Rolling Stone (Mexico) interview
May 2006, Rolling Stone (Mexico)
thanks to Dora, for translating it and typing it out
The presence of your guitar playing on this new album is huge, what motivated this change?
In many ways I thought I had kept some stuff to myself before. When I joined the band the first time, I only did some guitar solos and play alongs, at that moment I didn’t feel I had the capacity or the possibility to do anything else.
Because of your youth and inexperience?
Yes, I was very young, I didn’t have experience or knowledge to do anything else. It wasn’t like Jimmy Page, who when he started Led Zeppelin had already done session work for ten years. He knew exactly what he wanted to do, not just with The Yardbirds; he had been working on recording studios since 1958, so when he came into Led Zeppelin he felt free to do what he wanted to do. To me that was a learning process between 18 and 21 years old; when I started to record Mother’s Milk I limited myself, I didn’t play as well as I knew I could do. That was my way to make good music, but at the same time I knew I wasn’t doing everything I could.
But in this album, after a lot of meditation, I asked myself why about said limitation, why I couldn’t just let go freely, breaking out of control with my playing. Omar Rodríguez helped me a lot. When I met him he came from a punk scene, but he liked to do things solo, play very fast, stuff I could do. That gave me the courage to put out that part of me to be able to create guitar solos that really exposed that emotional side; I was able to find the way to do it without getting too carried away, but also without setting myself any limits.
I suppose your solo work was very influential.
Of course, especially with Joe Lally from Fugazi, as Ataxia. It was the first time I could get out of control and find a new direction. With Ataxia, every solo was like an explosion, and I wasn’t again worried about me playing too fast or too slow, or if it was too simple. I was only concerned with making interesting sounds with my guitar.
I also learned how to use the studio in a creative way on my solo records. I used to leave a lot to the engineers, but I started experimenting on the studio with things that I didn’t know how to do before. When I was 21, no engineer ever asked me if I wanted my guitar on a single channel or to duplicate it; they took all those decisions. Now it’s a collaboration between both, that’s why I insisted that the engineer that worked with me on my solo albums joined me on this album’s overdubs and mixes. We have the experience, we understand each other perfectly, he’s like a (business) partner and is ready to experiment and take the technical decisions that are necessary to make my dreams come true.
Was this recomforting protagonism by chance?
It was never my idea to be upfront or to stand out in this album. Even when we started to work on this album I felt like the most fragile part of the band. It was a moment of emotional weakness, in which everyone else was making an effort to support me. I had this weird feeling in my gut that made me tell them we had to stop. I came back three weeks later, when they were on the bases of the songs and I started doing my overdubs and all these things. I had to work with those inner feelings that haunted me, with my demons, but I came back stronger and we sounded like a band again. I wanted to participate in every aspect of every song, but I didn’t want to have any keyboards or any compression; I didn’t want it to sound like a studio record, my idea was for it to be like a live-recorded album, very raw.
I worked on a 24 channel console just for the bases, another 24 channels for the overdubs and some others for backups, licks and dubs. Sometimes we had up to 72 channels on the console for guitar. I was very inspired by Led Zeppelin’s Presence or Jimi Hendrix’s last songs, where in spite of having many channels on the record, they were focused on the raw, the fresh and the warm of the feeling you can get from a good band playing together.
So the sounds that seem like synthesizers come from your guitar?
Yes, the only songs with keyboards are the second verse of “Wet Sand” and a synth on “Charlie”, which is very obvious, parallel to the guitar solo. The rest of the time it’s me with my guitar making sounds through the synthesizer, putting together different processed electronic gadgets. In fact, when the synth came out it wasn’t as people know it nowadays, it was an electronic element that existed in science, and was taken advantage of by musicians since the fifties. In that way I’m using it today, just to change traditional sounds. I’m not gonna start playing a keyboard at this point in my life. I’m going to use anything that enriches my sound and changes it, be it a filter, a reverberation, or simple distortion, upping and lowering volume, panning from speaker to speaker or with a flanger, as Hendrix’s engineer did on Electric Ladyland, that’s how I used it on “Dani California”. I’m trying to do everything as possible to play with sounds, with synths, console, mixes, effects, the same air in the studio when I feedback the sound and even the relation between the place I’m standing in and my amp.
