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Scott the Hoople!
The following is based on outtakes from a Georgia Straight article, NOW ONLINE!!
https://www.straight.com/music/a-plus-one-to-minus-5-a-scott-mccaughey-interview
As a music fan who has been listening to the Young Fresh Fellows since the mid-1980s, it was kind of a dream-come-true to be interviewing Scott McCaughey, but rather than starting with the Young Fresh Fellows or the Minus 5, in fact, we began with McCaughey and Buck's side-sideproject, the No Ones, and late American folksinger Phil Ochs. I had laid out various Ochs records behind me ("Are those for me?" Scott said) and told Scott I was going to give him a Canada-only Ochs rarity. And then I immediately leapt to the No Ones' My Best Evil Friend and the song, "Phil Ochs is Dead." Where did that song come from?
McCaughey was happy to go there: "The whole idea of the No Ones album was to be a story of being inspired by musicians and people we loved, and have all the songs be about things like that, and being record geeks and music lovers. And that was one of the subjects that came up, and Peter wrote this great music for it that just spoke to me, and I knew he liked Phil Ochs, so I thought, 'This could be the time! This could be the time to write a song about Phil Ochs!' I think it came out really great--it's a lovely song. It's kind of rousing, but it's kind of sad; I think it covers Phil pretty well, in a way. All the songs on the record weren't supposed to be definitive statements about people, they're just my feelings about various musicians that I love... a lot of people who kind of get overlooked a bit, who don't have the level of recognition that they should have, maybe?"
He laughed. "Well, it's all about me, of course!"
I forgot to ask Scott if he'd ever actually seen Ochs play (it seems unlikely, but I've interviewed two people who had done, Peter Stampfel -- who actually knew him -- and Eugene Chadbourne, and Eugene is the same age as McCaughey--and saw Ochs "several times"!). But talking about Ochs brought us quickly enough to Oar On, Penelope!, the album the Minus 5 are touring, because there are tons of nautical references in the lyrics: harpoons, sinking ferries, strapped sailors, a title that riffs on The Odyssey. Ochs too had a penchant for nautical themes (consider "Pleasures of the Harbor," "The Scorpion Departs, But Never Returns," and... well, you see my point). So was this informing McCaughey's writing?
"I don't know, I think that it's probably just that we read the same books or something like that, or are inspired by the same kind of imagery. Somebody I was talking to said, 'There's a lot of stuff about the sky on this record!' I guess so... and I can see the nautical thing, because y'know, I'm very influenced by The Odyssey and Ulysses by James Joyce; those are kind of my seminal literary works I go back to again and again; I drop references to all those. So that makes a lot of sense, for the nautical aspect, with Homer and The Odyssey..."
So Penelope really is the Penelope in The Odyssey?
"It's a reference to her."
I here have to confess: I haven't read The Odyssey, only The Iliad, but (based on my gleanings from Wikipedia), I gather, she doesn't "oar," she weaves!
"Yeah, yeah, but... My words are never really literal, they're never trying to really recreate something that actually already happened."
While we were on the topic of stroke recovery, given that my Mom had a massive stroke, and I was her caregiver for the last six years of her life, where she never fully recovered her language functions, I asked McCaughey if it's true what they say about stroke recovery, that singing can help with getting words back, because it accesses different parts of the brain. It's true, he told me, but with a major footnote: “Unfortunately, when I’m singing onstage—or anytime I’m singing— I just never know when I’ll be able to remember the words. The ones I can remember the best, it turns out, are the early Fellows songs, because I’ve sung them so many times, they’re back in there, somewhere, but if I write a new song, I can’t remember one word of it: I just have to sing it over and over and over again, and it starts getting a pattern in my brain, but I can never tell if I’m going to be able to remember it at the time. It’s really scary, because I’ll get up there and sing the first line of the song, and, what’s the next line? I don’t know! Sometimes it comes out, and sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve taken to having a music stand, and all that, which I kind of find really annoying, but… I feel really lost if I’m up there and I don’t know what word is going to come out of my mouth next.”
Does he ever improvise new lyrics, on the spot, when he can't remember the right ones? "I used to, all the time, with the Fellows, either because maybe I'd forgotten, or maybe because I just wanted to play with people and change the words as I went along. But now it's really hard for me to do, because I don't feel like I'm improvising, I feel like something is coming out of my mouth that I don't want to come out, and sometimes it's garbled stuff, not even real words sometimes... so I really wish I could improvise like I used to but it's very, very difficult for me now. But I'm not really complaining! I'm in good shape compared to a lot of who had strokes and didn't really come back as well as I did. I never want to sound like I'm complaining, because I feel really, really lucky that I can still do what I want to do. But people probably think I'm just the same as I was before, and, I'm not, and I never will be. It's been eight years now, and I know that it's always going to be different."
Rather than try to make sense of songs like “Bison Queen” or the other real outliers on the album, in terms of meaning-making, we perversely end up talking about one of the songs on Oar on Penelope that is actually pretty straightforward: “Burgundy Suit.”
It also is the song that most evokes vintage Fellows—life-affirming but wry. Even with the world “sucking hard,” McCaughey asserts in giddy defiance that “I’m gonna take a stroll/ Eat a piece of fruit/ Believe in rock ‘n’ roll/ Buy a burgundy suit.”
But what about mushroom microdosing, ketamine, and ayahuasca therapy, mentioned in that song’s lyrics; were those things he’d really tried? Maybe people are using psychedelics for stroke victims now or something?
Nope, that's not what the lyric is about. "I think I was kinda making fun of it a little bit, in that song. That's a really playful song; it was supposed to be really positive. That's the way my life is: I saw somebody talking on a talk show, and they said, 'Whenever I feel bad, I just go put on my burgundy suit and I feel better.' I thought, 'That's a really cool thing!' And of course I can't remember what talk show it was or who said it; somebody's out there who I borrowed this thing from, and I thought, 'Let's make a happy song about using something that makes you feel good, makes you feel happy.' So I was goofing around about all those therapies and ayahuasca and stuff. I'm not against any of those! Ayahuasca is probably a good thing, but I'd be afraid to try that myself. I took LSD and that, but ayahausca, I don't know if I want to go there. It kinda scares me. And ketamine seems like an x-factor: you seem just as likely to fuck yourself up real bad as to help yourself. I mean, I've talked to people who've done it... I was just listing off things in that song that make people feel good."
Scott doesn't actually own a burgundy suit?
"No, I don't, but Ed Stasium who mixed the record, said, 'Man, I used to have a burgundy suit, that was the best!"
There's a bit more on the stroke and its impact on his lyrics, on women, and more in the Straight piece. At one point, I asked about the title of the new record, (also a lyric in the lead single), and confessed that while prepping for the interview, I thought for "a good 20 minutes" that it might be an anagram, which prompted me, pre-interview, to try to rearrange the letters, to see if I could backform a hidden phrase out of it: “Pope Lear No. One?” “Lean E’er on Poop?” “Leap on Rope, Neo?” “Pee Porno Alone?” “An ‘Oople Opener?” (Riffing, implausibly, on McCaughey being called "Scott the Hoople?") . Everything I could come up with was either weirder than the actual title, or too mundane to be possible (Like “No People Are On”): no hidden messages sprang forth.
McCaughey laughs (at me? with me?) when I report this. "I gotta try to figure one out, and then I can say that that's what it's for!"
Event link here!
Thanks be to Lellie!
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