills, and their musicianship, and how much I love them as artists. The music comes first. The music always comes first.

The Katy Perry song…well, first of all, jazz artists have always covered pop songs, so I’m not doing anything different there. But the thing that really got me excited about doing “I Kissed a Girl” in particular was watching her do an MTV Unplugged version. She obviously had jazz musicians playing with her, and the way she dressed, and the way she set it up, it was kind of this smoky jazz cafe sort of atmosphere. I liked the concept she was going for, and the image she was portraying, but she didn’t give those cats any solos! So I thought it’d be cool to do an actual jazz version, but I was really just continuing what Katy Perry started.

When I’m putting styles together like that, I want to do it organically. I don’t want to just throw things together out of the blue if they don’t make sense. To give you another example, there’s something that Mozart did in a lot of his pieces — a resolution where he’d take the augmented second and resolve it up to a major third. To me, when I hear that, it sounds like the blues — that’s what that is, basically. So when I played a movement from one of his piano concertos on my State of Nature album, I took it and made a blues lick out of it. I feel like it works because Mozart already gave me permission himself, you know? And history says he improvised a lot on that particular composition, so I did it too.

So here with “I Kissed a Girl,” the composer is Katy Perry, and she said the song could be done in a jazz way, so I said “okay,” and took it the rest of the way.

It’s refreshing to hear your take on the jazz “sellout” debate. I think a lot of artists struggle with that.

You know, what I really love about popular music is its raw power. Its energy. If you can marry that to the more sophisticated structures you get on the jazz and classical side, I think you’ll find the amazing new integral music of the future. I love that word, integral, and I’m a fan of Ken Wilber’s philosophy. I think it applies to music as well.

He talks about the difference between integration and fusion, and you see it in music, too. Fusion is where you kind of melt things together and end up with something that’s a little this and a little of that — neither here nor there. With integration, you’re putting things together and creating something new, but the original elements are still really there. I like my rock to be rock, and my jazz to be jazz. When I put them together, I like it to be jazz rock. You know?

I remember before fusion was a thing, they called it jazz rock. Then it was rock fusion, and then it kind of started to become more bland.

And then fusion became a four-letter word.

Right, right. Whereas for me, I’ll do things like…for example, I covered Michael Jackson’s “The Lady in My Life,” and I’d describe my approach to that performance as jazz soul. I didn’t have the word “fusion” in my head, but I liked taking the R&B and soul elements and mixing them with jazz. That means there are things you wouldn’t do, because they wouldn’t really work — so in other words, everything has some constraints on it.

Everything has some sort of limit. Artistically, it’s about working within those limits. But on “Lady in My Life,” for instance, I think I did some things on my solo with some of the intervals and patterns I played that nobody was doing. It’s interesting to me that some people will hear the beat to a song and classify it without hearing the music. They’ll say they don’t like it, but they don’t notice that there are some innovative lines going on in there.

Back when I was first getting my concepts together, I was really influenced by a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. It contains some really good points that can be applied to music. For instance, the author points out that a lot of people lose the ability to draw as they get older, because every picture they want to create is already attached to a concept. They could be looking right at you and try to draw your nose, but they aren’t really drawing what they see, they’re drawing “a nose.” It always ends up looking the same, and it isn’t good art.

So the author suggests turning it upside down, so it’s no longer a mirror of your preconceived image. It’s a light area, and a dark area, and so on. You draw the lines and the shapes and the flow of the energy, and boom — you end up with a drawing that really jumps off the page. I think it’s the same thing with music, where listeners — and musicians, too — will go in with a concept, and it’s no longer based on sound, tone, energy, structure, or any of the fundamental energies of music.

You’re talking a lot about energy, but it seems like one of the crucial differences between fusion and integration would be a firm grasp of theory.

I think that really helps. I’m a theory buff from way back; I have a degree in theory and composition, and there’s still so much. It’s infinite. I do feel that it’s helped me, because it gets me out of the box sometimes. I’m always aware. I’m often reminded of a good friend of mine from college, who was a mathematician, and we’d talk a lot about his work, which had to do with algebraic topology. He was studying manifolds in 14 dimensions and so forth.

One day I asked him, “Bill, don’t things get really complicated after the fourth or fifth dimension?” and he said, “Actually, things simplify. With more dimensions, you have more space — it’s easier to do things because you have more places to put stuff.” It’s just like cleaning your room — if you have a big room, you can move stuff over here for awhile so you can concentrate on this other section.

I think it’s the same thing with theory. The more you know, the more room you have to work, because there’s always something else you can bring in to make the piece fit together.

But is there ever a tension between all that theory and the energy you’re talking about?

There can be, yes. And this is one of the things I talk to my students about. The mind and the heart and the hand — there can be tension between any two of those things. I tell my students to try and remember that they’re holistic people, and to try and integrate all those things. It can be useful to focus on one for a period of time, and section it off, but you have to reintegrate it later.

If you’re working on theory, let’s say you’re learning 10 new scales. Well, realistically, you probably don’t have enough time to play all of them in a musical way, so I’d suggest picking three and using your knowledge of theory to choose the ones that represent all 10. Start with the first one, and really, really stay with that scale until you feel like you’re making music with it. Until you know it like a friend.

That takes time — it has to settle in. You can’t predict; you have to sit with it. I often tell my students that they have to slow down, because the mind is faster than the heart. You have to give the heart enough time to catch up — but you need the heart, because the heart gives guidance to the mind. The mind knows of a jillion possibilities, but the heart knows which one is the best one right here and now.

We’re kind of skirting around the edges of music therapy, which is a field you’ve explored pretty deeply over the last decade or so. I’d like to talk about that now, and about how music therapy influenced your work on Friends.

Music therapy wasn’t so much of a conscious thought when I was making Friends. I think it was more in the forefront of my mind when I was making my last album, State of Nature. With that album, I was trying to do global music healing, in a sense, by using music to try and help people feel their connection with nature more — and to be more thoughtful about it, too.

When it came to Friends, even though I didn’t have that thought in my mind, music therapy ended up being part of the album anyway, because I’ve always been kind of an introvert. A lot of people don’t know that about me, because they only see me when I’m confident — I only emerge when I’m ready to deal with people, and then I disappear for awhile. A lot of times, I feel socially awkward, because when I was younger, I spent so much time practicing that it was almost sort of a substitute. I didn’t have the nerve to go talk to that girl, but then she’d see me perform, and then maybe she’d be more receptive.

So I kind of developed in a weird sort of way, and what Friends did was help me come out of my shell and be more social. On this album, I’m the host. I’m the one going around to everybody and making sure they’re comfortable, and they have everything they need. That helped me feel comfortable.

I think there’s really a connection. I developed my whole style of playing solo because I loved people like Joe Pass, but there was another element to it; sometimes I had difficulty finding people who wanted to play when I wanted to play, or who wanted to do things I wanted to do. Sometimes you get into a band situation and there’s all this other noise that goes on, and I was just…forget it. It was easier to play solo. My social deficiencies may have been why I developed so much of a solo style in the first place. So this time around, I decided to pursue the musical opposite — I think this is the first album I’ve done where there isn’t a single solo song on it. It really was healing for me in that way.

Do you feel like you’ve mastered your craft at all? To what extent do you still feel like a student?

I’m always going to feel like a student. The more you know, the more you know you don’t know. That’s what my teacher Elroy Jones always told me, and he was right. I’m always going to hear all the things that didn’t quite work out — to hope I managed to play those things off. There’s always going to be that kind of insecurity, I think.

But sometimes I sit back and think about all the ground I’ve covered so far, and I do feel proud of that. I see young guitarists coming up, and they don’t worry about playing in an unusual way, because they don’t have anything to prove. It’s a little like the younger gay or TG generation — for them, it’s just an alternative lifestyle, and it doesn’t bring with it the same type of struggle it did before. I do feel like I’ve made a difference with my instrument that has made it okay to play differently, or to do the kinds of things I’m doing.

One of the things I’m really excited about is work I’m doing with my harmonic vocabulary. It’s been a long-term project — it’s really been decades now — but lately I’ve been putting more energy into it, and I feel like it’s coming to fruition in a new way. I have kind of a big harmonic vocabulary, but it doesn’t always occur to me when I’m on the spot. On stage, I tend to fall back on the things that are comfortable, but once in awhile I’ll remember what I know, and I love those moments of creation.

Lately, I’ve been training myself to use more of what I know. It’s a balance, because I don’t want to overdo it and play something that doesn’t make sense musically. But basically, I’m working off a list of about 1300 chord types — and what I mean by chord types is chords and scales. They’re the same, so I call them both chord types. So there’s 1300 of them, and they can be played in all 12 keys, so it’s a pretty big list, and I’ve been really getting deeply into it. Just loving the exploration of it. I want five or six more lifetimes, and there’s no way I can even make a dent in it.

So what I’m really excited about is teaching. I want to develop a method so that people can learn this quickly — these different approaches to voicing on the guitar. I’ve come up with a way of modeling and notating it; I’m still kind of working on the terminology a little bit, but the concept is totally in place. I’ve discovered what is kind of a unified field theory of chord structure, and I’m really excited to develop and teach it. I’m going to be putting an educational website together. Of course, my technique stuff will be there, but the theory and composition side is what I’m the most excited about. That’ll explain this unified harmonic theory.

We’ll also get into aesthetics, which we haven’t really had time to talk about today. I think you can use ideas from aesthetic philosophy to help invigorate our discussions in the field of music criticism, where I feel we’ve hit an impasse, and there’s a bit of a battle between the artist and the critic. I think we can heal that by clarifying what musical criticism is, and the principles we come from. There are times when we should agree to disagree, but we’re just disagreeing to be disagreeable. I think we can heal some of that if we can find a common language, and I feel aesthetic philosophy provides for that. I’d like to get other people involved in that, and build a community around it.

The advent of affordable home recording technology and the rise of digital distribution have led to a massive explosion of music at the indie level. It’s a subject I’ve discussed at length, but I think it bears mentioning here again, because it framed my experience of Julian Velard‘s new album, Mr. Saturday Night, pretty cleanly. The overwhelming influx of music to my mailbox meant that I let it sit for weeks in the teetering stack of to-be-ripped CDs on my desk, but — and more importantly — in the old days, an independently released record never would have sounded like this.

Mr. Saturday Night is a brilliant record — not only in terms of the songs, which are, yes, very well-written, but also in terms of the sound. Hell, even major-label albums don’t really sound like this anymore: bright and warm, with clever, intricate arrangements, thematic depth, and lyrics that toe the line between smart, funny, and emotionally affecting. It’s one of the best albums I’ve listened to all year, and I had to steal half an hour of Julian’s time to talk about it.

I have to admit, this is my first experience with your music. The album came from a publicist I trust, it has a great title and eye-catching artwork — and it still sat on my desk for a couple of weeks before I got around to listening to it. We’re all in this constant deluge of music now. As an independent artist, how do you cut through that? And to what extent do you think it’s your responsibility to even try?

Well, that’s a question that’s changing the way I make music. I’ve put out albums on my own, and I’ve been signed to a major label, so I’ve run the gamut, you know? I started out about 10 years ago, when CD sales were at their peak, so I’ve been able to watch the industry change from the inside. Really, the one thing I do to try and make myself stand out comes down to my live show, which I try to make as unique as possible. Following that path is what’s leading me on to the next step, which may not even be an album.

If you want to cut through the noise, you have to find different ways of doing things. People forget that the music business, at least as we understand it, isn’t much more than 40 years old. Before then, an LP was something you did for, you know, the soundtrack of a movie. The medium changes, and we have to change with it. That doesn’t mean you stop making music, but you can’t just expect to put a record out there and expect everything to come to you.

When I signed with EMI, I thought I’d hit paydirt. I was accumulating this massive credit card debt and just living like a total bum, and I learned that it’s often more difficult to operate in that world, because for all the advantages it brings, you’re moving as part of this big machine. Your fate is tied to the ship, no matter what. And music’s role in the culture is changing; we have to be able to adapt to that. It isn’t that I wanted to be a businessman — I just wanted to write songs. But that’s life, man. There are parts of any job you aren’t going to want to deal with. You can hope that your career turns out like, say, Justin Vernon’s, but that’s the same as trying to win the lottery.

It’s funny that you started releasing albums at the cusp of this industry-altering moment, but you signed with one of the oldest record labels.

Oh, totally. I started playing clubs in New York around the time I graduated college, in 2001, and that was the peak year for industry revenue. It was like everything they put out was going diamond. I signed with EMI thinking “God, it’s the Beatles, it’s Abbey Road, this is amazing” — and then two months later, they were bought and restructured. And now they’re owned by the bank.

I think it’s also worth noting that, for all this discussion of new paradigms in the music business, your songs are very deeply rooted in classic pop songcraft.

That’s what I love. That’s what brought me here. I’m just a huge fan of songs, from Dylan and Springsteen to guys like Harry Nilsson, Tom Waits, and Randy Newman. And I also love musicals — Gershwin, Cole Porter. I’ve been noticing this vibe. When I started out, I used to make more of an effort to try and fit in to what was going on in terms of trends, and I’ve given up on that. It’s kind of central to the idea for this one-man-show project I’ve been thinking about — the idea that you can be hooked into technology and still be stuck in the past.

There was a real industry for music in the ’60s and ’70s, and the pop culture was such that people got together and there was a need for these things — there was a real audience for an album. It was a way of expressing yourself and getting ideas of some scope across. It produced a lot of great music that was meant for people to really experience, instead of just giving it a few minutes to fit in with everything else that’s going on.

The album hearkens back to that era in a number of ways. Most importantly, you really don’t hear arrangements like these anymore.

Oh, I’m always trying to get the kitchen sink in. [Laughs] It’s funny, because my early records are just me and a piano and maybe a trumpet, and I built a fanbase around those. So now people who have been listening for awhile hear the new songs and they say, “Can’t you just, you know, play the piano?”

I love those records. This one I wanted to really push into overdrive and add everything I could think of. Rip off a Sly Stone tune, make a weird Leo Sayer song…I set out to do every nerdy thing I’d ever dreamed of. And the concept came, basically, off the back of getting dropped by EMI. I was so angry, so frustrated by the situation. I created an album I really believed in, which was The Planeteer, and it got shelved and messed with, and then I got it back, which is the type of thing that goes on with almost everyone who ever signs to a major.

So to cope, I invented this weird Catskills comedian, Lenny Bruce-type personality who’s a complete asshole, but he’s always smiling. The only way I could get through was to make a joke of it. I think the reason the album comes at you with all that stuff is that there’s a lot of anger in there.

I think that kind of dissonance is crucial to a lot of really great pop music.

I agree, and I miss that. The idea that there’s any additional level to a song is totally lost. It’s too nuanced for this market.

What’s your writing method for all this? Do you go out to the shed and clock in every morning, or do you just wait for it?

There was a time when all I did was write. I went through that. It’s changed over the years. The songs on this record really came out in a blast — it was three months of writing when it all came out. Now, I feel like it isn’t so much that I’m waiting for inspiration; it’s more that I’m waiting for a project. I’ve written every type of song I want to write. I’m not into just sitting around and writing a song because I think it’s nice — it needs to have a purpose. I want to tell a larger narrative. If I know why a song has to exist, I can write one right now; that’s part of the skill set I’ve acquired over the years.

But without direction, I feel like it starts to get watered down. I went through a period where I did a fair amount of writing for other people, and going through that process of coming in every day and working with these artists, I started to feel like I was rubbing my muse in the dirt. There are guys who can do it, and they’re amazing at it. I don’t take anything away from it at all, but I started to feel a little bit numb, and my sense of taste started to feel a little bit off. I love the act of creation so much, I really want to feel like I’m sitting down for a purpose — I’m writing an album, or a musical, or a song cycle. Whatever. Otherwise, after awhile, it starts to become self-indulgent.

It’s funny that you say all this, because on Mr. Saturday Night, you come across as very much a craftsman. For example, the first time I listened to “Sentimental,” I thought “Oh wow, that’s a lost Hall & Oates song” — right down to those stuttering vocal pads between the chorus and the verse. That’s the type of song Daryl Hall forgot how to write sometime around 1990.

Yeah, totally. Exactly.

So using that song as a specific example, what’s your approach? Are you just a conduit for the stuff you’ve loved, or are you purposely assembling something to fit that ideal?

Right, right. This album does have elements that are one step removed, where I’m presenting this character and the sort of songs he’d write. There are emotional tunes on the record, and more straight-up singer/songwriter tunes. My last album is all that stuff — it’s very much me. Doing it this way…I don’t know if it’s me becoming more of a craftsman or just setting aside a part of myself to write these things. It gives you freedom to create, but there is a tradeoff. Raw honesty and craft don’t usually go together; sometimes you just have to go through something and make it.

Sometimes I think if I had achieved major worldwide success with my first few albums, I might still be making those kinds of records. I may make more of them down the road. I don’t know. I wonder what might have happened with Dylan if Freewheelin’ hadn’t been a hit, he might have changed his approach entirely.

“Sentimental,” especially, is so…I really wanted to make a song that I could hear over the speakers in CVS and not know if it was recorded in 1982. I love that shit. I have such a sweet tooth for Dr. Hook and the Little River Band, all that stuff.

Ambrosia.

Yeah! I’m on a weird Christmas compilation record with David Pack. I was totally buzzing on that. But yeah, that’s the kind of album I wanted to make, that had room for all these things I loved, and what I’m enjoying now is hearing people’s reactions to it. People hear “Sentimental” and wonder, “is he for real?” It was actually a hit on smooth radio in the UK. It lived in that Kenny G zone for a second, which I thought was awesome. There are three layers to it — there are people who love the song, there are people who don’t get it at all, and then there are people who understand what I’m trying to do as a songwriter and recording artist.

Has gaining the ability to exert that level of control over your songcraft changed your relationship with the music that made you want to be a songwriter in the first place?

I don’t know. It’s interesting. It’s like…for example, the other day I heard “The Fool on the Hill,” and the really analytic part of my writer’s brain thought, “Hey, this isn’t that good.” [Laughs] And I had to check myself. But I think with some of those guys, like Lennon, the meat of what they did was so strong that the stylistic way it moves is sort of irrelevant. The hook is in there. There are McCartney tunes you can dismiss and say they’re fluffy garbage, where he’s just striking a pose. I think that’s the kind of thing I’ve become more aware of, is affectations.

You even hear it in someone like Springsteen, where half his catalog is amazing, and the other half is just him talking about his own bullshit. Or Randy Newman — there’s a lot of his stuff that I love, but in a lot of ways, you could say he doesn’t take many chances. That’s why, for me, in a lot of ways, it always comes back to Dylan. He just doesn’t care. He’ll make something totally terrible, then turn around and make something unbelievably brilliant. I admire that level of fearlessness.

By the time you finish reading this, Max Allan Collins will likely have completed a novel, dashed off a novelization, and put the finishing touches on a graphic novel. But his prolific output–did I mention that he’s a sometime filmmaker?–isn’t what’s amazing about him. What is is that it’s all good. (I haven’t heard the band he’s in, but I wouldn’t write them off.)

The pride of Muscatine, IA, a base of operations far from NY or LA, Collins has been grinding out pulp for decades. Pulp fiction, that is, in every form imaginable, including comic strips and trading cards. You’ve seen his name in lights, as the author of Road to Perdition, the basis for the acclaimed film hit. And he does run with the Hollywood crowd, if only as one of the more prominent scribes of movie novelizations. But mostly he works in the dark, toiling on tough guy thrillers featuring (among others) Chicago P.I. Nathan Heller and the hit man Quarry. There was also a Return to Perdition, published earlier this year.

Collins’ friendship with the king of hardboiled detective fiction, Mickey Spillane, has led to an unusual partnership since the creator of Mike Hammer died in 2006. Over time Spillane more or less bequeathed Collins, a friend and occasional collaborator since the 80s, his unfinished work, and Collins has been dusting off the pages ever since. First, it was Hammer time, as Collins completed three new novels featuring the infamous shamus. More are to come. But Collins has just sprung another Spillane character, Morgan the Raider, from cold storage.

A modern-day buccaneer, Morgan was introduced in The Delta Factor, then dropped when a film version flopped. In The Consummata, Morgan returns, up to his gun sights in espionage involving Cuban exiles, the CIA, and $40 million in stolen loot. Doublecrosses and corpses abound as Morgan zeroes in on the woman at the center of the web–the elusive “Consummata,” the world’s top dominatrix. “They were closing in,” the book begins, and it’s off and running.

I e-mailed Collins about Spillane, The Consummata, and other matters of intrigue. He shot me. Shot me back a few answers, that is.

How did this particular project come to be? (I take that it has its roots in a soured film version of  The Delta Factor in 1970.)

Mickey Spillane had an unusual number of substantial unfinished manuscripts in his files. There were various reasons why–chiefly his on again/off again relationship with his conservative church, who disapproved of his writing (but not his financial contributions).  Also, he had a tendency to set manuscripts aside, intending to get back to them, when another enthusiasm took hold. He was a force of nature that way.

The Consummata was set aside, as you indicate, because of Mickey’s frustration with the film version of The Delta Factor. He had conceived his modern-day pirate, Morgan the Raider, as his next big series character, but the film did sour it. He’d been a producer on it, so in addition to being dissatisfied with the end result, he lost money on the deal.

Shortly before his death, he said to his wife Jane, “After I’m gone, there will be a treasure hunt around here.” Mickey had three offices at his South Carolina home, one downstairs, one on his third floor, and another just outside, on stilts. “Give everything to Max and he’ll know what to do.” 

Obviously this was a great honor, but I admit I saw it coming. He had sent two partial Hammer manuscripts home with me in the late ‘80s, when we were collaborating on a lot of projects–anthologies and a comic book series–and also the unfinished Consumatta, about which he said, “Maybe someday we can do something with this.”

After the treasure hunt, we had a total of six substantial Hammer novel manuscripts, and I’ve just finished the fourth, actually, Lady, Go Die!, which Titan will bring out next May. There were two non-Hammer novels, Dead Street–which was more nearly finished–and The Consummata. Mickey and Charles Ardai had already been talking about Hard Case publishing something of his, so Hard Case was the obvious place to go. And of course I already had a strong relationship with Hard Case, who just published my Quarry’s Ex.

How did you write in Spillane’s distinctive voice, and how does writing for Morgan differ from writing for Hammer?

Mickey’s protagonists are all different shades of the same guy, hardly unusual in the hardboiled mystery field.  What I work hard to do is find and maintain Mickey’s voice in the period during which he wrote the unfinished material I’m working with. For The Consummata, obviously, I looked very hard at The Delta Factor, reading it again and again, using a marker pen like a college kid prepping for an exam. I looked at other mid-‘60s Spillane material, as well.

With Lady Go, Die! I was dealing with a very early manuscript–the second Mike Hammer, begun in 1945, over twenty years before The Consummata–and that was a much different Spillane/Hammer voice, and a younger, brasher version of the character.  For that book I read and read and marked up the first several Hammer novels–I, the Jury, My Gun Is Quick and The Twisted Thing, the latter a book written around 1948 but not published till the mid-‘60s.

Did you find yourself shaping the manuscript your way, or adhering to Spillane’s vision as much as possible?

I stick to Spillane as much as possible and do my plotting in a manner that I believe reflects his approach. Sometimes I have plot and character notes, and about half the time I’ve had Mickey’s ending, either an actual draft or just a strong ending he had shared with me when we discussed various of these stories. Other times–and The Consummata was one–I don’t have anything but that substantial fragment, in this case around 100 pages. But that’s a good chunk and it gives me the entire cast of characters and the direction of the narrative.  I am confident that I know Mick and his work well enough to predict where he was headed, and who the bad guy–or gal–is.

By the same token the book is (delightfully) “incorrect” regarding sex and violence. Obviously you decided to maintain that, but did an “inner censor” ever kick in as you were working with the manuscript?

No censor, inner or outer.  This is pure and unadulterated Spillane, and Collins for that matter. I don’t share Mickey’s conservative politics, but the main character obviously does, and like any good actor, I stay in character. I grew up on great pulp. It’s in my bloodstream.

Page 159 really took me back to the days when I would sneak “adult” novels off my parents’ bookshelf. Hot stuff, late 60s style; was that something you had to add to or was that pretty much Spillane’s?

Some of the sex stuff is by Mickey, but the really steamy one, the shower scene, is mine, very much working in his style of that period.  If you check out my Nathan Heller novels, like the current Bye Bye, Baby, you will find the influence of my Spillane schooling. There’s no formula, but I make sure in most of my own novels–the Nate Heller and Quarry ones particularly–that there are shocking scenes of sex and violence. You can’t make spaghetti without marinara sauce. Well, I guess you can use alfredo sauce, if you’re dull.

The Nate Heller novels, incidentally, are all back in print from AmazonEncore in lovely trade paperbacks.  They released the first book, True Detective, which won the Best Novel “Shamus” Award from the Private Eye Writers of America in 1984, last week. It hit #1 on the Kindle bestseller list, I’m pleased to say.  And Bye Bye, Baby is the first Heller in almost a decade, out from Forge and also doing nicely.

Is there a particular anecdote that captures your relationship with Spillane?

We were friends. It was warm relationship, sort of a father-and-son relationship, but a mix where he treated me as an equal.  He didn’t have any other writers in his life, really, during his last several decades. In the 50s, he used to hang around with a group of guys, some of them from the comic book field, who were also writers. But I was the only guy, in those last decades, he could talk shop with. Talk storytelling.

There are so many great stories, some having to do with my son Nate–Mickey was his godfather, and they were just two big kids together, fun to see Nate about eight and Mickey in his seventies just fooling around together, very grandfather and grandkid.

But I like this story. I was visiting Mickey around 1982, coming down from my home in Iowa (where I still live), and he was driving around in his “Carolina Cadillac,” as he called it, a pick-up truck. We were outside a Hardee’s, having just put away some biscuits and gravy, and Mickey turned to me and said, “What’s this I’m reading where you’re saying you want to be your generation’s Mickey Spillane?”  And I said, “Well, Mickey, I just mean, I would like to be the mystery reader of my generation who has your kind of impact and success.”  This he barely seemed to hear, before saying, “You can’t be your generation’s Mickey Spillane.  I’m your generation’s Mickey Spillane.”

I like your Mommy films, and it looks as if Hollywood is coming to call you again with an adaptation of Black Hats. Have you tried to get a Spillane film off the ground?

Thanks for the kind words about my indie films. Did you know that a new cut of my 1999 documentary, Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane, is a special feature on the recent Criterion Collection DVD and Blu-ray of Kiss Me Deadly? Very proud of that. Mickey hated the film version of Kiss Me Deadly for years until I finally convinced him of its worth. He came to think Ralph Meeker was the best screen Mike Hammer, next to himself, of course. (Spillane, who’s in the Mommy films, was that rare author to play his own fictional creation, in the 1963 film The Girl Hunters–RC.)

There’s been a lot of Hollywood activity on Hammer, and some interest in other Spillane properties, too. After about a year where a Hammer TV show seemed about to happen, the emphasis has shifted to a film, which I think is exciting.  There’s a possibility one of the Spillane/Collins will be the basis for a film.

I’ve also had the fun of working with Stacy Keach on two audio projects based on Spillane material, The New Adventures of Mike Hammer: The Little Death, which won an Audie for Best Original Work, and this year’s The New Adventures of Mike Hammer: Encore for Murder. These are two-and-a-half hour, full-cast “movies for the mind.”

Speaking of movies, when you write a tie-in book, how closely does it adhere the finished film? (I imagine that the manuscript may have to be turned in before the movie is fully edited.)

When I base a novel on a screenplay, I am slavishly faithful to the structure, to the order of events and the characterization and every element of storytelling. But I do my best to craft a novel that seems to be the novel the film was based on, doing back story and expanding dialogue and adding scenes. Occasionally a studio hamstrings me, but usually I’m given my head. Saving Private Ryan and American Gangster, for example, are strong novels despite their filmscript roots. And I’ve occasionally turned a not-so-wonderful screenplay, like Daylight or I Love Trouble, into a really decent novel. I get some flack for doing work like this, but I’m a blue-collar writer, just keeping the food on the table and the lights on in the house. I’ve had some big successes, notably Road to Perdition, but I am a fulltime freelancer writer making my way in the world.  Like my hitman Quarry, I’m for hire.

Is there more Spillane in your future? (And, if so, please retain Robert McGinnis for the cover art; great job.)

All six of the substantial Hammer manuscripts will be completed.  The first three were done at Harcourt for Otto Penzler, the next are being done at Titan. I have several other non-Hammer novels that may wind up at Hard Case, and I’m also fashioning short stories out of the less substantial fragments. A Hammer story that appeared in the Strand magazine, “A Long Time Dead,” has been nominated for the Shamus and the Thriller awards and selected for a best of the year anthology. I hope to do enough short stories for a Hammer collection.

Funny thing about McGinnis.  Initially Hard Case just wanted to reprint my ‘70s stuff, starting with Two for the Money, which collects the first two novels in my Nolan series. But Charles started asking for a new novel, specifically a Quarry. Quarry was the first hitman to star in a book series, and I’d written about him in the mid-‘70s, four novels that achieved a sort of cult status.  So I kiddingly said to Charles, “Get me Robert McGinnis for the cover, and I’ll do it.”  Within days Charles called and said Bob McGinnis had signed on, and so The Last Quarry was written.

Incidentally, that novel was in fact intended to be the last Quarry novel, but it unexpectedly did so well with readers and reviewers that I came back with a prequel called The First Quarry. And I’ve done Quarry in the Middle and now  Quarry’s Ex. The 2008 Quarry movie The Last Lullaby starring Tom Sizemore, which I co-wrote, is just out on DVD now. It’s a good little indie noir that got a lot of film festival love.

 “Death can be so goddamned undignified. The saving grace is, when you’re dead, you don’t really give much of a shit.” Your philosophy or Spillane’s?

Not to be coy, but the way I work–which is to expand and extend Spillane, revise and polish and interweave my own stuff, as opposed to just plopping down his section and picking up where he left off–makes it difficult for me to remember who wrote what. I think that’s my line, however, though it’s certainly consistent with Mickey’s world view.

What do you do when a dream is denied? Sometimes, all you can do is pretend the dream is over. Such was the case with ’90s alterna-vet Jeremy Toback, who walked away from music nearly a decade ago after finding himself at loose ends following the end of his stint in Brad and the frustration of a solo career.

But the music found a way to persevere. Jeremy’s creative spark first resurfaced with Renee & Jeremy, the kindie duo that finds him harmonizing with Renee Stahl, and although the target audience was decidedly different, the music carried essentially the same message of hope and wonder that he’d always tried to impart. So it wasn’t all that surprising when he started branching back out into the ‘grown-up’ world again — first via the electronic-laced ONS project, and now with Chop Love Carry Fire.

The band grew out of the long friendship between Toback and drummer Butch Norton, who met while they were part of Lollapallooza’s 1997 lineup — Norton as a member of the Eels, and Toback near the end of his tenure with Brad. It was a reunion, in a way, but it was really something new, and that tension between the familiar and the unexplored, between chaos and grace, between the freedom of an embrace and the energy of a fist — well, it all came roiling out in their debut six-song EP.

You guys actually put out a CD. And a video! You’re crazy! You’re madmen!

Butch: That’s right, you’re not supposed to do that nowadays, are you? Well, we’re old school.

Jeremy: I think we’ll do more of both.

What led you to take the old school approach, as you say? Was it optimism, or stubbornness, or something else?

Jeremy: I think, quite frankly, that in terms of CDs, the irony is that…you know, Chop Love Carry Fire is still new, and we know that people get inundated with links to stream or download stuff, and we figure that if they’re confronted with a physical manifestation of the music, they’ll at least have to put it in the stack on their desk, as opposed to just a stack of emails. There are still ways in which CDs make more of an impact.

Butch: And it impresses my mother. [Laughter] I’m still in the basics of my childhood, even though I’m way past childhood.

The sound of the EP is also a throwback, to an era of rock records that weren’t compressed until they hurt your ears.

Butch: We come from a place of…you know, it’s interesting, the whole “record” concept you brought up. I grew up in that, Jeremy did, our manager did — everybody we’re associated with grew up in that world, including the person who mixed the recordings, Eric Liljestrand. That’s what has been produced from us — that sound, that feeling, that space. It evokes those times, and I don’t know if it was conscious, but obviously, it’s a part of our DNA. I feel like it seems to be reverberating with people.

Jeremy: When we made the EP, the band was, in terms of playing together, super young. The idea was “we’ve done some shows, we have some songs, let’s document this.” We wanted to capture the energy. It wasn’t about diving really deep into the sonics.

Jeremy, I asked you before if you were a Chris Whitley fan, because these songs remind me a lot of his Din of Ecstasy album.

Jeremy: Yes. Chris is one of those guys…he started making records before I started making music, but when I heard his songs, I felt like he was a guy who wrote songs the way I did. We ended up having collaborations with similar people, but I never met him. I just always really admired everything about him. He was a great lyricist, in particular. In terms of this record, it certainly wasn’t conscious, but that doesn’t surprise me.

There’s a definite sense of hope to these songs, which is one of your lyrical trademarks, but it’s buried in this absorbing squall.

Jeremy: In some ways, I think that hopefulness is more highlighted by what we’re doing live right now. The record is somewhat darker. That’s okay, though. [Laughs] To me, that’s the stuff that makes our unison uplifting or transformative, which is something I’m always interested in — the shadow, the darkness, the underbelly. It has to have its place. You can’t have a chorus lift without something low and gurgling there.

I want to talk a little about how, in your experience, an artist makes a living in this music industry. The rules have changed, to a certain extent, and I think this conversation is always educational for creative people.

Butch: Well, again, it comes back to my mom. [Laughter] I call her, and I say “Mom, I’m still playing drums,” and she says “What happened to you?” And I say “I can’t give this up.”

I love what I do. And in the loving what I do, I do a million things. Which I’ve always done — I started taking that approach in junior high school, playing in jazz band, concert band, playing in the garage. This is an extension of that — now I just have to tie in the monetary aspect. I went to art school, but things didn’t really start happening for me until the ’90s, when I was already married. You get sessions, and hopefully a great gig springboards from that, which is what happened to me when I started playing with the Eels.

Other sessions spring from that, and then you have touring, teaching…all those have to be part of it if you want to make a go of it, unless you’re part of the .0001 percent that makes millions of dollars. In reality, the rest of us — fortunately, I say — are working people, loving what we do.

Jeremy: Butch is fortunate to have a real marketable skill.

Butch: Unlike Jeremy.

Jeremy: Exactly. He’s a drummer, and he’s a great drummer, and you need those. You also need to pay for them. My journey’s slightly different — part of the reason I tried to quit music eight years ago was that the major label advance money was gone, and I didn’t really see my own skill set serving me that way. I was going to have to be on the road selling CDs out of a suitcase, which is fine, but I had a kid and I couldn’t put it together. I went and worked other jobs for awhile, until I realized how fun that was. [Laughter]

So I live this sort of hybrid existence now, doing lots of things too. Which includes a couple of music projects — this one is nearest and dearest to my heart, but as you know, I also have Renee & Jeremy, which is its own sort of boutique business, and I also do consulting, writing, and editing work outside of music. That’s how I do it. It isn’t like “Hey, let’s call Jeremy Toback to write some abstract lyrics for the new Katy Perry single.”

Jeremy, you and I started dealing with each other because of Renee & Jeremy, and I think those are two interesting worlds to occupy at the same time. Unlike a lot of artists who make family music and ‘grown-up’ music at the same time, your stuff is discrete — it isn’t like you’re, say, They Might Be Giants, where the two sides aren’t all that dissimilar. I wonder what sort of response you’ve seen from your fans on either side of that spectrum.

Jeremy: I don’t know that they know. [Laughs] This is very different from Renee & Jeremy. It isn’t like I’m hiding it, but this is very much a growing thing, and I really don’t know what people think. There’s been no attempt to build a bridge between them aesthetically. Both projects will pursue what’s right artistically, and I love them both. Part of the reason Chop Love Carry Fire even exists is that Butch came to see a Renee & Jeremy show, and the conversation we had afterwards made me think of him when Chop Love was sort of coalescing in my mind.

Butch: In other words, don’t tell this shit to anybody, because it’ll blow our whole image. [Laughter] We understand how this works. You can’t mention that last night I was playing with ten percussionists and a scarf on my head. People can’t comprehend that stuff. It doesn’t equate with rock ‘n’ roll, man.

Do you feel like this project reconnected you with something you’d been missing?

Butch: I say this to everybody: this hearkens back to my high school days. What Jeremy and [guitarist] Sean [Woolstenhulme, who recently joined] are doing as this trio, the energy, the spark — it feels the same. I’ve worked with some amazing artists, but this…there’s a fire, there’s a burn, that I haven’t felt since that time. I’m pretty sure that’s what this is supposed to be all about.

Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah!

“Last night I dreamt I was an orphan
Like my father before me”

So begins “Orphan,” the first taste of MyNameIsJohnMichael‘s upcoming album — and after those opening lines draw you in, the song’s loping groove does the rest, buffeting the listener on jazzy keys, syncopated percussion, bursts of stinging guitar, and roiling New Orleans horns. A tale of leaving to return, of turning away to see, it travels from its haunting refrain to a triumphant breakdown that rises over a surging Hammond organ, then leads into a joyous fadeout that piles handclaps and gang vocals on top.

It’s an intoxicating blend, and once I had my first listen — for free, courtesy of the band’s website — I couldn’t stop repeating it. I had to hear more, and I had to find out where all this glorious noise came from. The logical next step was to arrange for a chat with John Michael Rouchell, the JohnMichael in MyNameIsJohnMichael, so we could talk about where the band has been — including its beginning as the somewhat accidental outgrowth of a yearlong experiment in which Rouchell wrote and recorded a song a week — and where it’s going with the new album.

The new record won’t come out until next year, but you can hear “Orphan” and another track, “Elders,” at the band’s site now, and check out their recent Live from Paste set here. I haven’t been able to stop listening to this record for weeks. I think you’ll love it too.

I have to tell you — my five-year-old daughter had a very stern reaction to your band name. She wants you to know that MyNameIsJohnMichael should not be one word.

Well… [laughs] It helps with Google searches.

Was that the reasoning behind it?

Well, I was getting ready to start my 52-song project, and we had to find a website. At the time, JohnMichael.com was taken by everyone’s favorite country singer, John Michael Montgomery. The same day I was spending all this time trying to come up with a URL for the project, I met somebody, and often when I’m introduced to someone, I’ll say “I’m John Michael, nice to meet you,” and they’ll say something like “Oh, hi, John.” And I’ll say “No, no, no — my name is John Michael.” ‘Cause my father is John, and we’re all trying not to be our fathers in some way, you know?

Anyway, it happens all the time. It’s this phrase I’ve said so many times, and I thought it would make a cool site name. We didn’t put much thought into it — it was quick. And then when the band came together, the site was already there, and it wasn’t like I could call the band, I don’t know, the Roosevelts or whatever, and send people to a site with a completely different name. I was really more concerned with the project — the demand of writing and recording a song a week. It was initially just a bedroom project. It was a way of…I didn’t know if I was a songwriter yet.

You decided you were going to write and record a song every week for a year, and you didn’t know if you were a songwriter?

No, I didn’t. Up until then, I was always the guitar player in a band. I mean, I’d written songs, but to me, a songwriter was someone who was constantly writing. Just because you’ve written a song doesn’t necessarily make you a songwriter, you know? There’s a difference between a guy who does something and someone who hones a craft. It’s a craft.

It’s definitely a craft, and I think that 52-song project is illustrative of it in a way you don’t often see anymore. What you did was almost like digital busking — you took your songs and immediately put them out in the world, where they had to fend for themselves. It’s a really effective way of discovering your strengths as a writer and performer.

[Laughs] Exactly. I started thinking about this around the time Radiohead did In Rainbows, and I was in music business studies at Loyola, so everyone around me was freaking out. “What’s going to happen?” It was a really cool time, and digital busking is exactly what it was. You’ve got the music out there as people are passing by, and if they like it, they can toss some money in your hat.

And at that speed, the stakes are low enough that if you don’t get the response you’re looking for, it doesn’t kill you.

Right — and because it was a song a week, the songs were quite random. I could experiment. If one week I’m listening to Lou Reed, I can try something along those lines — try and find my voice that way, and get that feedback. And ultimately, when it came time to cut those songs down to an album, we let people vote on which ones they thought were the best. Fortunately, it turned out that most of their favorites were our favorites, too. And to get back to that earlier point about honing the craft, the 52nd song in the bunch was one of the most popular tracks, and it’s one we still play live all the time today.

Let’s talk about how the whole process changed your approach as a songwriter.

Well, during the project, there was a major focus on quantity, obviously. The whole thing was kind of like basketball practice — a lot of free-throw drills to develop that skill so it can be called upon when it’s needed. It was a healthy experience, because it taught me that I can sit down to write a song, and that I don’t necessarily have to release it. I scrapped an entire album last year.

Now, I want to focus on quality. How do I make things more personal and more special, instead of just writing a song for the sake of writing a song?

It seems like it would be useful not only from the standpoint of helping you develop the skill of writing on a deadline, but also helping learn the art of getting out of your own way as a writer. That’s a problem for almost everyone I know. It’s hard to find the balance between striving to do your best work and simply being overly precious about your art.

Absolutely. I mean, I can’t believe every single song Bob Dylan wrote during his peak period was as amazing as the ones we heard. If they were, then we should all hang it up and start selling insurance. I’ve got to believe there’s a ton of stuff where he was just like, “Eh.”

There’s a great, possibly apocryphal story about Billy Joel meeting Stevie Wonder for the first time, and Stevie giving him his famous greeting, “Hi, I’m Stevie Wonder. I write a song a day.” And obviously, Billy Joel is at the other end of that spectrum — writing is a much more belabored process for him. You went from putting out 52 songs in 52 weeks to recording and tossing away an entire record, so it seems like you’re still struggling to strike that balance between when to let go and when to really apply yourself to the craft.

Right, and I think that’s what being an artist is all about. You know, you watch the documentary about Springsteen making Darkness on the Edge of Town, and you see he had all these songs, and he had to whittle them down to 10. He had all those great sounding boards, but ultimately, he was the guy. And that’s what it is — you create, create, create, and then you peel away everything that doesn’t matter. And then you repeat the process. When people tell me I’m an artist, I have to disagree — I’m more like a guy who makes jeans, you know? It’s more of a craft than an art, if that makes any sense.

It does, and I think it’s interesting that your music is so rooted in the traditional sounds of New Orleans, because I think, more than most music, it’s a pure expression of the tension between craft and release.

Yeah, I think you’re right. Aside from Dr. John and a couple of other names, like Allen Toussaint, New Orleans has never really been known as a “storytelling songwriter” sort of town. People come to hear the Funky Meters and artists like that — to hear the horns and the revelry. They aren’t necessarily hearing any narrative in the songs. After I scrapped that album last summer, I had to get out of town for awhile — I asked my girlfriend to watch my dog and I just hit the road. And the only DVD I had with me was The Last Picture Show. I watched it four, five, six times on the trip.

I don’t know a thing about West Texas, but that movie still felt so alive to me — it’s a really identifiable coming-of-age story. And it made me want to record a coming-of-age story for New Orleans, and set it to this musical landscape. That was the idea. Hopefully we achieved it.

So the new record is sort of a New Orleans concept album.

I guess. That phrase, “concept album”…[Laughter] It freaks me out. This isn’t that. But there are a lot of great stories here, and nobody is telling them. After Katrina, a lot of people wrote songs about that, and to me, it felt kind of like salt in the wound. But there are a lot of things about the town — a lot of times I feel like we’re all partying on the outside, but on the inside, there’s a sadness and a hurt. A kind of questioning — “Why am I still here? Am I stuck, or am I choosing to be here? What is the meaning in all these things?” Everyone has a great pride in this city, but there’s also confusion, to a certain degree. And I thought that was an album. I thought I could write a record around that.

I mentioned Allen Toussaint earlier, and that’s one of the greatest things about his music, is the way he’d tell stories about life here that anyone who’s from here could relate to. “Working in the Coalmine”? “Mother-in-Law”? People here understand that. And that’s the same tradition I was reaching for. There’s a song on the new album called “No Work” where we took a sort of Neville Brothers, Caribbean thing, and mixed it with kind of a Clash vibe, and it’s all about not being able to get a job. But then there are also sentimental tracks. I don’t know, man, I’m really proud of it. I think this is some of my best writing.

Let’s talk about your decision to start promoting the new album by releasing a pair of tracks, “Orphan” and “Elders,” for free.

Yeah, well, it’s been kind of a long time since we released anything. And there’s a concept down here called lagniappe, and it’s akin to going to a restaurant and getting an amuse bouche — you know, a little bite before the meal. It’s basically the idea of giving away the extra. You know, you order a sandwich, and it comes with this great roll you cut down the middle, and in go the fried shrimp, and the lettuce, and everything else, and at the end there’s all this extra fried stuff. Well, just take it — that’s lagniappe. It’s the idea that we’ll give you something for coming to us. You’ll get the bite, and you’ll want the meal.

It was also somewhat inspired by being out on the road this year, and watching our crowds grow, and hearing them sing along. Getting those songs out there was a way of validating the record, and also of giving people a way of bringing the music to their friends — of giving them the ability to say, “Have you heard this?” instead of just touring in a bubble.

You mentioned studying the music business in school, and you’ve obviously given a lot of thought to the ways in which emerging technologies can help you promote your music. This is the way forward for a lot of artists, but it also poses the question of how you strike a balance between being creative and being an entrepreneur.

Whoo, yeah. That’s even more difficult than the writing balance. When I was writing for the new album, we kind of let some business things slip, because that had to be my focus. I don’t think I could have made this album if I hadn’t been able to turn my attention completely toward the music. Now we’re building a team for the new record, and I have this routine where I wake up at 7 and I write, because I figure no one on the business end is going to be awake at that hour. [Laughs] At this point, if my life can be theoretically divided into leisure, business, and writing…I’m kind of cutting out the leisure part. I’m kind of a hermit.

It’s tough, man. We’re working on two videos right now, so we have to meet with the director. There’s PR stuff. And on and on. It’ll eat you alive. Luckily, a lot of people have responded to the music and helped us out. What I’ve learned is that it’s important to make friends first before you start hitting people super-heavy on the PR side. Let people figure out their emotional stake in your music before you start asking them to put energy into it. We need stakeholders, as my professor and dear friend George Howard says.

I think a lot of times, artists don’t create enough of a stakeholder base before they get out there and start trying to make it in the world. That’s where a lot of people fail — they don’t have enough people they can call for help, or for advice. Those are the people that are really going to matter down the line.

Let’s talk a little about how the new album came together in the studio.

The band now is basically a touring band, and when we came together to make the record, it was basically my drummer, Neilson Bernard, my bass player, Joe Bourgeois, and me. We didn’t flesh out the band we had — I knew Raymond Richards was going to produce, and he’s done some stuff I really love. He played some amazing pedal steel for Mojave 3 — if you haven’t heard their song “Running With Your Eyes Closed,” you really need to. It’s just fuckin’ pop gold.

So we did the basic tracking and then we started calling some friends. Like Brian Coogan and Phil Breen, who are both incredible keyboard players — Coogan played on four songs and then Phil played on the rest, and ended up joining the touring band. On the horns, we were lucky enough to get guys like Craig Klein, who’s played trombone for Harry Connick, Jr. and is in a band called Bonerama — he’s a genius. And Gregory Davis from the Dirty Dozen Brass Band came in and played trumpet. Just a ton of people, like Theresa Andersson, who does this looping stuff that’s just mind-blowing. Just insane. You need to look her up on YouTube and hear it. We had a whole cast of characters.

I’d love to hear what you could do with the Dirty Dozen.

Those guys are sweethearts, and we do shows with them quite a bit. They’re statesmen, and it’s been a privilege to be able to play with them. Gregory — or “Blodie,” as he’s normally called — came into the studio the night before we were supposed to record and said, “Let me hear what you’re doin’.” You know, in his really refined Southern gentleman’s voice. So we played him some songs, and he said, “So it’s kind of like Elvis Costello and Bob Dylan in New Orleans. I can dig it. Let’s do it!”

That’s high praise!

I know — those are my two heroes. I’ll take it.

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