Interview with August Kleinzahler

We contacted August Kleinzahler because we wanted to talk about his poetry. But one can talk only so much about the writing of verse. And August Kleinzahler, in granting dozens of interviews to dozens of journals, has done his fair share of talking.  So, on his suggestion, we detoured into the world of music, a world Kleinzahler inhabits in his new book of essays, Music I-LXXIV. The book takes readers on 74 brief and acid-wise journeys, starting at the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas and ending with an examination of Bach’s Suites for Solo Cello. Kleinzahler’s appetite is large. His knowledge is vast and, at times for the reader, humbling (we had to use Google occasionally, which probably fills Kleinzahler with a secret, devilish glee). Eventually we overcame our shame, and now rightly admit that Music I-LXXIV is fascinating and enjoyable — a polished-intellectual-sensual-revelatory-wisecracking read. And one that any person with an interest in sound should take up. — Kevin Murphy

Dark Sky Magazine: How long have you been writing about music, where’d you get your start?

August Kleinzahler: I received a phone call in the autumn of, I think ’97, out of the blue, asking if I wanted to write a weekly music column for the San Diego Reader. The individual who made the invitation, Judith Moore, an editor at the Reader who lived in Berkeley, had read a piece I’d written in The Threepenny Review about selling my CD collection. I was of at least two minds about the offer, even though I was unemployed, then I went down the block to the local independent bookstore and leafed through the current Rolling Stone and Spin and determined that if I could breathe and micturate at the same time I could do better than that. I wrote, and made my living, writing that column for three and a half years.

DSM: What’s been the response to Music I-LXXIV thus far?

AK: The response has been extraordinary, and quite surprising. Poets seem to like the book a great deal. Go figure.

DSM: You’re primarily known as a poet. But with Cutty, One Rock and now Music under your belt you’re also being recognized for your essay writing. Is this a change in direction, in terms of the writing you want to produce?

AK: Actually, though I’d written prose before, the music gig helped me develop my chops, as it were — a thousand word column a week. It’ll do that. Then the London Review of Books gave me some prose assignments. Really, it’s a skill, so far as I’ve developed it, that came with middle-age. It’s not so much fun, or so hot, as poetry, but it’s writing, and a challenge, sometimes a pleasure.

DSM: Most music enthusiasts cite a particular genre, band or performer that influenced their early tastes. What was yours?

AK: My tastes are all over the place, but my longest established and best-informed tastes involve jazz and the blues, and I’m also very keen on mid-20th century art or serious or classical music. But I love World and Country, almost everything except HipHop, Reggae and contemporary everything.

DSM: Much of this book is about the people that helped shape the modern American musical landscape. Which person/period stands out to you as the most important?

AK: 1957 is a great year for American culture and American music, especially jazz, but also “serious” music, blues, country, painting, whatnot. Why that window of time? That’s a tome, babe, a tome.

DSM: I’m a jazz and blues guy too. So I especially enjoyed reading about Chess Records, Sonny Rollins, Junior Walker, Keeley Smith, etc. Does your interest in a musician ever precede your appreciation of his or her work?

AK: I think as an adolescent one is interested in “personalities” and biographies and attitudes more than the art, or it’s a way of getting into the art. One’s beginning to define oneself. I’m a tragic instance of severe “arrested development,” but I haven’t, biologically-speaking, been an adolescent for 40 years.

DSM: I had a chance to see Keeley Smith when I was in college. I was working at Scullers Jazz Club in Boston. The club has a nice view of the Charles River. During her performance, Keeley kept mentioning the river, how dark it was. It’s funny, but I remember that even more than the songs she sang. How does music find its way into those weird places in our brains?

AK: Rhythm is big: breathing, walking, fucking, etc. A duple rhythm, truth be told, and a secret of how to write poetry, for those who might blunder in that direction. But when the voice gets involved — I’m leaving harmony, melody, et al out of there for no special reason — getting in that groove and talking about love, lost love, springtime, whatnot, it seems to be MOO-ving to us hu-monkies.

A Young John Lee Hooker

DSM: Aside from your classic John Lee Hooker encounter, which you describe in the book, any other memorable run-ins with musicians?

AK: I have, and have had, musician friends: singers, songwriters, singer-songwriters, composers, instrumentalists, classical, jazz, pop, etc., but no one famous comes to mind, although some very talented and backing up the famous. On balance, I find musicians, at least the ones that can talk, as opposed to grunt or bark, most amusing, and a great deal more fun, as well as more interesting, than writers.

DSM: In the book you call yourself a timbre queen. Can you talk a little more about this? How does one become a timbre queen?

AK: I find that I develop an appetite, over time, for a certain “sound” or timbre, be it late ’40s Chicago blues guitar with an electric pickup or a fruity, mid-18th century French harpsichord or tart alto sax or the harmony of therebo, organ and viol from the  late 17th, early 18th centuries. Sometimes I don’t have an appetite for any music at all for months on end, then I’ll gorge on a particular sound. That might go on for weeks. It’s real enough, and probably not unique, but I haven’t run across this phenomenon in my reading or chitchat.

DSM: Recently I moved to Seattle. You’ve spent time here. Any fond memories of shows from the Emerald City?

AK: The Seattle I know best was from 35, 40 years ago — another place, and, to my mind — as always to sentimental old fools — a better place. My great musical experience there, which I talk about in the book, was listening to The Persuasions, as a warm-up act for Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, at The Paramount. For all I know the Paramount is still there. I tend to be claustrophobic and uncomfortable in performance settings, then and now, but that, they, The Persuasions, were hair-raisingly good. And I had hair to stand up on end in those days!

Video: The Persuasions, 1974