THE GEOLOGIC SYSTEMS OF THIN WHITE ROPEAn Interview with Guy Kyser by David Turin
"Where man is not, nature is barren."
-William Blake, Proverbs of hell, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
"I fun tate plat!" Guy Kyser shouts from the immense gray slope of the LA River flood bank. He looks and sounds indigenous.
"Wha dyu say?" I yell from the middle of the LA River. I'm seated on a rotten chair Kyser found, posing for a photograph. The chair teeters, threatens to dump me in the toilet-blue chemical gravy - 95% treated sewage effluent, 3% hypodermics, used condoms, dead dogs, 2% mystery meat - I'm told. Wrapped waist-high in forest green polypropylene, the photographer and I haul our stinking cargo over the bank to check out what he's onto.
"I found a tomato plant", he exclaims upon our approach. "Oh", we say, index fingers swinging elliptically in our minds. Then it dawns on us how amazing it really is - not only that there's an edible nightshade growing there in Garbage Pail Kid turf, but that Kyser would recognize its leprous silverish growth. It occurs to us that Kyser is admirably equipped for survival in the sewers and stormdrains of LA or other post-apocalyptic environments.
Thin White Rope singer/songwriter/guitarist Kyser deals with the man/science interface: the poesy of a human being set against mysterious, uncompromising natural laws. Thin White Rope (a Burroughs code word for semen) is what Kyser uses to suture together past present and future. The result is the Frankenstein monster of Thin White Rope sound - mirthful and eerie at once. There's the batter of Kyser's feedback soloing and living-dead vocals and Matt Abourezk's Bonhamesque drum pummeling. The emotions are hazy, subliminal in the effervescent buzz of geologic time. In the lyrical foreground, there are petrologic daydreams, tectonic veerings, climatic spasms, screened through the distraction of the seasons.
Kyser was born in Ridgecrest, California's Los Alamos, the son of a physicist. The band is based in Davis, CA. Where Kyser studied geology and now works part-time as a lab and field technician in the UC Davis agriculture department. The growing success of the band, he swears, won't deprive him of his great job cruising horizonless fields in an Andromeda Strain uniform hosing down beans with weird white test snows.
Thin White Rope has released four critically acclaimed albums, Exploring The Axis, Moonhead, In The Spanish Cave (all in Frontier) and Sack Full of Silver (RCA). The band's fifth album, The Ruby Sea, is currently circling the globe.
-David Turin
MONDO 2000: Has geology made you what you are today?
Guy Kyser: Geology - the concept of geologic time - tends to make an existentialist out of you. A living-for the-moment-type, where no matter how worked up you get about whatever's going on, you realize there'll be a situation even vaguely resembling this for only a few thousand years more.
MONDO 2000: Geologically speaking, how would you describe yourself?
Guy Kyser: I would say mud flow, but that wouldn't be very flattering. How about a horn-a point made by passing glaciers.
MONDO 2000: Where in time would you most like to be?
Guy Kyser: If it was an extended visit, I'd probably enjoy the 1920's. But for just a short-term peek, I'd say one of the ice ages. The cold caused everything to get bigger, hairier and more intriguing.
MONDO 2000: In your opinion, what's the difference between an archaeopteryx and a pterodactyl?
Guy Kyser: Well, they're starting to think that pterodactyls might have had feathers too. They might have been warm-blooded. There's no reason to suppose that feathers just all of a sudden popped out on archaeopteryx. Normally, fossils don't show feathers too well. Archaeopteryx is a very unusual, finely preserved fossil, so it's quite possible that other animals had feathers which didn't show up.
TYCHO BRAHE'S GOLD NOSE?
MONDO 2000: How do you approach songwriting from a scientific perspective?
Guy Kyser: There's a lot of mathematics in it. I've been trying to come up with a manifesto - why some melodies work and some don't - because it's puzzled me for a long time. A lot of my melodies are one precise interval carried up and down the scale. When that doesn't work, you have to bend it a bit. Decide where to bend the rule is what makes a melody work. If you come up with a rule for a whole song, and it doesn't work, then you find a logical, geometric place to shift into a different key. There's a definite logic behind melody. I have no idea why.
MONDO 2000: Would you say that say that soul, the irrational aspect of being, is a component of logic?
Guy Kyser: It's what allows you to make logical leaps. That's how you fill in the gaps between two logical paths.
MONDO 2000: What role does science play in your lyrics?
Guy Kyser: There's a lot of references to paleontology and botany, and a lot of metaphors. I don't ride on those things, though, because you can get clinical real fast. Science is as fertile a ground for metaphor as religion or sailing ships. You just have to be careful about getting too esoteric.
MONDO 2000: How did growing up in the household of a nuclear physicist influence your interest in science?
Guy Kyser: It just made it an accepted part of life. Some guys are really comfortable around cars or horses, I happen to have grown up around physics.
MONDO 2000: On the last album, you give a poetic and geometric description of some of the songs. Is there a geometric pattern for how your songs are sculpted? Are there any geometric shapes you try to duplicate?
Guy Kyser: A lot of them are like angular spirals. They keep coming back to the beginning, but not quite - moving on a little bit in each circle.
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INTERVIEW CLICHE?
MONDO 2000: What symbol would you use to describe Thin White Rope?
Guy Kyser: What comes to mind is this comic book I had called Korak, Son of Stone. Korak kills and skins a dinosaur to make boots to walk across burning lava. He negotiates the lava flow by wearing dinosaur-skin boots. That kind of sounds like some of the songs.
MONDO 2000: What authors have most influenced your scientific perspective?
Guy Kyser: Stephen Jay Gould and Isaac Asimov.
MONDO 2000: I saw some William Gibson books on your shelf.
Guy Kyser: He's the technological side of things. He uses technology and humanity almost interchangeably. It's not my strong suit, but I like the way he does it.
MONDO 2000: One of the scary themes in your songs is the notion of the ideal being elusive because, due to some historical mishap, it was never created.
Guy Kyser: That notion drives a lot of writing. It's a lot better than a negative motive - a couple of songs on our first album were completely hate inspired. And it gets reinterpreted as scary, but it's not scary - it's awe. It's awefulness.
TECHNO-BABEL
MONDO 2000: Do computers ever figure into your art?
Guy Kyser: They never have. I'm a little worried that if everyone developed some amount of computer knowledge, then anyone would be able to create anything they envisioned. It makes me feel a little insecure about having spent all my time learning on these mechanical instruments. On the other hand, people who are limited because they are physically uncoordinated would be able to create, so we'll probably discover a lot of genius. The only thing I'm really worried about is computer technology and smaller technology-like desktop publishing and home cassette duplication - saturating the world with information. It's nice to be able to pick and choose, but at the same time, you could spend your whole life doing nothing but sorting through information.
MONDO 2000: Do you think the overload of information makes it harder to find oneself?
Guy Kyser: No, you can find yourself more easily. But it's a lot harder to get someone else to pay attention once you do. Everyone's already overloaded.
MONDO 2000: You seem to talk the Frankenstein's monster of technology.
Guy Kyser: It's a bit like a Tower of Babel. People just keep slamming stuff onto it without having a chance to assimilate everything that's come before. Pretty soon it will be impossible to assimilate even the story of your own field, much less the history of all the fields that should be learned to understand what you're doing.
BEEFHEART 'N' BEER
MONDO 2000: Who are some of your musical influences?
Guy Kyser: Captain Beefheart was probably the biggest. I don't know how much he shows up in the music, but what I feel is more from him than anyone else. The Velvet Underground and the Stooges probably show up a lot more in the music. The Ramones and the Sex Pistols had a lot to do with getting me pissed off enough to get in a band in the first place.
MONDO 2000: What role does beer play in what you do?
Guy Kyser: Fortunately, it's a very low-tech kind of behavior. Beer is regression. Beer is 10,000 years of de-evolution in every bottle.
MONDO 2000: Are you sick of the critics heaping Thin White Rope in with cow skulls and Saguaros and peyote?
Guy Kyser: We set out on a deliberate campaign to disassociate ourselves from that.
MONDO 2000: What replaces the desert imagery?
Guy Kyser: There are no big scale schemes. It's all determined by song-writing. I seem to be heading into ocean imagery now. Again, it's not a concept. It's just a crank metaphor. I'm fond of using the ocean because it's three dimensional. In the desert you can't get any more down than you are. In the ocean you've got another seven miles to go.
- MONDO 2000