From: jupiter2@netcom.com (Hal Broome)
Subject: hal's interview with Tim Gorman @ San Jose Plaza Park 7/23/92
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 92 00:16:29 GMT
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services  (408 241-9760 guest) 
Summary: second interview with Jefferson Starship
Keywords: the Who, Keith Emerson, Paul Kantner, "America" song



 [This is the second in a series of interviews with individual
  members of Jefferson Starship:  the New Generation.  The next
  will be at the Vietnam Veterans benefit in San Jose on Sept. 26th.
  The band has been reading your net reviews and enjoying them,
  although Paul Kantner went out of his way to tell me that he
  took exception to one reviewer who wrote that Paul hated America:
  "I don't hate America," he protested to me, "I _love_ America!
  It's still the best place to live."  Hopefully we'll set the
  record straight in a future interview with him; feel free to
  email any questions that you might have.  Meanwhile, it is
  the band's keyboardist Tim Gorman's turn in the hot seat. . . .]

hal:  How did you wind up with the Who?

Tim:  During the early 80s I was in a band from England called Lazy Racer;
we were on A & M records, and we were kind of a cult thing over there--not
a very big cult!--we did release two records in the States and the rest of
the world, had a minor following, and the guy that produced our records
was also the producer of the Who and the Rolling Stones; his name was
Glyn Johns--he's made a lot of famous records, Joan Armatrading, and he
was the guy responsible for bringing me to England and sort of got my
career going.

hal:  Where are you from originally?

Tim:  I'm originally from the Bay area; I was born and raised in
San Francisco.

hal:  Did you go to the Fillmore during the days that Paul Kantner
played there?

Tim:  I did, actually, yea, but I also used to go see Cream quite
a bit, and Traffic. . . .

hal:  The British Invasion bands.

Tim:  I sort of cut my teeth on that stuff more than the American
stuff, even though I was a big fan of Little Richard and Fats Domino as
piano players . . . but I also loved Keith Emerson a lot.  I grew up
with this kind of binge for English rock.  When I got out of school
I went and studied classical piano (from the age of four) and went through
Conservatory all the way through college and got my degree in composition
and theory and didn't really know what to do with a degree and started
doing session work as a way to make a living as a musician, and from that
Glyn Johns heard my playing and my song-writing and recommended me for this
job over in England, brought me over there, and pretty much anything he produced
I got to work on.  He would recommend me for Stones sessions, and the Who
were looking for a new keyboard player and Glyn played one of the Lazy
Racer albums for Pete Townshend, and Pete liked my playing, as I heard
it from Glyn, and I was in the Bay area visiting with my parents and
Glyn called saying they wanted me to join the band, there was no audition,
it was like a dream come true!

hal:  Was there a different atmosphere playing for British bands
compared to American bands?  I know from having lived there that
the British audience is far quicker to boo the band than here.

Tim:  There's an attitude difference towards the music; I think that
British musicians are not as relaxed as American bands are in terms of
the style which they play; they tend to play a very punchy style, and
they are quite aggressive about the way they go about it; of course
we all steal from each other, you know, and it seems like that it
goes in waves:  you know the European wave brings something to
American and we take from that and send them something back, and they
get into that and send us something back.

hal:  Did you ever meet Keith Emerson?

Tim:  Yes, I have, I met him once.

hal:  Did you find your classical training was a help or an
empediment?  You know that rock and roll is rather basic. . . .

Tim:  It is basic but it requires quite a bit of technique to play
rock and roll piano well; the tempos can be quite quick sometimes so
your fingers do need to move around pretty good, so classical training
does help in that sense.  I've played a lot of jazz, too, not that
you should cross styles that much, but the classical training definitely
helps; and you never know, there's always one of those recording sessions
out there where there's a bullet with your name on it:  where someone
puts a piece of music in front of you that looks like fly shit and you have
to sight read it pretty fast!  And in those days it comes in kind of
handy. . . .

hal:  A friend of mine has detected some Aaron Copeland influence in
your playing; what have you learned from Copeland?

Tim:  Just a great sense of harmony; he had a great harmonic rhythm
to his works, and by that I mean that he would displace a chord, like
playing a fifth in the bass, and by playing a sixth on top, and being
that very open, very APPALACHIAN SPRING type sound.  The way I got
into the KBC Band was that when I came back to the States one of the
very first phone calls I got was from Paul Kantner, who was looking
for a keyboard player for the KBC Band, and I don't really know who
recommended me--somehow Paul got a hold of my name--and I've been a
big fan of Paul's music for a long time, I grew up listening to his
compositions and stuff, and so I felt I had really the best of both worlds:
I had worked with Townshend who is an excellent composer and I got
to work with Kantner who I consider on the same level composition-
wise.   To me they are both very intense writers; they both have that
great poetic, that great lyrical quality to their music, and their vision
of that idea of how a song should be shaped is usually completely different
from how other people approach rock and roll.

hal:  Yea, Paul, from what I've heard on early tapes, has this
"method acting" style of composition:  he'll tell a band to
"think Saturday Afternoon" when writing about that. . . .

Tim:  A perfect example of that would be the day he
handed me six pieces of computer read-out paper with the
lyrics to "America"--the original lyrics to "America" which
I still have that sheet--this was my first rehearsal with them
too! and so I kind of cut my teeth on that song, and he says,
he just gave me this bunch of paper and he said "well this
is a kind of an American thing that I'm working on and it is in
'B'"--like that, and he never did give me any other kind of 
instructions other than that!  This was on our second meeting,
we had met originally for lunch just to say "hi" and meet each
other, and the first rehearsal was kind of intense for me, and
we just sort of fell into it, and we got signed to Arista and
the song got recorded, it got cut down by producers, engineers, and
stuff, but we now, every once in a while, we will float into a very
free section and he'll grab some of those old lines from those
original six pages.

hal:  Did you write that end, that organ bit of "America" where it
seems that the bass tone just shatters everything?

Tim:  Yea, the instruments have come quite a long way; the chords
that I'm using now, which Paul and I both got on the Airplane tour,
we just really love that sound and we have had quite a bit of luck
with them:  and they have that real symphonic quality that we are
looking for in this type of set-up, and they also have this ability to
be very spatial, which is another quality of this band. . . .

hal:  You wrote the song "Wrecking Crew" for the KBC album; Slick
was telling me that he helped you put it together.

Tim:  I've always been this real big fan of the STRAIGHT SHOOTER album
by Bad Company, and liked Ron Nevison's production a lot, and um,
I just played guitar just well enough to write songs, and I 
needed Slick to help me arrange guitar parts; I wanted it to sound
Mick Ralphs-like:  the original idea was to have the song have
kind of a Bad Company feel to it in terms of chord changes--simple
chords, A, G, D.  I wanted the lyric content to be very hard-
edged; there was a building being torn down and I had the first
sampler we had just bought, and I was sampling a pile-driver in
downtown San Francisco where they were erecting a new skyscraper
and I was making a sample with a tape recorder, and the workmen
were yelling stuff about how the wrecking crew would be
here tomorrow, and I just got the idea from these guys!

hal:  Is there a new song you are excited about in particular?

Tim:  Well there is a new one I'm working on called "Guns and Guitars"
which is a kind of following in the tradition of our serial killer,
you know, type of song . . .  I wanted to do something in the studio
to process guitars in a new and different way--perhaps to make them
sound explosive, even bigger than they do now.

hal:  Any new keyboard technology that you can't wait to get your
hands on?

Tim:  I'm using a Hammond organ in the band, an XB-2, and it has
been completely retooled and cut down--it only weighs thirty pounds--
and it has a complete computer microprocessor in it; it will store
128 sounds, which is great, and we use it for like "Girl with the Hungry
Eyes"; it has midi, so I use it to go to my brain rack, so it not
only has the Hammond organ sound it also has the synth sound that
was used on the original recordings.

hal:  So where do you see the band heading in the near future?

Tim:  I've been on the road with Paul pretty much for a year now;
and we have had small breaks:  you have to be out there playing
in front of people.  We are not trying to rehash anything, we are
trying to do something new; this is a lineup we are
really proud of.

hal:  Well, the rest of the band is tuning up:  anything you want
to say to the Net community out there?

Tim:  I just want to say thanks for coming to see the band and
for the years of listening to Paul's music; and thank you for
the future as well that you have given the band, because we want
to continue and we do see some recording coming up in the future
and we are excited to play for more and more people all the time!

[The band proceeded to play the following set list:
 We Can Be Together
 Ride the Tiger
 Crown of Creation
 Wooden Ships
 Law Man
 I'm on Fire
 Papa's Boogie
 Ain't No Country Girls
 Girl with the Hungry Eyes
 Genesis Hall (the Richard Thompson/Fairport Convention song)
 I'm Moving
 Somewhere Over the Rainbow (duet by Tim and Papa John Creach)
 Dark Ages
 America
 Volunteers
 enc:  Other Side of this Life

hal