MSSV performs at the Fisch Haus, Tuesday, April 22.
The trio brings together guitarist Mike Baggetta bassist Mike Watt and drummer Stephen Hodges. Each musician boasts a rich pedigree—Watt was a founding member of the San Pedro, California trio Minutemen who helped forge a particular punk aesthetic in the 1980s. Later, he released a series of critically acclaimed solo albums and took what he termed “sidemouse” gigs, performing with reformed versions of proto-punk bands such as the MC5 and The Stooges. Hodges has worked extensively with Tom Waits, appearing on classic releases such as “Rain Dogs” and “Mule Variations” in addition to his work on Watt’s 1997 punk opera “Contemplating the Engine Room,” which drew from his own autobiography as well as from the life of his father who died young after a career in the U.S. Navy.
Baggetta’s groundbreaking guitar work draws upon influences that included David Torn, Nels Cline and Ornette Coleman, often bridging the distance between jazz, punk rock, and the avant-garde and always doing so seamlessly. He and Watt first performed together in a trio featuring legendary drummer Jim Keltner (he’s recorded with three of the four Beatles, toured and recorded with Dylan and added his deft and subtle touches to myriad recordings) that issued one recording on Chris Schlarb’s Big Ego imprint. When Keltner declined to tour in support of the album, Watt and Baggetta recruited Hodges, recently releasing their third studio effort, "On and On" and now preparing material for a fourth.
Baggetta recently spoke with KMUW about the history of MSSV, his gateway into experimental music, and his compositional process.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
To catch people up to speed about this album: The three of you went on tour with this material, performed a string of back-to-back dates. Then, at the end, you went into the studio with producer Chris Schlarb and recorded the new songs you’d worked up. Was the thinking, “We’re going to get these to the place we want them and then record them while they’re in peak form”?
Yeah, it wasn’t even about getting them just right as much as it was about seeing how far we could take something. We’ve always done it that way with this band but even before I started this band with these guys, I had other projects and I always tried to do this way. I lived in New York City a long time ago and I got to play in a bunch of interesting bands with a lot of interesting music and a lot of short-lived projects. People would put this music together, we would practice it a bunch, go into the studio, record the music, then eight to 12 to 15 months later the album would come out and [you’d have to] go back and re-learn all the music because [you’d have to do] a week or two of shows to promote the album. [Then] we’d play the music every night and I remember thinking, “Man, we should have recorded the album now, this music sounds so much better than when we made it without doing any gigs first.”
I always thought, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if you did all the gigs and then recorded the record?” Then, when it comes out, yeah, you play those songs but then maybe also you have new music and you work on that for the whole tour and at the end of that you record that music. So that’s what’s been happening with this band and a lot of my other projects.
The cool thing is that it’s not about getting the music perfect, it’s about, “Oh, how does the music change?” How do you take it to places where I, myself, as the writer of the music could have never imagined it because things change when you do music every night for, in this case, 50 nights in a row. You could never write what that music’s going to be like. It’s totally about the unknown and the other personalities playing it and about all the things that happen in life over the course of a couple of months.
I wonder if so-called mistakes can influence the outcome of the compositions. Maybe there’s a night when Watt plays something other than what was intended and you say, “That’s brilliant, let’s make that part of the tune.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The clams can definitely make their way into the final product! [Laughs.] I’m not of the mindset that things have to be perfect. Perfection doesn’t really even exist in anything. Thankfully. The things that are not intended can always become better ideas than somebody would have thought of. What I like about music is all the things that people bring into it. I can play solo and there’s definitely a lot of mistakes that happen when I do that. But they’re still my mistakes.
Someone else will play something I can’t even imagine being played, whether it’s unintended or intended and then I get another idea from that. You get influenced by the things that people are playing around you. That, to me, is where the real magical part of the music lays. I’m always open to that for sure.
I would imagine that, because some of the rooms you’re playing are not always spaces designed with music performance in mind, you might have to change dynamics within the performance. I would think that might also have the potential to impact the compositions.
MSSV played an old, converted church somewhere in upstate New York on our very first tour. It had this really, really high ceiling. If you look at the church from the outside there was this gable. On this inside it wasn’t separate floors, it was just this one tall room that went up into this peak. The guy that was running sound was having a hard time dialing out this feedback overtone that was happening with certain chords.
It was really amazing to hear actually because I could play a chord and this feedback note would pop out of the room, not out of the amp. The trick to that was playing a lot quieter than we’d ever played. I think that helped influence this idea of, “Oh yeah, we have to be really quiet. We can also be really loud because of the room.” How do you write music that can reflect that also? So it does find its way back into the music too.
You mentioned earlier this notion of making a record and then having to wait all this time for it to come out before you do gigs. There are of course other records that get made and those players never get out to do live shows. So it seems that it was important to you to have this band be heard.
That’s my prerogative. I like to see bands. I like to see live music. It’s important to me. I think it should be important to the world. MSSV started when Mike Watt and I did a record with Jim Keltner called “Wall of Flowers” [2019]. None of us had met before the one day we had in the studio. It was an experiment in a lot of ways. When the record was about to come out, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be fun to try to do some gigs?” I wanted to do a handful of gigs but Jim doesn’t really travel or at least at that point wasn’t really traveling for gigs. [Since then] he went on the road with Bob Dylan for a couple of months so I guess that’s kind of a different thing. [Laughs.] Who wouldn’t?
So I was talking to Watt and we still wanted to do some gigs. I had been aware of Watt’s record “Contemplating The Engine Room” with Stephen Hodges on drums. Our buddy Nels Cline plays guitar on that. That’s a huge touchstone record for me. Has been for decades. I remember asking Watt, “Do you think Hodges would be into it?” He said, “I don’t know. Here’s his number, give him a call.” So I called him up, met up and talked things down with him and he was into trying to do some of these gigs as long as we did it in such a way that it wasn’t just him subbing for Jim Keltner.
Hodges is an amazing drummer. He did all those amazing found sound drum kits on those [classic] Tom Waits records, the “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” soundtrack. I was psyched that he was able to do it. We did 10 shows back-to-back, coast-to-coast for that tour. About halfway through, the three of us said, “Oh, it might be cool to try music that’s just for this group.” You change one member of a group and things are different. That’s when MSSV started.
Even with that original project I didn’t know if we were going to do gigs with me and Mike and Jim and it turns out we didn’t. But I wanted to play something and we ended up getting Hodges to play and then the music changed so much that we had to make a different band to contain that so that’s exactly what happened.
This is the third album so something worked. There was chemistry there.
I think you’re right. I wouldn’t keep doing something if it was a drag. [Laughs.] I do “write” the music for the band although Watt and Hodges definitely play a huge part in editing some things that I give them or making them fit their voice a little better than I had imagined or setting the drama of the tune better than I had imagined. They’re definitely responsible for a lot of the music. We’re all having a lot of fun with it and I do try to bring a different sort of evolution to the music every time we have something.
I haven’t done this and I don’t know if I’ll ever do it, but if you go back and listen to the first record and the second record and now this third record, hopefully you’ll hear that evolution and I have a new set of music that we’re gonna be playing on this tour to record after that for the fourth album. That’s even got some different kinds of things happening in it right now.
It’s exciting. I want to stay excited about it and I think we’re all still excited about the music and the band and the different things we end up getting into.
When you’re writing do you think, “There’s this thing that Stephen does on the drums that I really love and I want to have a piece that accentuates that”?
Absolutely. I learn more about the way that those guys play every time that we play together, so I put it in the back of my mind or things come up subliminally too. Sometimes there’s something I play or write that I think maybe influences something and that gives me an idea for the next time. There’s a lot of give and take for me.
“On and On” highlights a lot of the intersections found in MSSV. There’s the jazz stuff, there’s the punk stuff and then there’s stuff, lyrically, that’s like Beat poetry. It’s an interesting confluence but I think when you probe each of those a little bit more deeply you see that they’ve always been interconnected.
I think everything’s interconnected. That’s actually one of the themes of the whole album, given the title, the title track and the title of the record. Everything is the same, everything is one in a way. In music, it’s funny because people … well, not even people but, like, corporations and, like, streaming cartels and stuff they like to give you this genre laden grift about, “OK, pick all the styles of music you like” and they give you 25 bubbles and you pick the ones you think you like. And then they file you into that category and they give you the folder. But I don’t think it’s like that.
I think of music as an art that reflects life or vice-versa. I think of music as a mirror almost. If you think about all the things you are in life, you’re not one thing. You’re not a disc jockey, you’re not an interviewer, you’re also a dishwasher and you’re a brother or a husband or whatever. You’re all these different things all day long.
So why do I have to pick what kind of music I play? [Laughs.] It sounds so insane in a way when you really start thinking about it.
To that end, I listen to all kinds of music. One of my favorite recordings, now that you mention it, is Jack Kerouac reading a lot of his poems and book excerpts to the old TV host Steve Allen [who is] improvising jazz piano behind him or Zoot Sims playing saxophone behind him. There’s all these kinds of things that influence me, whether it be Minutemen or Eric Dolphy or Andrés Segovia or Jack Kerouac or Bootsy Collins. There’s good music and then there’s everything else, right? Why should we limit ourselves?
It seems like you use technology as a compositional tool. It’s not just, “I’ve got a delay pedal,” but more like maybe a delay pedal can be a springboard to a compositional idea. What that something that was there from the beginning? “This is just another means of getting my idea across.”
It wasn’t actually there from the beginning but I can actually pinpoint the exact moment. [Laughs.] My sister, when I was 14 or 15, and I was starting to get into playing guitar more—my dad plays guitar so it was always kind of around the house and I would bug him to show me some stuff—but I remember, one year for Christmas, my sister gave me this CD by this guy named David Torn. The album was called, “What Means Solid, Traveler?” It’s got this really trippy cover and he’s inside with this big tattoo on his arm and one of those weirdo looking Steinberger guitars.
I didn’t know anything about him. Looking at the album, I was, like, “What kind of music is on this? I can’t even imagine what this guy’s about.” I wore that CD out, listening to it, and the big thing I took from that was [that] all these different sounds, whether they be manually acoustically made or electronically manipulated in real time or postproduction they were pretty much all guitar oriented on that record. For the most part.
I remember thinking, “Whoa, this is something really heavy that’s happening here, that you can manipulate sound in these ways to create textures and other things to improvise and play with that are really not from another person that you’re facing.” [It’s] a way that you can interact with the music that you’re making but have it surprise you in real time.
These are all these ideas I got from this one record and then, of course, later on I found out that there were devices and little samplers and loopers. [It was] not only David Torn but listening to Nels Cline and Bill Frisell and going back and hearing Terry Riley manipulate tape loops and [hearing] Robert Fripp ….
There’s a whole host of historical perspectives on live sampling and interacting with that in real time. So that stuff became really kind of important to me. Finding ways to incorporate that with a band is really interesting because it’s almost like adding a fourth player sometimes. It’s not so much that I compose with it but it is a part of my play that I can be aware of when I’m making a song. “This would be a great section to bring in some of that element,” or “It would just get in the way of this section,” so I leave it out. So I do kind of think about it those ways when I’m making a piece even though I’m not strictly composing with it. It is there. I kind of think of it as my little alter ego, the little devil that’s up on [my] shoulder. [Laughs.] That’s kind of what I think of the live sampling as.
There’s a singularity to the people we’ve been talking about and the three of you in this band. It’s unlikely that someone’s going to call you to add your guitar in a Chuck Berry-type band.
Unfortunately, no. But I would love that. I love Chuck Berry. [Laughs.] Actually, Hodges played with Chuck Berry. Can you believe that?
No way.
He did some gigs with him in Long Beach.
That’s wild. What I wonder, though, is when you’re working really hard on carving your own path the way the three of you have with the music you make, do you come to a point where you ask, “Are people going to get this?”
Every day. Right now, yeah. I’m never comfortable but I don’t think I’m supposed to be either. But it’s not really about whether people are going to “get it” for me. My job is just to make the music. I am confident enough to know that I’m hearing things or that I’m feeling things and having these ideas that I want to put into reality [so that they’re not just] living in my imagination. It’s important for me to get them out in a number of different ways, whether it’s MSSV or solo or whatever. I’ve been doing that long enough that I can trust that that’s something I’m going to do whether or not that’s accepted as society at large I don’t think is the job of the artist and I think if you start thinking about that you’re getting into some difficult territory.
But I do think about it of course like everybody. I’ll make something and go, like, “Boy, this is going to be different. I don’t know. We’ll see what happens.” What’s really helpful to me is to have bandmates that are as psyched about it as I am. I can come up with some crazy idea for a song and I can bring it to these guys and [they’ll say], “Yeah, let’s try it. Let’s do it. This is great. How ‘bout we change this? Wouldn’t it be cool if we put this thing over here? Change the drum part in this way, take the bass off of this one.” It’s very confidence building for me.
I didn’t even used to sing because I had a guitar teacher a long time ago who told me I shouldn’t sing because it sounded bad. This is when I was a kid. Like, no kidding. Who doesn’t? So I didn’t sing for like 25 years or something and then I wanted to try and Watt and Hodges were, like, “Yeah, of course. We were wondering when you were going to try to sing some of your own songs or something.” Then it was like, “Oh yeah. I guess I can do that.”
For me, a confidence builder for me is the people I’m making the stuff with. I think that if you believe in it yourself, you can’t help but have an audience that also wants to believe in it with you.
