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Fri. Jan 20 & Sat Jan. 21 It hasn’t been 33 straight years for Mission of Burma. No, there was about 20 years where the guys – guitarist/singer Roger Miller, bassist/singer Clint Conley and drummer/singer Peter Prescott – had other gigs. They packed it in the first time because of Miller’s worsening tinnitus. They came back, basically, because he learned to live with it (playing with ear protection) and, he likes making noise. So while Burma lives, they all still have other gigs – Miller’s in Alloy Orchestra, Conley’s a producer for WCVB’s “Chr onicle,” Prescott just recorded a solo album and is working the album resale beat on e-Bay. As to Burma, they became a whenever-they’re-in-the-spirit band, both in concert and in the studio. It revved up again in 2002, with a brilliantly titled album, “OnOffOn.” At present, they’re finishing rough mixes on their first album since 2009’s “The Sound, The Speed, The Light.” We spoke with them in their Allston rehearsal studio on Sunday for an interview that aired Friday on the WBUR-FM (90.9) program “Radio Boston.” (It's up at: http://radioboston.wbur.org/2012/01/20/mission-of-burma They’re playing Brighton Music Hall Friday Jan. 20 and Saturday Jan. 21. We thought we’d give you some out-takes here.JSInk: Let’s start at the end of first round. How were you feeling?Pete: We went on a high note and I skated into another band in a year or two. … I kept going with rock bands and the rock bands took the things I was really fond of about Burma, which was sonic overload and a sense of confusion, with a little peace mixed in, and added a lot more silliness to the whole thing. Later on I played guitar in a couple band sand didn’t expect to play drums again, so it’s weird that I slid back to that place again. Clint: It was definitely sad in a way. We really enjoyed our time together, the four years, and like Peter said, we were ending on kind of a high note or hadn’t overstayed our welcome or we didn’t have that feeling. At the same time, Peter and I were philosophical about it. I don’t remember any wailing or gnashing of teeth. We were ready for the next thing, wondering what the next thing might be. So when the band ended I had designs on probably continuing in music, so I did in fact write a bunch of music the following year but never quite took the step of launching another band, and gradually morphed into another life.One thing that kept Burma in the public eye was when Clint, your song “Revolver” got covered by Moby. I know it (you said royalties) paid for your septic system. How did that feel? A good thing to happen?
Clint: It was a good thing to happen. From time to time, we’d hear about bands that were covering our songs or something like that. We seemed to still be in the conversation five years after we broke up and ten years after we broke up and even 15 years after we broke up. Bands would be doing our songs and I think we were surprised and happy that the music we made in the early ‘80s seemed to still be holding up in the mid-90s, and people were interested in it, didn’t seem to have fallen that far out of the front edge of our little world, our little sub-genre of indy guitar rock kind of thing. To be still relevant 10, 15 years after you’ve made your music, it was more than we probably hoped for when we started in 79. It was gratifying.Roger: In the late 80s, [the label] Rykdodisc reissued all our [original label] Ace of Hearts catalog the first run of the band, 79- to 83, and to our absolute stunned-ness, it was reviewed in Rolling Stone magazine and it said “Four relevant re-issues. They were Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Van Morrison and Mission of Burma.” I was so flabbergasted. I don’t even know what to think. It was like a miracle had happened and yet it didn’t have a big impact on me. … Miles and Hendrix are like gods. We’re just like little petty demons that bugged people in the woods.Peter: That makes me think. We had a lot of enforced humility in the early days, because the sense of amazement that anyone cares at all comes from that in that we always felt we were always at war with people I think. …Talk about the assaultive aspect of the sound.Roger: As someone said after seeing at the Paradise some years back, “When our show’s over they feel totally bruised and battered – and they’ve never felt better.” I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a band thing.Peter: It’s funny because it’s definitely a mind/body thing. He mentioned Hendrix and Pink Floyd were formative things for us all. It’s got to be pummeling to exist; it’s got to have a battering quality to it. But there’s an awful lot of mind meld mixed with that. It’s the best way I can look at it. I don’t think we wanted to go too far in either direction.Roger: Our music is extremely physical but the concepts, like Clint was saying, the concepts and the constructs are fairly well thought-out, not your regular boy-meets-girl lyrics, although there are boy-meets-girl songs but they’re usually a little more complex. So you have this complex almost mental kind of stuff, abstract, but it’s anchored in the super-physical.Peter: Really primal.Roger: That’s a problem for some people, and for those who get it it’s a catharsis.Peter: A pleasure!You’ve worked with a fourth member, Martin Swope in the early days and now Bob Weston. Roger: Bob Weston, as did Martin Swope in the early phase of the band, is our soundman, but he also records snippets of the band on a recorder, then while the band is playing, manipulates them, maybe slows them down, makes them go backwards and then he feeds them back in later in predisposed places. It’s like part of the songs where he’s going to come in. Sometimes, it’s improvised, but sometimes it’s very tight. He’s like a fourth member, like a third and a half member, let’s say, and he has definite parts and it definitely messes with your perceptions of what things are.A lot of bands re-form after being away and its’ a nostalgia trip. They may make a record and people don’t care. You keep making music and it adds to the credibility factor, that you’re continuing to make very good music people are interested in.Peter: I don’t think anyone reformed or not sets out to make a poor forgettable record. I’m not sure why it is ours work. I know we don’t want to do anything that‘s a waste of time for us or anybody else. There’s a lot of thought and time put into it and it doesn’t matter what age we don’t want to put out something that we would consider substandard for any reason. I hope that has something to do with it.The gigs this Friday and Saturday, the tenth anniversary of your reformation. Are you playing new material?Clint: Our gigs these days, we play a mix of old and new. I don’t think anyone’s more surprised than we are that we’re still doing this ten years after those initial gigs of getting back together. The initial idea was to play a show in Boston and a show in New York and that show in Boston turned into three shows and the show in New York turned into two shows and that turned into playing the Fillmore and being asked to play in festivals. And along the way, we’ve been writing new music because that’s what we do. There’s no particular ambition behind this band at this point. We kind of know who we are and know where we’re always going to be. There was quite a lot of hoopla, and a lot of froth around our reformation and we were playing these big halls and people were making a big deal of it. We knew that froth would blow off at some time and things would get down to a more manageable level and indeed they have. But it’s astonishing to us we’re able to play when we want and more or less where we want. We’re in a great position. So, we’re making records just because it seems the next right thing to do. Hopefully, we’ll know when to stop but there’s good material out there. I would say we feel as disconnected from any particular scene as we ever did. It’s not like we were ahead of time and history has caught up. People would say “Were you ahead of your time? Or “Has history proven you right?” We just feel we’re as disconnected from the world around us as we’ve ever been and that’s just the way it’s always going to be. And we’re having a blast doing what we do, and let the world take it or leave it.What can you tell me about the new music? Any unexpected forays into new areas, or a continuation of what you’re doing throughout? Roger: Well, a little bit of thought behind this record. Pete thought we should we should try to push the limit a little bit. Initially Pete and I had brought in some new songs, after [our last album] “Sound Speed Light” came out and we both looked at these songs and said these are like songs we would always write, so Pete and I just threw the songs out the window. Never came back to it. We came back with more of a vengeance on ourselves. We wanna do stuff that’s more outside our comfort zone. In my case, I wrote a couple of songs on bass guitar which I’d never done in Burma before and I wrote a couple songs on acoustic guitar and I think we’ve all tried to do something a little outside our comfort zone and keep us a little off kilter. If you’re a little bit unsteady you work harder to keep your balance and that gives more vim and vigor as it were.Peter: We’re a very question-of-degree band. Things always seem to be vibrating or moving or changing or doing something, but from an outsider’s perspective it sounds like a big ball of noise. There’s always some movement between us and how we’re writing a song and I think that’s on a nice uphill glide with this batch of songs.Clint: What he said. Clint you touched on it earlier. Roger and Pete, what are you aspirations and goals?Roger: We’re all pretty similar. Each of us is different. The first round of Mission of Burma, ‘79 to ‘83, we lived and breathed Mission of Burma. Everything else was secondary. We all have different lives now and we have lots of different things. So it’s not that type of intensity, though the minute we’re on stage it’s back 100 percent, there’s no difference. But we’re not really ambitious; we’re never going to be in the real sense rock stars. Some people think we are but it’s kind of amusing. We just want to make stuff that will stand up for us and for others over time and for the present. But whenever it’s ready to not happen then it shouldn’t happen. We’re so undriven, in a way, the world pulls us around. If the world keeps saying you should do this, we’ll do it. And if the world loses interest, well, yeah, we’ve lost interest too. It’s just not a problem to us.Peter: It’s interesting how there’s a few things we retain from 150 years ago or whenever it was. And one is the lack of ambition thing, every time they both say that I’d start laughing but it’s sort of true. We’re very personally ambitious I think in some ways as people and it’s not like our songs are unambitious, but there’s such a hopelessly anti-careerist tinge to it which was there then and is there now and I think just allows us to play whatever we want and feel comfortable with that rather than, “Oh, someone doesn’t like us.”Roger: This is something Clint said. I remember reading it in print some years ago and it always struck me. Even back in the day and in the present, there’s a big city but we’re just like these guys that camp out in the woods – “We have a little fire and we do little forays into the town. When people look for us all they find is the burned out fire, ‘cause we’ve moved our camp.”The new record. When and where?Roger: It’ll probably come out in the early spring. We’re not exactly certain. We haven’t decided the exact fashion it will come out. Things come out any number of ways these days.Peter: Early spring, we expect that. Roger: Spring, late spring?Clint: Mid-late spring?Peter: Uh-oh. Bad questions.Roger: We don’t know when it’s coming out. Peter: Logistics have always been a problem. |
