(group photos shot and provided by Ben DeSoto, Kira photo by Mike Watt)

Kira, you did work on the dialog editing for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Insomnia, right? Could you talk about the sensibilities of that versus editing music?

Yes, I did do dialog editing on those two movies, as well as others….

Music editors live in a completely separate world from the rest of the sound team (dialog, fx, foley, ADR, etc). They are treated as their own group with more access to the director and editor right up to the mix. They receive the scored material in sync, but inevitable have to make things work timing-wise in both source and score. It can be extremely tricky to get music to conform to the timing the director wants as he edits his film. Dialog editing is completely different. The challenge here is not sync necessarily but problems recorded on the set and edited into the film. One solution is ADR,

(recording the dialog anew in the studio), but very often it does not end up solving the problem because performances on the ADR stage don’t always recreate what the director wants, or the director just gets attached to the performance on the set. The material come to me in sync, but chopped up, many scenes and takes and has to be forced into sounding like one scene. Problems are fixed in a variety of ways to try to deliver the best quality out
of the already recorded material.

You have said that film people expect you to work long hours, but I assume the well-noted years touring and working with Black Flag taught you about resilience and a hard work ethic. In fact, you’ve said, “all the physical challenges were very hard for me. I was at the limit of my physical abilities a lot of the time. There were times when I had problems with my hands. There were times when I was in a lot of pain.� So, though the hours doing dialog editing might be long, and the work not always dependable, does it compare at all to “Life in the Van�?

In that they were and are exhausting, yes, but that is about all. BF was physically challenging, like training for the Olympics or something. The challenging thing in my work now is the hours, many of them sitting in front of the computer. I find no time to do the other things I need to do, or have to practice my bass at six in the morning, and skip exercising, or skip life to work….(Do this interview at an unreasonable hour, etc) …Also there is the aspect of having to sell yourself, like we all have to do in our work, and that is hard for me. My neck and shoulders hate long hours in front of the computer, could be because of bass…..

You told an interviewer, “When I don’t have the energy to really be writing songs or whatever, doing a full-blown practice, I’ll sit in front of the TV or whatever I’m doing, listening to the radio or whatever, and I will just doodle with my hands to try to keep my hands strong.â€? I do recall Mike telling me that when he was in the hospital he began to play along to Stooges albums as a way or regaining a sense of playing (since there are few chord changes), and I know that successful musicians insure their hands. But do you think that bass requires a different kind of long-term stamina that differs from that of drummers or guitar players? I mean, you once said that in Black Flag practices Greg could go for ten hours while the rest of you would drop out one by one…

Well, bass and drums are more physical than guitar, if you ask me. And sometimes I think that it is the one area where being female may be a factor. The muscle structure in my hand can only be built up so far. The concept of having someone’s large hands attached to my arms was a fantasy during BF. What I said to the interviewer also relates to what I was talking about earlier, being so tired from a long day of work that noodling in front of the TV was all the energy I could muster and I had a gig coming. I have to practice, I have to warm up before gigs, I have to make the parts become somewhat automatic to my hands, or I will suck. There are those who may not need that much work, I am not one of them. Maybe that is true for all instruments. My hand will seize and not move the way I tell it to if I don’t warm up before a gig.

With recent Dos material, you tend to use ProTools over at Mikes’ place, and David Gedge, the lead singer from Wedding Present, told me that it (ProTools) was liberating for him, but is this really an extension of things like 4-Tracks or literally a whole new world of possibilities in execution and self-production? What are, if any, the pratfalls that come with the widespread use of this format? For instance, Gedge said that sometimes you make music on ProTools that is difficult to replicate on stage and end up having a studio and live version of the band, which I guess, is no different than “Remains in light� era Talking Heads.

Well, for us the Pro Tools is not an extension of the 4-Tracks but a replacement to having to learn a whole record worth of songs and go into a studio and execute them all. Working on the songs one at a time and then recording them is a blessing. We use it almost like a tape machine, so there is no risk of us doing something we couldn’t do live. Multi track recording has always allowed one to do something he couldn’t do live, by overdubbing other material, for example…

Part of what I am suggesting is that it creates an atmosphere that is more free and open to experimentation in contrast to studios, where time, budget, and tension can often hinder it. But that freedom of expression may mean adding parts that are unplayable in the same way live. Granted, regular over-dubbing does the same thing, but you never feel more exploratory on Pro Tools than in other past forms?

I have all sort of ideas of things I would like to try in this arena… but usually when we are working on ProTools it is to record something that has already be hashed out somewhat. We are still learning how to use the tool to our advantage. If we both had it at home it would be a step in the right direction. There are also just time constraints, studio or no, which get in our way. I never feel very limited without ProTools is the real answer….

In the new book Rip it Up and Start Again, the writer Simon Reynolds notes that, “Crucial to the Talking Heads unique look was the matter-of-fact presence of Weymouth, gamine and androgynous with her short Jean Seberg hairstyle.� He quotes Jerry Harrison as suggesting: “I think we were the first band that had a woman as a journeyman, not the front person /singer /sex symbol of the band, but just a working musician?� then does say Harrison forgot Maureen Tucker, and I would add, the Alley Cats (in fact, doesn’t Dos cover their song “Angel Face is the Devil’s Daughter?�. In some ways, do you feel it was important to Black Flag that people saw you as a “journeyman� of sorts, not a sex symbol per se, even though I think Patti Smith, with her love of Artaud and Keith Richards, earlier debunked the notion of the sex symbol front woman?

Girls grow up as tomboys all the time and always have, that they would naturally always participate in music and sports in garages and playgrounds…. Mo Tucker is a good example and there are many we haven’t heard from. There is no

obstacle in the playing, in the interest, the capacity, the role, sex symbol or otherwise.
The difficulties (from my perspective) come with some personality stuff between men and women, the physical challenges of some instruments, and of touring in general. Guys probably didn’t want a girl with them on the road in the van, whether they were dating a member of the band or playing. Any signs of physical weakness or lack of technical prowess (not understanding signal flow) would be accepted
between guys but not by a guy for a girl. And there is this underlying assumption that sex is somehow always at play. If I am in the van talking to someone for a while alone, sex must have occurred. Girlfriends of band members also don’t appreciate the girl player who goes on the road with their sweetie while they stay home….

It is the political problems in any band that create the issues and so many guys just avoid some of those by not having women in the band. I didn’t particularly enjoy having an all-girl band either…. I felt some of the same feelings about the other women I played with that guys must feel. Mostly they are unfair assumptions or judgments we place on each other.

You have mentioned before that you think Black Flag liked the idea of having a girl in the band because it messed with people’s heads, yet you had experienced the live power of the Avengers and the Germs, both mixed sex bands, and Wendy O. and Joan Jett are/were by no means girly, so in what way did Henry and others think you messed with people heads? Plus, are you suggesting that hardcore was inherently more macho, alpha-male, even more sexist than punk rock?

In the examples you gave, the premise of the band included women, in Black Flag it did not. It was already established as a hard driving boy band, videos existed with Henry as a skinhead, songs had content which some might say degraded women. Don’t get me wrong, it is the audience who may have assumed that changing the bass player to a girl might soften the result. I don’t believe that they thought it would at all, but that they thought others might. Greg was all about The Process of Weeding Out - (in my interpretation) removing “fansâ€? that were only fans if BF conformed to certain rules like short fast songs, short hair, or whatever…. I was just another way to break the rules for some people…. When we went to Europe, I had the shortest hair in the band, and there were lots who were pissed off about

Henry’s long hair and me being a girl…. it didn’t conform.

Are you suggesting that you think even today people are open-minded enough to think it makes no difference whether a girl plays bass or not?

I don’t think the genre matters. Punk Rock was less alpha male for sure - look at your examples and many more, but the stereotypes were still there and some women even fostered that. The Go-Go’s come to mind. What did they do for women in punk rock????

You’ve said that Slip It In is one of your favorite records because it was really more of an instrumental record in which Henry ended up ad-libbing some lyrics, so the feel is different than the rest maybe less studied and precise. That is, you break the mold, but does it get harder to break the mold with Dos after such a long time playing, and such down time between projects, and using ProTools instead of constant practice and rehearsal?

Wrong record… In My Head is the record you refer to. (editor’s note: I had just read a Black Flag interview from the mid-1980s in which Henry said it was his fave Flag record. My fault). The mold is always easy to break. The down time between projects is not as big as you think, just because a new record takes forever to come out doesn’t mean we haven’t been developing new material the whole time, we have. There are challenges in that the writing is the whole thing, the two bass lines have to be intricately worked and reworked before we are happy with them. In terms of the raw ideas, they are endless. It just takes a while to transpose those into 16 finished, recorded songs.

Pro Tools doesn’t substitute for practice. Whether it is with a four track or Pro Tools, there is the recording of initial ideas, the one player sitting with one bass line refining the other one, and then the playing. Mike often presents raw ideas to me via tape or disk and then I work on a part for a while before we work together to re-work both the bass lines yet again. If a lot of time is passing we re-record the “rawâ€? lines to keep refining (say while he is on tour). I often worktwo bass lines before ever presenting the idea to Mike and then he makes one line his own…We are also inspired to cover artists we like.

But you have said, I believe while working on Numero Quatro, that writing songs is a slow and sometimes even discouraging. Do you find it harder to capture the songs or poems in your mind’s eye than when you were younger, even though you describe them as endless? Or is it a matter of translating the concept in the mind to the work of the fingers? Or is it something else entirely?

Getting the two basses to always complement each other in both of our perspectives is what is tricky. I might like a part that Mike feels steps on his. I can sit with a recording of a Mike Watt bass line and have no idea what to do to accompany it, often because it seems to have few holes rhythmically or melodically. I can’t find a way to counterpoint it or don’t do it the way he might like. I am definitely better at writing parts to his songs than I was when I was younger. But he has also evolved so his parts are even trickier…. I never really can work “in my mind’s eyeâ€? the way others can. I have to play it, to hear the bass lines played together, to work the poem on paper, etc….

You’ve said that you tend to play behind the beat a bit (“laying on the back�) which is different than say, Chuck’s style in Flag, and Bill Stevenson told me that in All, and I would assume sometimes in Flag, that he actually followed the singer instead of the backbeat of the bass, which makes for a very fluid and dynamic rhythm section, it would seem. How did you approach playing alongside Bill, and what in your past paved the way or prepared you musically for the style of the band? I mean, did Twisted Roots or the Monsters, with infamous Nicky Beat, prepare you?

Well, I certainly needed all the preparation that came before BF. But I was nowhere near physically prepared. Playing with Bill and Greg was mostly about practicing a lot of hours going over and over the same material, often at a slowed down pace, in order to create the feel that Greg wanted. Nicky and I worked really hard with him writing drum parts that reacted to my every note and that was probably good preparation. Listening back to Twisted Roots I was doing some pretty heavy stuff then, but never felt good about it for some reason, and again, the physical demands only occurred with joining BF.

Just so I’m clear on that point, the first week I joined BF I did something to my right hand playing one note on a song called Nothing Left Inside. I went to the hospital and they said not to play for six weeks. I did not heed that warning because I am female and felt that was weak, and my hand has never really been the same. Maybe if that hadn’t happened I wouldn’t feel that BF was such a physical challenge, but I always look at it a little like College ball players who go into the NBA and blow out a knee in their rookie year. They pick it up a notch too quickly and their bodies can’t handle it. Some recover and some don’t. Dos is easier on my hand because it has no drums. When I do rock stuff, which I do on occasion, I still have problems…

(editor’s note: Kira has told Razorcake that the injury was in part, as stated in Our Band Could Be Your Life, worsened when a woman grabbed her in a bathroom before a Black Flag show, beat her, and bent back her hand. So, she basically has sustained multiple injuries…)

Tony Kinman told me that when Blackbird would play shows with a fake drummer and a drum machine, people in the audience would become visibly tense, as if they were being duped or ripped off. I’m sure Suicide might have experienced similar vibes early on. Do you think that rock’n’roll (in the wide open sense) is still overly, and perhaps unfairly, dominated by the drum dynamic and how do you feel about bands that delete the bass player and go with two guitars?

There is a big difference (to me) between omitting a player and making the parts work without it, and having pre-recorded or pre-programmed material that you play along to on stage. The latter has always bothered me too, and seems to bother audiences. I am not sure why, the spontaneity that they believed was there??? The “stiffness� ??? Mike always says that playing to a click track would make us play stiffly, so isn’t that what a drum machine might do (at least in his mind) ? I don’t think it is feeling ripped off. However, on the Europe tour with BF I was playing behind the amp for Nigheist (our opening band) and people were very pissed off, even dropping cans of beer on my head. Maybe they felt “duped� as you said. I know for me as an audience member it is somewhat nebulous why I don’t like it, but I never have.

One of your newer fave bands is Mates of State, at one point, you actually considered playing with Mars Volta, and you don’t seem to mind the White Stripes, so it’s not like you are cocooned away. Plus, you still think that Dos is one of the punkest bands around. To me, I equate shamanistic minimalism with the White Stripes, fragility and modernism with Mates of State, and expansive Roxy Music-isms with Mars Volta, but Dos seems to be a whole other kind of monster. What do you see in Dos that reminds you of punk rock, that is, the same kind of momentum and style that encapsulates bands from the Sleepers to the Zeros? Your official KRS web site, quoting Mike I believe, says it’s because they “pay no heed to genres or fads, and don’t care if people can’t get the weirdness of their thing� but that seems a bit vague.

It is not like anything else, that is what punk is about, non-conformity, Creating something new, without any rules. Let’s face it when punk started it wasn’t the music that was so non-conformist, many of the bands were just rock bands, but they looked completely different. They bucked society’s norms in style and attitude. In lyrics, too. The Minutemen made short songs with no guitar solos because they were trying to buck the rock style. Mike and I wanted a band so we just decided bass was enough…. the first record had only one singing song, that was an afterthought….I hope that feels clearer, I don’t know how better to explain.

Well, Mike always talks about the Wire influence in terms of no guitar solos, and the power of expression in the Pop Group. But to you, who saw the Screamers, knew them, and perhaps the Sleepers, and whose own brother played the keyboards, and still composes songs on piano (and you too played piano for five years), did you see punk rock as a large umbrella that has been narrowly defined? Do you think any young kid today would lump Twisted Roots with Black Flag? The guys from TSOL told me that punk rock was everything from Joe Jackson onwards, yet their own fans might now disagree.

Yes, I do think that “Punk Rock� like so many labels is misunderstood, mis-defined, etc. It was time-specific, audience-specific, and less type-of-music specific. And yet, there were bands at the time which were not appreciated by punk rock audiences because they didn’t conform to preconceptions. Twisted Roots was

problematic for those audiences, so were Meat Puppets, Saccharine Trust, and many others. Somehow the Screamers were okay…. it wasn’t the instrumentation though. It was somewhat the style of music, Twisted Roots was trying to be a bit more pop and the audience felt that. How does a new band develop its audience? At first, you might play for the wrong audience and only a handful of people liked the show. Eventually, people kind of know that the band is more that style, so people who like that go. Minutemen opened for REM on a tour, but the audience may not have appreciated them. Meat Puppets opened on a BF tour, and people didn’t always like them. Labels have always sucked and good bands have always been hard to label.

And if we could continue a bit to talk about the early wave of bands like the Screamers, do you feel that the first wave of L.A. punk was partly shaped by gay Hollywood outsiderness that is often downplayed when people recount the history Some people have stressed that Darby’s spiral downward was, in part, a result of his being unable to bridge his two sides: the intelligent teenage punk heart throb that was adored by even heavy crowds full of surfers and meat heads by 1980, and the closeted gay kid trying to come to grips with confusing sexuality. Did you think that punk culture was open to queer culture, or shaped by it?

I don’t think anyone gave a shit about anyone’s gayness. And it was no more shaped by that than by many other things.

I never knew, or perhaps paid attention to, the fact that you had written some of the lyrics for the last Minutemen record. In addition, you are a part of the well-received Minutemen documentary that has been floating around for awhile. We know about your relationship with Mike, beginning, I suppose, with the ‘84 or ‘85 tour or Minuteflag sessions, but what do you recall about D. Boon, who still seems to greatly impact Mike?

In fact, in addition to Mike’s bands doing some Minutemen songs once in awhile, Dos does a version of “Forever� that Mike has described as “From our (Dos) first record but like lots of Dos, I used again by combining it w/one I wrote for the Minutemen’s “Double Nickels on the Dime,� called “One Reporter’s Opinion.�

Watching that documentary I cried all the way through. It wasn’t just that D Boon had been and was lost, but there was a part of Mike that I hadn’t seen in so long, which had been lost too. So, in many ways what I know of D. Boon is through what Mike lost. They were kids together and life looked different with D. Boon in the world. What I remember is his humor, his sincerity, his acceptance of people, his
easy going nature. His knock down drag out fights with Mike over nothing and everything being okay five minutes later for no reason. Their concept pieces dreamt up together to tell the world something, or try to.

(editor’s note: I vividly recall Biscuit from the Big Boys telling me that he and D. Boon once grabbed each and jumped around like fools in the middle of a floor during a punk show, laughing and being irreverent, two truly big boys at the time. He kept that close to his heart, even named the Minutemen as one of his fave bands in one of the last interviews before he died)

I wrote those lyrics for Mike because he asked me to, and then more for firehose. In a way, it was a part of how he was trying to know me and understand me better. I have always gone through dry spells and creative spells lyrically and that was a creative spell inspired by Mike.

And, as I’ve read, Mike too had a dry spell after the death of D. Boon, before Ed came and sort of shook him up enough to play with George again. It was during this time that you taped him bedtime stories (like you had for your nephews) in which you read some stories and did two intertwining bass parts, which re-connected you two a bit. How do you both continue to keep connected musically, even outside of Dos itself? People like Ian MacKaye told me about sitting around with friends and really listening to old Queen or Groundhog records—really listening and taking it in. How do you inspire each other, beyond presenting him with bass parts or poems, or vice versa? And were those tapes at all inspired by late 1970s Jonathan Richman, by chance?

The story tapes started even a little after Mike and I had jammed two basses in his apartment a few times. We had no plans to do a band per se but were just playing. I moved to Connecticut and starting making those story tapes so my nephews wouldn’t forget me. Mike and I worked on our first record then and our early jams and the story tapes became sources for songs. Jonathan Richman did not influence that.

How do we keep connected? It is mostly through our basses and bringing stuff to the table in dos that may have been inspired elsewhere. Or not.

Dos has covered Billie Holiday, who remains an influence on you, but were/are you a fan of Nina Simone, who died not so long ago? It would be hard to imagine that either artist, if arriving on the scene today, would get much attention in the current climate. Do you think there are any lessons people should learn from these singers, who, despite alcohol for one and self-exile for the other, built a body of work that transcends time?

I have to say I am very ignorant about Nina Simone’s work. I think that in all time periods there are artists who somehow create a body of work that lasts. My gut feel about Billie is that it has to do about the emotions she expressed and that we who listen identify deeply with those feelings. Unrequited love is such a base emotion. With other artists, it seems to have to do with breaking out of old molds (Elvis, the Beatles, etc) and being remembered and appreciated for that. They give young people an alternative (in their day) and then influence scores of artists who come after.

But those feelings were not always just universal expressions of love, anger, and disappointment, but also, though sometimes metaphorical, very topical, like “Strange Fruit� (loved and covered by Jeffrey Lee Pierce), that tragically recounts lynching during an era when 20,000 men were battered and killed. That’s why I think the Minutemen remain so powerful, because they do expose, even in an art-fueled way, the geo-politics of the Reagan era. Do you enjoy when politics become immersed in music, or do you prefer when it is more muted, per se?

Personally, it is in the emotion expressed that I find greatness. It is Her emotion about that incident, or D. Boon’s strong feelings about politics that make them good. Content does not matter (to me) unless I actually feel an emotion expressed.

You told Razorcake that “You know, do I want to go hear X still play the same songs they were playing fifteen years ago? No, I would rather see them do something new and interesting and different.� Yet, they continue to tour and play only the first four albums and the band has seemed reluctant to write new material (though they did write new material in the 1990s). In some ways, does that retro-rockism make it at all more difficult for people like you to forge ahead and keep presenting new ideas, because people see your peers giving into perhaps nostalgia or income issues?

No, what they do does not affect me and what I do. I have no issue with them doing that, I just am not dying to see it either. I will keep doing new stuff, so will many others, and that will be what I go see, if I go see anything. It may, however, be mostly to do with the same thing we discussed earlier. Greg (Black Flag) was willing to lose audience and try new things. Audiences may just want to hear the old songs played the same way and it is them then that are having a stagnating effect. The bands have a choice to conform to what the audience wants or to practice artistic license and there are plenty in both camps…..

Now that you have worked in both the music and film world, what do you think you relate to more, the world and approach of film music with its own language and conventions, or the world of bands and tours? Mike told me that bands were more of a young man’s thing, but do you see yourself ever returning to the routines of touring or do you now simply approach music with Dos, or even your one-off stints with Henry’s version of Black Flag, as just another project, simply deserving of a show here and
there. Why or why not?

Big question. It is not “just another project� ever. Music is in me all the time and if I only play alone in my room I will still play, or feel empty if I do not. Trying to earn a living at music is a huge challenge for all I have watched doing it, and huge compromises and/or sacrifices may result. I chose not to go that way. This allows me to play the music I want to and compromise nothing. However, it means I have
to make a living in another field which is currently sound editing. Do I get from that what I get from music? No. Can I go on tour tomorrow? No, because I do have this career to keep going, and bills to pay, etc.

If the question is more esoteric, like: putting money aside would I do music all the time and gig and tour? Well, then the answer might be different. I would certainly do a lot more than I do now. But I am very lucky, because I get to make a few records, play some gigs, and share my musical emotion a bit and haven’t had to make a black and white choice in that area.

Top

Copyright 2005-Left Of The Dial Magazine-All Rights Reserved

mp3 aasma ul husnaaassi mp3 helanyon 000 loans as 100 tvadelaide ringtone crowsjaate mp3 aate gaate hanste3660 mp3 skinluxmi aathi mp3aati kya mp3 khandala Map