Nicole: I learned something from Paul Westerberg once. He did an interview many years ago--maybe ten or twelve years ago--and he was asked about lyricism and how he puts together the verses and choruses and things. And he said, "When you have a great line--and you know it is a great line, you know it's the one they're going to paint on the leather jackets and write it on their notebook covers--you have to bookend it with two throwaway lines." It's like a laugh line. You have to give them some crap afterward so they don't miss anything while they're laughing. While that line is lingering in their heads, they're not missing anything. If you put it between two transitionary lines, it makes the great line even greater because it stands out from the rest of the dross.

"It is the sound of failure; so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing itself to its limits and breaking apart."  (Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Apendices)

Nicole: Absolutely fucking right. Who said this?

Brian Eno. He was talking about modern music and distortion.

Nicole: Is that from A Year with Swollen Appendices? I remember flipping through that book and thinking, "I should buy this for Anton." Great fucking book. I should buy a copy for myself. Such a great book.

It's one of those things that has been sitting on my shelf forever and I finally got around to reading it. I was not able to put it down. It's a diary! Half of it is stuff like: "Sat around. Watched TV. Played with Photoshop."

Nicole: And then there were those moments. Bing! Bing! Bing! That's the Westerberg moment. You're like: "Oh! Where's the highlighter!" But you recognize you have to get through all that to get to this otherwise this won't feel as special. Because if all the good stuff was back to back, you wouldn't recognize it. It's the sifting process that makes those things so important.

Nicole: I think he's absolutely right. I wonder if what I think is my best work is what other people think is my best work. But I know that I get the biggest payoffs when I feel like I've gone way out--when I've spun so far out and I don't know if I can come back. That's like what happened with Dead Inside.

Originally there were going to be three vocalists: myself, Lori Carson, and Stina Nordenstam. Each of us was supposed to do three tracks. The third track I did was "Victim" and I thought it was going to be the last track that I was to do. Anton always stepped out of the room when I did my first vocal take. I didn't ask him to and he always did. It would be just me and the engineer. I guess he felt I would be more comfortable if I didn't feel like I had "Papa" looking down on me. I didn't know if it was going to work; I hadn't rehearsed it; I hadn't practiced it with the music. I had no idea. The engineer went, "Roll tape." I just did it and it happened to fall where it was. I stepped back and gave the engineer the hand sign and he pressed stop and was like, "Holy fucking shit!" And I said, "You'd better call in Mr. Fier."

Anton came in and sat down. He never said or did anything when he was listening. He was very quiet and he listens to it. I was under the table because I can't listen to playback. It's like listening to yourself on an answering machine--you always sound like an idiot. You just sound like a dork. God, I sound so nasally and terrible. I couldn't bear to listen to it. I was thinking that Anton was either going to really like it or hate it and send me home in a cab. Once or twice in between I had come in with something and he had been like, "Okay, this isn't working" and had just called a taxi service to come pick me up and take me home. You just never knew. And so I was really walking on eggshells. He listens and the engineer turns off the tape and I come back up from under the table. I'm looking at Anton, trying to figure him out. There is just no response. And finally he said, "You...are...a..." Understand, I'm dying inside right now. [laughs]

He liked it. And he asked if I wanted to do it again. I said, "Yeah, there are all these pops and clicks and mouth noises." I went back and tried again and we couldn't get it. I think we did two or three takes and we all agreed that the first take was the best for it. It just happened to fall where it did. That's when you recognize that there are forces outside of you and that you have to take huge risks. If I had written something for the track or I had tried to do something else, I wouldn't have gotten "Victim." That's what it is like, literally, to step out and trust that there will be a bridge underneath you. I understand that more now than I did at the time. It just means that now I have to take bigger risks. Now I have to go really far to push myself. Otherwise it isn't interesting to me. It is constantly stunning to me to take these huge risks or to say "yes" to proposals that I don't know are ever going to work out and make them happen. Because you can never do what you're asked to do.

It's like when someone came to me and commissioned a huge performance at The Kitchen [in NYC] in December for three nights. And I've got to fill the house every night. I was thinking, "I can't do that." And I said, "Yes, of course, I'll do that." And I was looking at myself on the phone going, "Who is talking through me?" I can't do this. Why would I put that much responsibility and that much terror on myself? But I recognize that if I don't, I'm going to stay right where I am for the rest of my life. And that is scarier to me than anything. That's actually number two.

"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we are seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."  (Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth)

Nicole: If you're not living, you're dying. We're doing both at the same time. It's really a choice of which direction you want to go. I try and act like every reading or every poem I write is going to be the last thing I'm ever going to write. I want to make sure that whatever it is that I have in my notebook at the time is something really great.

Having something worth cracking the notebook open.

Nicole: Exactly. Nothing could be worse than what they did to Auden. The Early Auden Poems. Jesus God! If they published the poems I wrote when I was nine... I could get hit by a bus tomorrow and I just want to make sure that whatever I'm doing is worthy and not something I just wrote on a cocktail napkin yesterday. That just degrades the audience. As an audience member for so long, I hated it when a performer took my time and attention for granted. I don't ever want to take my audience's attention for granted. These people come from far away. When I was performing in New York, there were people coming from Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Boston and Canada! These two guys drove all the way from Montreal. If I didn't give them the best show they've ever seen, I've ripped them off. I have to be that good all the time. Yeah, it puts a tremendous weight on me, but how could it be any other way? Would I show up drunk to a reading? That's when it would all start falling apart.

Has the work always been meant to be read aloud?

Nicole: When I first started, it was all meant for print. But when I started reading aloud, I realized it was a very different vocabulary, that there were sound tricks, that there ways I could tip the character's hand. There were ways to tell you: "No." [nods "yes"] She's saying "no" but when I perform it live I can tell you things she doesn't even know about herself. I can tell you things she's lying about that she doesn't even know she's hiding. People give themselves away. They say one thing but their body is telling you a totally different thing. I can use all of those tools to give you another understanding of the situation. I love the fact that you can get a complete story on the page and you will get a complete story in performance, but you're going to see both sides to the conversation. There's two sides--maybe three--to every conversation: his side, her side, and the truth.

Nicole: I always wrote to music so it was never that much of a jump. The first thing I recorded was with [NYC producer] Kramer. It was a track called "Indictment" that was later adapted into "Dogma" [on KMFDM's Xtort album]. I was KMFDM's publicist at this time and they asked me to open their tour for them [the 1995 tour supporting Nihil]. I had given Sasha a copy of the single. I had wanted to call it "Indictment" but, as you know, every song on Xtort had five letters. So I knew their tour was coming up in about a month and Sasha calls me late one Sunday night. I'd been out with some friends and was really drunk. [Slurs heavily] "Hello?" And he tells me that he wanted me to come out on tour with them. He wanted me to open the show. "No," I said, "you've got Dink opening the show." Dink was this band from Cleveland or Chicago or wherever--really nice guys. He says, "I want you to do 'Indictment' on the tour. I'll pay you. You'll come along for the whole tour. It'll be fun." I thought he was crazy. "You're out of your fuckin' mind," I told him and hung up on him.

He calls me up on Tuesday (at which point I'm very sober) and asks me if I've thought about the offer? "Which offer?" I ask. "What are you talking about?" "The offer to open the tour." "You can't do that," I said, "they'll stone me." These are industrial hard rock kids. I knew exactly what their audience was. But then he explained it to me. He didn't want the DJs from the local radio stations doing their "hey, this is WKM-whatever. Put your hands together for the industrial godfathers, KMFDM. Whooohooo!" thing. They hated that. If he told them that he had someone introducing them, they wouldn't do that. And he thought I would set the tone for the show. And I said, "I'll only do it on one condition. At the point where I'm not enjoying it anymore or you think it isn't working, I have the right to quit and you have the right to fire me." He said, "Yeah, alright." I immediately thought, "What the fuck have I got myself into?" It was the best thing I ever did.

We started out in Los Angeles and I was reading "Indictment" from a piece of paper on stage. Who opens a tour in Los Angeles? [laughs] Usually you start in, like, Topeka. You go someplace small so you can work these things out. (Apologies to those of you who live in Topeka.) But, after the first week, I had the whole thing memorized and it's delivered at top speed. "Alliwanttoknowiswhateverhappenedtoexperimentingwithdrugssexreligionfoodcars wordsschoolalcohol..." And these kids come out to the show and see Dink and some record is playing in between and they're all dancing or buying t-shirts or fucking or I don't know what they're doing, but the lights come down on stage and they all mass forward to the front of the stage.

I called a friend of mine--Jud Ehrbar from Space Needle--and said that I needed a backing track. I needed some kind of environment--not musical--more like a heartbeat to set the tone. He found something and it was on this loop that I had them run for, like, twenty minutes. "I don't know how long the piece is. Just do it for twenty minutes. I don't know what's going to happen." The lights come down and I would come out. Most of these kids had never seen KMFDM or if they had, they weren't quite sure who the members were now. So I come out and they're like, "Whoo! KMFDM." [Claps and then pauses] "Who the fuck is this?" They couldn't figure it out. And, for the first couple of minutes, they couldn't figure it out. "Is this? What? Did we pay? Is this?" And then some of the things I was saying started clicking. And they're like, "Yeah! Yeah!" I sort of called them all and they really got into it.

And then, as soon as the wave started building, I cut them off at the knees and started criticizing them. "Hey? She was... What the...? Hey, fuck you!" And then I built them back up, higher than they were before. We were into the tour a week or two before I realized that way of working with the wave and how that energy flows back and forth. They give you something and you give it back. As long as you keep that energy recycling, they're along with you the whole way. You can preach to the converted or you can take the people who didn't really want to hear you and win them over. It's much harder to do that, but it's much more gratifying. That time on the KMFDM tour is where I learned how to do that. It's always the hardest shows that I come away feeling the best from if I can win them over. And I usually can. If they come to see Front 242 or KMFDM or Bush or whoever the hell they're seeing and they catch me in the meantime--they don't want to see me--if I can win them over that makes their experience better and it makes me better as a performer.

<-Prev  1  2  3  4  Next->