PAUL WESTERBERG INTERVIEWED BY DAVID DYE
Thanks to Richard for transcribing this interview.
David Dye (INTRO): Paul Westerberg is here to play live for us today.
Even though Westerberg started making solo albums after the breakup of
the Replacements, he is not your cliched acoustic-guitar-toting
songwriter. In fact, Paul is somewhat uncomfortable playing alone
without a backbeat. We'll make him as comfortable as possible in just
a bit, and talk about the latest album, "Eventually," how he responds
to critical acclaim and finger-pointing and all other aspects of his
career. Paul Westerberg, our guest today....
[About 75 minutes into the program:]
DD: Paul Westerberg is our guest on the cafe today, and he's got a cup
of coffee, which is highly unusual.
PW: For me?
DD: No, for us. [laughs]
PW: Oh, yes, why is that? No one drinks coffee here?
DD: We rarely, uh, you know, have the full cafe ambience going but ...
PW: Well, it's about time ...
DD: I know
PW: ... by gum.
DD: Thanks for doing it.
PW: Thank you.
DD: And thanks for playing. You didn't really play so much acoustic
in a lot of these sessions you've done before.
PW: No, in fact I never really have, and, uh, I ... you know, I'm a
rocker, and I play ... I perform and sort of do what I do with bass
and drums, and, you know, I've sat around forever with an acoustic in
my bedroom, but I really do like having that rhythm, and, uh, so, I'll
take a wild stab at it, but uh
DD: Right. Well, the acoustics on the records, they're there, but
they're not in front of the mix.
PW: No. I mean, the tunes are usually written on acoustic and I'm
stomping my foot and that's the way they're born and then I use that
as, you know, the seed of the tune, kind of.
DD: Yeah. Well, you were warming up on one of my favorite songs on
the new one, "MammaDaddyDid."
PW: "MammaDaddy," yeah?
DD: Yeah?
PW: Well, we can give that a try. Old Archie's [a guitar tech
accompanying PW in the studio] never played it before, but ..
DD: That won't stop him. [laughs]
PW: Hey, he's a trooper. Shall we give that a whirl?
DD: Sure.
PW: Okay. [counts off]
[live performance of "MammaDaddyDid" with PW on 6-string acoustic and
"Archie" on 12-string acoustic]
DD: All right. Archie's 12-string debut on "MammaDaddyDid."
PW: [says some unintelligible words of praise, and Archie replies
"Thank you."]
DD: One other reason you can tell these were written as rock songs
is 'cause they all have great riffs, you know ...
PW: Yeah.
DD: ... circular chord patterns that you come back to.
PW: Oh, oh, musician talk!
DD: I don't know, that's how I see them.
PW: Yeah, you know, yeah, it's the same chords as, you know, "Your
Cheatin' Heart" and every, you know, "Wild Thing," you know.
DD: Right, right. If it can't be played with three chords, well ...
PW: Pretty much. I mean, I take that philosophy, like, you know,
a few primary colors in a lot of music I hear, that there seems to be
almost superflous changes, and I really like standard, simple things.
To me, simple is always better.
DD: Yeah, strip it down. Uh, well, you know, "MammaDaddyDid" talks
about mixed up kids and all that, but I've heard that you thought your
childhood was pretty normal.
PW: It was. It was okay. I mean, you know, it is just a song, and to
read too much into it ... I mean, my mom actually heard this song as
is like, you know, wants the explanation. It's like, "Hey Ma," it's
"I write songs and this is a tune and, you know don't take it all to
heart." But, uh, it's there if you want to really listen to it.
DD: I've been kind of following along on this leg of the tour, a
bunch of different reviews. And, it's funny, you can tell me,
because you've probably read more of them than I have
PW: I haven't read any ...
DD: Oh, well good. Well, let me tell you what they say, Paul. They're
all exactly the same. They all say: Really good show from Paul
Westerberg. It was workmanlike, and it sounded great ...
PW: Umm.
DD: ... but it wasn't the Replacements.
PW: Yeah.
DD: And there's a myth that must at some point start to feel like
baggage to you.
PW: Um, yeah, that's why I don't listen to them any more. The people
who actually pay the money, you know, have had fun every night, and
I've had fun, and, you know, the guys ... most of them had probably never
seen the Replacements. It's something they think they have to talk about.
DD: Yeah, they never ... they don't really say anything bad about the show.
PW: I mean, if they would prefer, I could just get up there and tune
and fall down for an hour and a half and you'd feel cheated, and you
know, if that gives someone a thrill, then that's, whatever, but ...
DD: Right. The other thing I've been noticing is that every review
I've, not review, but every interview I've seen with you, you
seemed really centered in every one of them. You seem to know where
you're coming from, um, which speaks well.
PW: I think so. I know what I do, and I know how good I am, and my
standards are very high, and if I please myself, then that's good,
because many a time, like, the audience loves it and there's a great
review, and I thought, "Ah, it could've been better," and you know,
sometimes I could be hard on the musicians with me, but I don't ever
want them ever to forget that it's for the people, you know, we're not
just playing for ourselves, because you can do that in your basement.
DD: Right. Well, you're playing with Tommy Keene on guitar ...
PW: Yeah.
DD: ... on this tour.
PW: [slurps coffee]
DD: Uh, I guess you had to find somebody, because you play all the guitar
parts on the records.
PW: Right, uh, Tommy's, you know, Tommy's a friend of mine, and I ...
actually I saw him play a month ago in Toronto, and I went backstage
and asked who he thought would be a good guitar player, and he went,
"Hmmmmm." And then, you know, a few weeks later, I called him up, and
he was game to come out.
DD: Well, that's cool. Uh, I'm not sure what to ask for. Something
strummy that will work well acoustically, or . ..
PW: Uh, we could try, uh. Well, I've been doing "Sadly Beautiful," it
was a song from ... what record was that? "All Shook Down," I think.
And, uh, let's swap guitars here Arch. This is very impromptu.
Archie is actually the guy who's been, like, taking care of my guitars
and tuning them.
DD: See, these are the guys ... they're always in bands, and they
always, you know, put out a record two years from now.
PW: Well, they can always play better than the guys on stage.
DD: [laughs] Right.
PW: It's just ... I don't know. So let's try this and see what
happens.
[live performance of "Sadly Beautiful," with PW on the 12-string and
Archie fumbling a bit on the 6-string]
DD: That's a great song, "Sadly Beautiful."
PW: Thanks.
DD: Paul Westerberg doing a solo version of that one today, with Archie on
the 6-string that time around. There's one of your solo songs that
hasn't been on either of your solo records, which is the one that was
in "Singles," actually there are two in that. "Dyslexic Heart" I was
thinking about.
PW: Yeah.
DD: Um, how did that come about being in "Singles"? I don't know the
story of that.
PW: I almost forget myself, because I've been lying for so long, it's
... I can't remember whether I wrote the song for them. I think I had
the song written--kinda--for this girl who was in a band, that I was
writing it either about her or for her, slips my mind [said somewhat
tongue in cheek] ...
DD: You know when you lie, you gotta remember your lies.
PW: I know. I can't keep them straight. Anyway, it was inspired by
her, and I was going to give it to her, but I never finished it, and
then Cameron, you know, showed me his movie, and I was to score the
movie, and he said, "Well, do you have a song that will work as the
theme?" And I thought, "Hmmm. You know I've got this little mixed up
country song." And he said he wanted something kinda like "Love Me
Do," so we sort of worked from there, and I went back to the hotel and,
you know, added another verse to it, and brought him what is "Dyslexic
Heart," and he loved it, and so that sort of became the theme of the
two main characters.
DD: Yeah. It's a great song. It's not something you could do?
PW: I could try a stab of it. I haven't done it in so long.
[Begins live performance "Dyslexic Heart." Tries to find the opening
two chords on 12-string; finds them; hums to find the opening pitch;
plays two bars intro. Sings: "You shoot some glances and they're so
hard to read."]
PW: That's all I remember. [laughs]
DD: [Laughs] We'll play it from the movie.
PW: Cool.
DD: From "Singles," this is Paul Westerberg's "Dyslexic Heart."
[Spins "Dyslexic Heart" off "Singles" soundtrack]
DD: "Dyslexic Heart," is ... is from the film, the song that Paul
Westerberg doesn't remember.
PW: See, the "Na na na," they made ... he told me that had to be like
forty-six seconds long to go with the credits. See, I wanted it to go
like once around and then dump it, but we was like, "No, we need this
timing for the 'Best Grip Key Boy' credit."
DD: [laughs] Exactly. Grip the key boy. Anyway, Paul Westerberg is
here with us today in the cafe. We're kinda in an informal session.
Do you wanna do, I was wondering, something from "14 Songs." That's a
pretty strum-filled thing.
PW: Oooooo. You know, I don't know, uh ...
DD: Oh, uh oh. Well, then let's, uh, I want to find out some more
about some songs from this, because ...
PW: I could try a little bit of "Love Untold."
DD: Okay.
PW: In the improper key. Let's see if that works.
DD: OK.
[live performance of "Love Untold" with PW on the 12-string and Archie
playing little more than the bass line on the 6-string, entering at
the second verse and pretty much dropping out after he misses the
chord change at the bridge. The song ends prematurely and quietly
with the line "Never came to be, I'm told," without proceeding to
"Does anyone recall, the sadest love of all," etc.]
DD: "Love Untold," uh, two sides of the story, from Paul Westerberg.
PW: That's the way it should have ended.
DD: They never meet. Good song. Now that's one of the songs that
you co-produced with Brendan O'Brien ...
PW: Um hmm.
DD: ... on the record.
DD: How did that work out? Why were some one way and some the other?
PW: Yeah, he's a real rocker, and the bulk of my material at the time
was undefined. I had yet to write, I think, "Good Day" or
"MammaDaddy," and the material he was touting as my A stuff I didn't
think was--I mean "Love Untold" I thought was great, but I had a lot
of sort of noisy rock and roll that I didn't think was, you know,
maybe as good as something like "MommaDaddy," so we argued a little on
that, and, uh, I just went home to write more music and by then he
had, you know, moved on to, you know, Pearl Jam or Stone Temple Pilots
to work on their records, so I figured I'd continue without him and
produce it myself.
DD: Um, I wanted to play one from the record, I don't know if we need
to know that much about. Not sure quite what it's about, but "Ain't
Got Me" was a really good rocker on the record.
PW: Yeah.
DD: Um. Any enlightenment?
PW: I don't know what it's about either. I think it's just a general,
one of those, sort of mildly-disgusted-but-feelin'-all-right songs.
It's kind of a T. Rex cop, you know, T. Rex bein' my fave as a, as a,
you know, a teen, and, uh, I liked that kind of glam rock. That was
really the thing that made me want to play rock and roll, so I still
listen to that, so I still try to imitate it .
DD: That must be why I like this one. This is "Ain't Got Me."
[Spins "Ain't Got Me" off "Eventually"]
DD: "Ain't Got Me" from "Eventually." Paul Westerberg is here with us
today. A T. Rex fan, yeah, those, um ... the way those records were
produced were wild, too.
PW: Yeah.
DD: Little string sections come in.
PW: You get the feeling that they cut the tune in like ten minutes and
then, you know, they put the strings on that afternoon, and it was
done. You know ...
DD: Right.
PW: ... It was a hit the next week.
DD: [laughs] Just a ... Yeah, it's interesting, I wouldn't necessarily
have picked out that was one of your influences, but ... I'm mostly
interested in what you read. It's funny. The last album had, you
know, the book of your lyrics you were reading on the cover ...
PW: Um hmm.
DD: ... which I guess was a way of saying "I'm a songwriter," but
PW: Um yeah, it was ... I was in desperate need of something to grasp
on because I had been a band leader for thirteen years, and my band
was suddenly gone, and I think I felt the need to trumpet myself as a
writer. And I'm more comfortable with, uh ... Hey, I can get another
band ... Hey, it's like, hey, I'm a guitar player and a singer and a
songwriter, and, you know, a performer and all that junk. So, I
don't, uh ... I maybe even went overboard trying to tell people that I
was a writer. But the irony was it was supposed to be the book that
was blank, meaning that I write songs not stories. These are not to
be read, and I never include the lyrics, you know, that would be
... You close your eyes and you listen, and that's what it is.
DD: Right, right. What about reading? Do ...
PW: What do I read?
DD: Yeah.
PW: You know, lately I haven't read anything. I read a couple of
biographies, uh, one on Elia [pronounces it "ih-ligh'-uh"] Kazan. Is
that how you pronounce it?
DD: Uh, Elia ["ihl'-ee-a] Kazan.
PW: Elia Kazan, yeah. And I found that very interesting, you know. I
like theater, and, uh, I like books on old Hollywood, like 20s, that
kind of, shady, I mean ... it's ... You know I've read everything
about rock and roll, and I'm not in a fiction mode. I was for years,
I read I think everything by Tennessee Williams, and I'm not ... I'm in a
lighter mood now where I like sort of entertaining, uh ...
DD: Right.
PW: ... fodder.
DD: What happens to you on tour? Do you have time to do anything, or
is your time pretty much ...
PW: You know, not really?
DD: Yeah.
PW: I mean, we've got the regime down, where we, you know, you show up,
and it's time to take a bath and eat, and maybe, I mean I watch, I
watch the "Flintstones" every day. No matter what time I turn it on I
can find the "Flintstones." Which is a comfort because I used to do
it when I was 11, and it's like, here I am, I'm grown up, and it's
like nothing has changed.
DD: [laughs] Except you're in a different city.
PW: Pretty much.
DD: Yeah, boy. Well, thanks a lot for playing live.
PW: Sure.
DD: We really appreciate it.
PW: Thank you very much.
DD: A lot of fun. "Eventually" is the new one, and you'll be out on
tour through the end of the year, or ...
PW: I think so. We'll probably be, uh, we'll be, down the West
Coast and maybe we'll make a run back through the Midwest, South, and
East, yeah.
DD: Cool. Well, thanks a lot.
PW: Thank you.
DD: Paul Westerberg, our guest today on the cafe.
WXPN Philadelphia - "World Cafe",
September 20, 1996
