One More Saturday Night: An Interview with Damo Suzuki

You have expressed in past interviews that you prefer playing live rather than recording in a studio. This fits with your vision of music as a synergy between audience and band. Also, your lyrics and vocals emphasize improvisation and repetition.

It’s not so much that I prefer one or the other–it is that the concert experience is a platform for communication. Especially now with the coronavirus crisis (and even before the coronavirus crisis) our minds are always being stressed with so much information and the mainstream media and politics – it’s all about attack and fake communication and false information. Music can calm everyone down. Nature can calm everyone down.

I do agree that nature is important for the psyche, for our consciousness.

Human beings need not just on a physical level, not just Vitamin C (laughs), but on a psychological level, they need to be outside so they can get Vitamin D.

Oh yeah, sunshine, sure. Of course. (laughs)
I wanted to ask, what you just mentioned, Damo, is interesting to me. You said that it’s not necessarily that you have a preference between playing live and recording in a studio, but you said that it has to be a “natural experience”. I was wondering if you could expand on that?

Well, what I mean by “natural”, is, for example, this interview between you and I happening right now. Many people already know the answers to their questions so when they speak to others, it is not natural communication. People need to have an open mind. Also, communication is about so much more than the words that are spoken.

I see what you’re saying. How it’s almost a contradiction. We have to use words to communicate, but these words do not always fully express our meanings. The words can trap us.

Yes. This is why an email interview or a phone interview is not the same as meeting face-to-face as we are right now. When speaking to someone over the phone, they could express one thing in words, but if you could see their face, they might be feeling something very different.

(Damo grimaces his face like someone who just bit into a sour lime. He and I both laugh.)

I need to see your face. We need to see each other’s faces. This is important for an interview and it’s also what makes music so special for me. When I am playing for an audience, I can see their faces. I can see what they’re feeling. The emotions between the band and the audience are what makes music powerful.

You sing in a mix of different languages and abstract sounds that you call the “language of the stone age”- how does this reflect your worldview and spirituality?

My worldview is simplicity. The music I play with different people in different countries does not make me any money. That does not matter. It is more important to me to have freedom, to not have a manager who tells me what to do. An audience member might say to me after the show that they did not understand my singing, but they connected with my performance. They were moved by my performance. Well, that’s what matters the most. That’s what’s most important. Not ideas you might have in your head about the music, but the emotions, how the music makes you feel. If you cannot open your mind, then you will not share in this special experience. There was a Guinness commercial that once said something like this in its advertisement “You won’t know if you like it until you try it.” As I said before, many people already have the answers, already have their mind made up about life, about music. I do not already have my mind made up about being somewhere specific. My goal is to get to nowhere.

Oh, nowhere like in the philosophy of Zen?

No, not exactly. Because I am not talking philosophically. I am saying simply “nowhere”.
Where are you from?

I’m originally from St. Louis, Missouri, but I currently live in New Mexico. You live in Cologne, Germany, correct? Why have you decided to stay in Cologne, Germany after all these years? What is it about Cologne, Germany that appeals to you?

Cologne, Germany is in the heart of Europe. So, I am close to everywhere. This makes it easier for me to stay in touch with my children and with my grandchildren. Cologne is also a cooler climate. I connect with cooler climates. I do not do well with heat. Although Africa is an amazing place, I spent a long time exploring Africa and exploring one of the hottest places on our planet – the Sahara desert. Where I live, though, just like where I play music, can be anywhere, everywhere. Each place I play, I play the music of the musicians in that place. If I play in America, I play American music. If I play in Mexico, I play Mexican music. Who I am is beyond these boundaries that countries enact.

I think that’s a good philosophy. I like to think of myself the same way, as a human being, rather than belonging to a particular nation.
Vinyl Writers is a community dedicated to discussing records that change our lives. What records have been most important in your life?

There’s too much music for me to name and remember.

What about films? What films, old and new, have been most inspiring to you?

I love films. I have long lists of my favorite movies on my website. Film, just like music, is like building a car, it’s a collaboration, for example, one of the most important parts in a film is the camera, one of the most important persons in a film, for me, is the cinematographer. I especially like Oswald Morris.

I don’t recognize his name.

He worked with John Huston.

Ah, I know the director John Huston.

Oswald Morris’s cinematography was quite memorable for me on a desert film, The Hill.
Sven Nyvkvist’s cinematography, too, in his films with Ingmar Bergman.

{Side Note: Visit Damo Suzuki’s website to see his favorite movies. Two of Damo’s favorite movies are also in my top 5 favorite films of all time – Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala (I mentioned to him that he reminds me of Dersu) and Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (we both praised Robby Muller’s cinematography of the desert landscapes of the southwestern states and Ry Cooder’s Blind Willie Johnson blues-inspired slide guitar score in our conversation.)

There’s also a list of his favorite books, restaurants, shops, and a list of the many sound carriers around the world whom he has played with (including the Australian psychedelic rock band Pond, the British guitarist Nick McCabe and the British band Spiritualized, and the Swedish psychedelic rock band Goat.)}
https://www.damosuzuki.com/links/

You wrote in your song “Paperhouse”, “you can make everything what you want with your head.” Does this philosophy still resonate with you today?

It simply means being authentic in your communication, being open to new experiences.

There is an explosion at the end of “Mushroom”. Different listeners have interpreted your line “When I saw mushroom head, I was born and I was dead” as either a reference to the atomic bomb or the psychotropic plant or both. Were you thinking about the atrocious war crimes committed by the United States against Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

I’m 70 years old so it’s often challenging and difficult for me to remember experiences from that time in my life when I was recording songs with the band Can. Many of my lyrics were improvised and spontaneous. Maybe it was simply about me eating food, eating mashed potatoes, eating mushrooms. That “explosion” sound is simply Jaki Liebezeit’s drums distorted and slowed down. Listeners bring their own stories into the songs that they hear. My perspective now, 50 years later, is completely different than the perspective from the state of mind I had during that time.

At this point in the interview, Damo asked if he could take a break to have some whiskey. He brought out a bottle of Scotch and introduced me to his girlfriend Elke. Elke filled up glasses of champagne and they toasted me. Damo then talked about one of the most interesting culinary experiences he had when he tasted the strange textures of insects at a restaurant in Mexico. He mentioned that it was similar to mezcal worms.

We all laughed when I mentioned my last name is Lager.

“Lager beer,” Damo remarked.

“I didn’t expect this to go from an interview to a party,” I laughed.

“We’re keeping our required coronavirus distance,” Damo said, with a smile.

“Damo, you’ve been so generous with your time. This was fun. Thank You for hanging out.”

Interview by Mark Lager ( April 2020)

(Read Damo Suzuki’s Three Wishes here)