MAXIM LANGSTAFF

Written from Max’s Interview with Joni Mitchell

ON LEARNING TO PLAY MUSIC

When I was a child we didn’t have a lot of records, but my father was a trumpet teacher, and he played in small local swing bands. My mother loved nocturnes, so she had “Clair de Lune” and “Moonlight Sonata* and every romantic piano piece.

Then there was the radio, which was pretty mixed broadcasting at that time. There was a lot of country and western music. I didn’t really like it, and I used to make fun of it.

But I loved Hank Williams and I knew all of his lyrics. Then in the fifties, rock and roll came along.

From then on, it was all about the jukeboxes in town. I became a lindy hop-or a jive or bop-dancer. And I went wherever there were sock hops or dances. They were all playing mainly Motown, the Platters, some Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, and that kind of stuff.

I taught myself to play guitar from a Pete Seeger record, but basically, the only thing on the record that interested me was the first track, which was how to tune the guitar, and the last track, which was about finger picking. I tried to do it but I couldn’t get my thumb to alternate, so I ended up with kind of a drone pattern coming off my thumb which is distinctive of my playing style.

One day there was a music festival at Big Sur, and there was a girl there who built dulcimers. She gave one to me and I put it across my knee. The moment it went across my knee, as far as I was concerned, it was a bongo drum. The dulcimer is supposed to be plucked with a feather, and there’s a certain way to play it. But I began to beat on it, and they kind of stopped me and said, no, that’s not the way to do it, and then they kind of let me go. Well, that way of using the dulcimer influenced the way I play guitar; I used a slapping style, which I had seen other people do. So my way of playing came from the transition of going from dulcimer back to guitar.

ON WRITING SONGS

The first piece of music I wrote was called “Robin Walk.” I wrote it out in notes, and my teacher hit me with a ruler for it and told me it was wrong to make up songs when I had the masters at my fingertips.

The idea of being hit with a ruler at a moment of creativity-it killed my love of music for ten years until I was eighteen, when I took up the guitar.

When I started writing songs seriously, there were things about old standard songs that I wanted to keep. I wanted to keep a melodic sense, which was disappearing in my generation. I had a hard time getting some of the chords I heard in my head out of normal tuning, so I invented my own tun-ing, so that I could get a more sophisticated or modern harmony out of the guitar and avoid the clichés that were being cycled and recycled that didn’t seem to bother anybody but me. At the time, women weren’t considered to be real members in pop bands.

The women were really kind of decorative.

They’d treat them like party favors, in a way, and the song lyrics were all written by men for women to sing, so they were sort of stand-by-your-man songs. They were kind of doormat songs. But a mentality was emerging in my generation of women; there was this vague sense of change.

I mean, this is a man’s world. So the idea was to bring some depth and some insight into the songs and to avoid stereotyping women in the same way that blacks object to stereotyping.

ON PRODUCERS

I’m a painter first. So to me, a producer is completely unnecessary. Mozart didn’t have a producer. Beethoven didn’t have a producer. When I began to record, most of the men were very resistant to taking instruction from a woman. And a producer is often a sycophant, a babysitter. If you know how you want to make your house, you don’t need an interior decorator. Frankly, all I need is a good technician whose company I enjoy. That camaraderie is important, since we’re going to spend a lot of time together.

So they have to have some depth because I’m always philosophical in the studio. They have to be able to enjoy that and not be annoyed by it. Some love it and some don’t. So you have to find the right chemistry. It has to be simpatico, somebody that finds that a woman who’s always theorizing and philosophizing is not a waste of time. When I got my first record deal I requested that I would not have to work with a producer for personal reasons so that I could continue my experimentation and allow my work to unfold organically.

ON BEING LABELED A FOLK SINGER

I look like a folk singer because I’m alone with an acoustic instrument that’s been associated with folk music. But if you listen to the music, you know it’s not like any folk song you ever heard. Nor am I singing folk music, which is an antique. It’s keeping a tradition going. I’m making original, new music with original, new harmonic movement, as fresh and as innovative as a young

Franz Schubert. My songs contain longer musical forms, they’ve got bridges, and the harmony is not based on the simple three-chord changes that typify folk music.

So I’ve always resented being called a folk musician. It was a shallow observation and it was also delivered with prejudice as something that is out of style. I like folk music, but the moment I began to write my songs, I knew that folk music was an inappropriate label for them.

I’m an outsider. I don’t belong to anything. There’s no pill that I can swallow whole. The Eagles, Jackson Browne-they have a harmonic kindredness and they belong to a school. I am not of that school.

My thing is, I’m an individual as defined by Nietzsche: someone who can’t follow and doesn’t want to lead. I’m a fine artist working in a pop arena. I don’t want to start a school and I don’t want to belong to a school. What I want is to improve culture.

Maxim Langstaff

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