Do you know people who make you feel like you’re moving in slow motion? I don’t just mean an over-caffeinated coworker on a Pixy Stix bender, but someone whose brain you sense is moving at close to light speed? That’s the feeling I get when speaking with Mike Keneally. If you’re not familiar with this Keneally, please get that way. A Wikipedia thumbnail might point out that he’s been a sideman for the likes of Frank Zappa and Steve Vai. Right—he’s a virtuoso. But he’s also a towering figure of contemporary music and a singular stylist in his own right. It’s obvious from the dimensions, density and the man’s musical output that he is a force of limitless ideas. To hear him elaborate on his projects and music in general can make you a little woozy. I was recently lucky enough to be woozified by MK in person during a stop on the Dethklok tour, an outreach vehicle for Adult Swim’s Metalocalypse series.

Seated at the back of the decked out Dethbus, we started by discussing Scambot 1, Mike’s long-marinating, multi-phase project which is finally seeing the light of day. I wondered if there were disadvantages to working on a purposely deadline-free project.

The only con I can think of is that with the amount of interaction that’s now kind of expected in the modern era, where you write online about what you’re doing and everyone gets a glimpse into your process in a way they didn’t used to have, the only con I can think of is that people get very, very eager to hear it—and it’s not even a con because it just builds anticipation which I think is always good, especially nowadays, when there’s so much competition for people’s attention. The people who are into what I do have known about this project for a long time and it would’ve been nice to get it done sooner, but from my perspective it was fun to do an album and have it built into the process from the beginning that there’s going to be no deadline set on anything, it’s going to take place at its own rate and I’ll do other albums while I’m doing it and I’ll do tours and other projects and just see to whatever business I need to see to. But always as sort of the wallpaper to the whole experience in the background is this major project. Now that I’ve got the first one done and I have quite a bit of work to do on parts 2 and 3, I’m trying to maintain the same kind of relaxed feel for the whole thing. I don’t want to rush to get Scambot 2 out—I might do another two albums before the second volume comes out. I see this as being a really long term, macro-project in my life.

If ever rock music spawned a worth gesamtkunstwerk (yeah, I said it—I didn’t go to college for nuthin’), Scambot would have to be it. The synthesis of music, art, and narrative create a lushly detailed artwork. Within such a framework, everything matters and everything belongs—probably right down to the font used in the liner notes. Though any album’s song sequence is important (Mike has described rescuing his album, Boil That Dust Speck, from an atmosphere of depression by simply honing the sequence), it may be more so in conjunction with a presentation like Scambot. I asked Mike how, in this case, the egg influenced the chicken.

Everything sort of nudged everything along. It was sort of a three pronged attack—there’s the music aspect, there’s the narrative aspect and there’s the artwork aspect. One of the things that was fun about this was that I was developing a plot line for a thing and really the only reason that I decided to do this sort of lengthy narrative was an experiment to see how one thing influences another. Because I would have an idea for a character or the way a character looked—I sketched out the way all the major characters looked, or felt to me like they should look—and then the way they looked would influence a bit of action, and that bit of action would influence the way a piece of music turned out. Then once I heard that piece of music, that might influence a lyric and then that lyric, in turn, would influence the plot. It was almost like all these little dogs on a racetrack, like, oh, the art just pulled ahead, now the music’s pulled ahead, now the plot line’s pulled ahead, now the lyrical content has pulled ahead. And in every case a development in one area would influence the rest of it. It wasn’t like I had written out an entire plot continuity and then had to devise the music to it. I started out with just some kind of basic tent poles, a couple basic narrative themes, and some ideas about action that would take place along the way, but I didn’t have the whole plot continuity worked out until after all the music was recorded. So the music influenced how the narrative goes and then once the music was done I spent a long time  writing the story, which is not in a standard short story form, it’s actually like half story, half outline, sometimes it reads like a screenplay, sometimes it reads like a treatment. What I put in the booklet for the CD forms the bare bones of what I imagine to be the comic strip, which is yet another thing I haven’t even really had time to do, other than I have some preliminary drawings. I have this idea of doing an online comic strip which also develops the story of Scambot.

Ideally, if it takes root and people are sufficiently intrigued by it, I would love to see it develop into something that you could watch on a TV screen, or see performed on a stage. I’m not imposing any kind of restrictions on the concept at all; I’m just kind of like sitting back and seeing where it flies. But, I’m just grateful that I finally have something to show for all the weird mental machinations of the past few years and finally, in a few weeks, people will actually begin to see and hear what this whole thing is all about.

In lesser hands, such a free form project might suffer from over thought or simply gather dust in a notebook. I wondered how the artist knew when this work was done.

The whole thing about the plot line and the characters and any dialog or story or any of that, in terms of it being an album that people would listen to, I didn’t want it to sound like the soundtrack to a story or have the music be constantly interrupted by dialog; the album is mostly instrumental. My thought is that I would use the plot line as a device to help me create something, whatever it might be and, as with any album I make, you just feel when it’s done. You know when you’ve finally hit that combination of things and you might rethink it later. Dust Speck is a perfect example—I thought it was done, then sat back and listened to it and it wasn’t. It was only the second album I’d ever made, so I hadn’t yet developed a certain kind of inner guide to that sort of thing, just a feeling of completion. So, when I finally narrowed it down to the 18 tracks that are on Scambot, out of the 60 or so that I’ve been working on for the project, it was just finding the music that lived next to each other the most comfortably, the thing that when combined into one running order made the most complete statement. And then when I’d settled on those 18 tracks, it was just a question of refining the recordings and the mixes on those tracks until finally it was a start-to-finish flow that is the most intentional of anything I’ve ever done, naturally because of the time I spent doing it and the fact that I wasn’t imposing a deadline on it. I was just slowly rabbiting away on day after day after day until finally I could sit back and go, that’s it that’s done. I had long lists of things that needed to be done and I’d do them and cross them off the list until finally there was nothing left on the list and the album was finished. And then, once that was done, we decided that we were going to do.

We like to do these special editions— it’s great fun to do them. We get to do some extra packaging and try to think of something special for the second disc. Lately we’ve been doing DVDs, but on this one we decided we wanted to get back to a purely musical experience. I had music left over from the plot continuity that’s contained within the time period described on Scambot 1, but that didn’t fit in musically or couldn’t have fit in terms of the time allotment on a single CD. I knew I didn’t want to put these songs out later on Scambot 2 or 3 because they weren’t going to belong to that part of the story line. So, what I did was take that music and very quickly—like the absolute opposite of the work process for the first disc—the second disc, which is called Songs and Stories Inspired by Scambot 1, was just like this spasmodic, feverish response to the first record. So you get two very different experiences: the first record is very considered and the second record is very raw. Eventually there’s going to be, I presume, a total of six discs, because there’s going to Scambot 2 and Scambot 3 later on, and each one of those, I think I will probably choose to continue in the same vein, to work hard to craft a specific, very considered musical statement for the first disc and then the second disc will be sort of like an extended combination sigh of relief and get anything out of my system that I wasn’t able to do on the first disc. For this album, the second disc has a lot more crazy improvisation and extended guitar playing and really weird vocal ideas—bits of craziness that at one point earlier in the process I had imagined would be part of Scambot 1 but which for whatever reason, Scambot 1, while still a demanding and peculiar album, is not as peculiar as I imagined it was going to be a while ago, so I saved some of the really fuckin’ peculiar stuff for the second disc.

Knowing his affinity for and deep appreciation of the Zappa catalog with its conceptual continuity, and owing to the integrated approach of Scambot, I asked Mike if he viewed his own growing output as a comprehensive artwork.

I was always delighted, as a youngster and hardcore Zappa fan, at the idea of a single body of work that is potentially interchangeable, and the idea that a lyric or a melodic fragment on one album is a reference to something elsewhere in the body of work and the whole project/object framework idea. Frank was someone who stated that explicitly, but I think any artist’s work is that—it’s just an idea of whether or not you’re conscious of it. I do like the idea about being conscious of constructing a body of work, but it’s not something that I really focus on too intentionally. It’s more about that I’m just working on a project and I just try to get that project as complete and as thorough a fulfillment of the creative impulse that I had when I first thought of it. And then when it’s done, I sit back and look at how that fits into the continuity of everything.

So, it’s not a case of cultivating a motif here or there and forcing it in just because?

I don’t think there’s a specific ‘poodle bites’ type moment. There’s a couple things in the story contained in the booklet, a couple of subtle references to earlier works. When I think about the album specifically, I think that if there are references to an earlier work it’s probably subconscious. But I have a feeling that in the succeeding volumes the character of Tranquillado is going to come back and make an appearance in a later episode.

Have you ever considered stitching together a plot line/stage show/opera from your entire career?

No! I know that has worked for Abba and Billy Joel and Queen and any number of other bands, but it always seems like it’s somebody else who imposes that structure. But it would be kind of fun to be the one in charge of doing the stitching. I’ve never considered that, but it’s kind of a fun idea.

Keneally has been a road warrior for more than 20 years, circling the globe as a hired gun and solo artist. We talked about the possibility of taking Scambot on tour.

I have to figure out the best way to do it. It’s very elaborate music and to execute it with any degree of faithitude onstage would be quite an undertaking and would require a lot of rehearsal time, which is always the real difficulty. It’s never hard when I get together with some people and play some music, but if you want to do a really complex, conceptual thing, it has to be rehearsed, which means you have to find time in everyone’s schedules and everyone needs to be paid. And that’s always the challenge. It would be wonderful to do something which is not too dissimilar to what Dethklok does, which is to have a thing which is simultaneously musical and visual that has some kind of film component that accompanies the musical performance and I think that the concept of Scambot is sturdy enough to support something like that. But maybe that doesn’t happen until Scambot 2 is out. We’ll see. I definitely want to tour next year and obviously Scambot will play a part in that, but it might not be a complete performance, it might just be the standard thing of, you work some of the tunes into your live repertoire.

Who would you cast as Ian McPlant or Boleous T. Ophunji in a film component of Scambot, vis a vis the Dethklok concept.

It’s difficult for me to even attempt to conceive of that, because, the way we view ourselves in the Dethklok is we’re the pit band, and the characters speak for themselves on the video screen. So, as musicians, we’re not attempting to manifest the members of Dethklok at all—all we’re doing is providing the live music accompaniment to the characters who do what they have to do up on the screen. We’re all dressed in black and relatively nonchalant about our presence on stage, uh, except for Beller (Bryan Beller, Dethklok bassist and longtime Keneally collaborator), who is getting all his metal rocks off, There are some attempts to be reasonably theatrical and energetic and engage the crowd to a small degree, but really we don’t see the show visually as being about us at all and we never consider ourselves as manifesting the character. So I think I might take a similar approach to a Scambot thing, where our job as musicians onstage would simply to perform the music and not necessarily to embody the characters. And maybe that’s something that is done visually on a screen, or through props on stage. Maybe there’s like cardboard characters who come floating through the proceedings when something happens. I’m not sure.

You wouldn’t try to cast Brian Dennehy or someone like that?

Brian Dennehy would make a pretty good Ophunji, actually. Who else … Paul Giamatti would make a very good Ophunji. And I think it’s gotta be Corey Feldman to play Scambot. That would be awesome. Now that you’ve got me thinking this way I’ll probably have the thing cast by the end of the night.

While Keneally is known to be a musical sponge, able to play and digest anything thrown his way, in all of my  research, I’ve never noticed anything to suggest a heritage of death metal fandom. I wondered if, after several tours playing the heavy and technical Dethklok set, there has been any influence on Mike’s own music.

Photo By: Todd Zimmer

I expected it would have more of an influence. I imagined a couple of years ago when this started that it would result in more of a metallic tinge to the Scambot music, but I think it’s maybe had the equal and opposite reaction where a lot of the music on Scambot is quite avant garde and some of it is almost symphonic in nature. I think I might have taken the opportunity while making Scambot to really give all the other aspects of what I do free reign, so in some ways it’s more an album like Sluggo!, where there’s a lot of different styles represented. Given that I’ve worked on it a long time, I think it’s a good picture of a lot of musical obsessions that I have. But, right now on this particular tour I think I’m enjoying the more than ever the down-tuned thing, the crazy speed picking approach, the relentless machine gun attack. More than before, I’m enthusiastic about writing some stuff in that vein. So, it might be that it took three tours for it to really sink in. I have a feeling now, sitting here, that that’s going to sneak into the next volume of Scambot. Given that I started the work for this album years before there even was a Dethklok, it makes sense that what I did was just follow that initial impulse I had years and years regarding what Scambot was going to be to its logical end and as a result it doesn’t sound too specifically influenced by the Dethklok thing. But now that I’ve got the first volume of this multi-volume work completed–and I do have a lot of music prepared for the second and third volumes–but there’s a lot of space on the canvas for other things to take hold. For that reason, I think that when I start working in earnest on figuring out a running order for Scambot 2 and figuring out what other new music is going to fill those empty spaces, it’s going to be heavy.

What type of gear are you using for the Dethklok tour?

I’m still using Rivera amplification, but whereas on a Keneally club tour I would be using a Rivera Quiana, a beautiful sounding 1×12 amplifier, now I’m playing a Rivera Knucklehead through two 4×12 Rivera cabinets and it’s a much more heavy, intense, powerful sound. I’m loving it. And Jackson has hooked me up with a new iteration of their Randy Rhoads guitar which looks and sounds really beautiful. I was playing a Rhoads on the last tour, but this is a new model that is just killing. Not that much in the way of effects. I’m using a Digitech HarmonyMan for some of the more orchestral sections where, Brendon (Small, Metalocalypse mastermind) recorded like 18 guitar overdubs on the record. I’m using a harmonizer to pick up some of the slack of having only two guitar players on stage. And, you know volume pedal, a wah-wah and a tuner and that’s pretty much it. I keep things stripped down. Brendon is using some more effects; Bryan is using some effects on his bass. From playing a lot with Rick Musallam in my band—Rick always has a huge pedal board filled with all kinds of things—I’ve taken that opportunity to keep my own sound pretty stripped down, more just like a guitar plugged to an amp with a minimum of other stuff in the chain, kind of a more classic guitar sound. It’s always about the sound your fingers make when they come in contact with the instrument.

Photo By: Todd Zimmer

You think the aforementioned constitute enough high intensity endeavors? Nope. Not for Mike Keneally. Aside from future Scambot  projects and who knows what else, the pipeline is full of a dizzying array of projects in various states of completion.  Somewhere along the way, we can expect a collaboration with XTC’s Andy Partridge, a take on the unfathomable Marco Minnemann’s Normalizer 2 franchise and a new volume of Steve Vai piano reductions—solo piano arrangements of the guitar hero’s compositions. When I last talked with Mike nearly ten years ago, he characterized the first volume as being one of the most difficult projects he’d ever undertaken. I asked about the progress of the next volume and from where the difficulty arises.

The main difficulty in the second one thus far has proven to be finding the time to do it. I was looking in my sound files last night that I have on the computer and finding that I started work on the first song for the second volume of the piano album in February and I still don’t consider it done. That’s one song out of eleven that we’ve already chosen. It’s not tearing my heart out to the extent that the first album did, I think because we managed to get it out. I’ve proven to myself that I can do a solo piano record that can be a work of quality and that it’s going to be well received. At the time it was an unproven idea and a little bit of a risk to take Steve’s music which people are so familiar with as a specifically guitaristic experience and to translate it to the piano and find a way to not just do justice to his compositions, but to convey something in the phrasing that still has that feeling of Vai in it, even though a piano can’t do all the things that a guitar can do. But I found ways to do it. I’m very thrilled—and Steve is thrilled as well—at the way the first album turned out. So now there’s that kind of wind at your back feeling of confidence when sitting down to work out the second record. The issue at this point is simply time, because it takes forever for me to come up with an arrangement that I’m pleased with for solo piano. It’s such an unforgiving medium and you’ve just got to do it all at once, sitting there by yourself. You know, there’s no chance to go back later and tart things up. All the music just has to come out of two hands in the moment. It has to be something that pleases me and it has to be something that pleases Steve and then it has to be something that someone who’s a Vai fan—or someone who’s not a Vai fan—can sit and listen to and receive as a valid piece of music, as opposed to a watered down rearrangement of something that should be played on the guitar in the first place. It’s finding a way to take that music and make it live in a completely different context. It’s not daunting in the same way that it was the first time.  But it is daunting in just knowing that it takes a long time to do it and that we have 11 songs chosen and I haven’t finished the first one.  (laughter)

Sorry for bringing that up!

But thank goodness that Steve is very patient. I finished recording the first album in 1999 and then Steve didn’t get around to putting it out until 2004. His attitude toward the whole thing is similar to mine in that you do the work and it takes as long as it takes and when it’s right and when it’s done, that’s when it’s done.

If an impartial party, say Mike Garson or Chick Corea, were going to piano reduce some Keneally tunes, what would be a couple of your choices?

Oh, man, I’d love to hear Mike Garson rearrange the entire “Lightnin’ Roy” for solo piano, and I’d like to hear Chick Corea re-imagine just about all of The Universe Will Provide.

Speaking of difficult, let’s discuss Normalizer 2: Evidence of Humanity. Starting from a percussion piece, what exactly inspired you for melodies/textures?

Because I was working on that at precisely the same time I was working on finishing Scambot—sometimes in the same week I would work two days on Scambot and then two days going to this other studio working on Normalizer 2. My M.O. for Normalizer was to respond completely spontaneously and be very much in the moment and not pre-plan anything. Before going to the studio I hadn’t even listened to the entire drum solo. I would literally say, we’re going to concentrate on the next 90 seconds. Then I’d listen to that and whatever fragment of an idea or concept or texture or timbre or whatever that piece of drumming placed in my head, that’s where I would start and I wouldn’t question it. That was the main thing: don’t second guess a thing. Whatever Marco was doing, if it suggested a bass line to me or it suggested a guitar melody, a keyboard thing—it might be a thing where I would listen to it and I would hear in my head a very specific melody and I’d work that out and record that and then orchestrate and develop that theme. Or, it might be a thing where he was doing something that made me just want to improvise, because the drum part is a 51-minute improvisation, and there are time when I just wanted to fly along with him. So I might say, ok, for the next three minutes I’m going to do a guitar improvisation along with the drum part. Then I might figure out little sections of the improvisation and choose to orchestrate them or figure out a composed bass line that would hit certain landmarks along the way in the improvised guitar part. If, even though it was improvised guitar, I would compose a bass part that supported it in a way that had development and logic. So that was tremendously great fun and it was just sort of like putting up wallpaper, you know? You’ve got this big empty space and you just work on a little bit at a time. It was extremely stream of consciousness and I wasn’t worried about going back and referring to earlier themes on the thing. I would show up for a day’s work and say, ok, we’ve done 16:00 so far, it would be great to get another 2:00 today, or I’m going to shoot for 4:00 today and see how we do, and the, ok, play me the next bit of drums. And whatever little piece of music I would hear in my head as suggested by the drums would be the next step to take.

Is it through-composed? You didn’t take a motif here or there and refer back to it?

No, I just let it flow. There were times where I thought, it would be cool to refer back to an earlier thing, but then I thought it felt like an imposition to do that. It’s not one long uninterrupted thing; it’s divided into 17 tracks. So I just chose to say, I’m not going to have it be like a thing where it has to have a symmetrical form or something like that. It’s just a presentation of instrumental pieces. I just did what felt right at every step and ended up with an album that I’m really, really happy with. Again, because the basis of it is Marco’s playing, it sounds like me, but it sounds like a kind of me that hasn’t been heard in quite this way before. It’s all mixed, it’s basically in the can ready to go and I’m excited about people hearing it.

Would it be possible to perform any of it live?

Sure, yeah. There are some parts that are very much a song structure kind of feeling that could be, probably not performed note-for-note as it is on the album because the basis of it is a drum improvisation, but  there are some sections where I was  inspired to create something that felt very structured. It would be great fun to take it to the stage.

Based on what you’ve heard, would it be possible to superimpose, say, your recording with Trey Gunn’s?

Sort of like what the Flaming Lips did with Zaireeka. To me that would be a good time to sit in the middle of a room and have four of the albums playing at once.

Just as Mike Keneally’s music is an extension of his personality and sum of experiences, so too are his writings. His website, Myspace, etc. are jammed with tour diaries and blogs—tens of thousands of words of unabashedly detailed prose. I asked Mike if he would ever consider expanding upon that concept through a memoir.

I would consider it. I don’t know whether it would be a memoir in any kind of a standard sense. There’s some aspects of the Scambot plot continuity which almost is a memoir, because it’s drawing on a lot of things that have happened to me filtered into this abstract story line. I don’t know what the market would be for a book about my life, so whether or not that’s the shape it would take or whether it would be something that is maybe little more impressionistic that just uses aspects of things that have happened. But I do like to write, although right now I’m very thrilled to be taking from writing. Last year I did a super extensive Dethklok tour diary and it was my intention to do something similar this year, but having finally completed the story for the booklet of Scambot, I find that I ran out of juice. I really wanted to just concentrate on performing on this tour; I just wanted to be a player. It’s a great relief to have a few weeks to just kind of think about one thing and doing one thing well. Having said that, I’ve been producing an album for Matt Resnicoff, his first solo record. Matt is well known as a writer and editor for Guitar Player and Musician magazine, and he also was associate producer on Wooden Smoke and is fabulous guitar player. We’ve recorded hours and hours of music and I have all the Pro Tools files for that stuff on the road with me, so I’m going to be trying to sequence that record whenever I have some time during this tour. And I also want to get started on the comic strip for Scambot while I’m out on the road too. So, right now I’m taking a break from prose writing. Where my energy is headed in that direction, I think when I sit down to start writing prose again is probably going to be just to continue developing the Scambot storyline for the upcoming volumes.

For me, no conversation with Mike would be complete without picking his brain about music in general. His instantaneous answers further demonstrate a lexiconic mind at work. I asked if he was obsessed with listening to anything at the moment.

I’ve been putting the iPhone on shuffle and seeing what happens, so I find that the iPhone itself has obsessions, like it keeps wanting to play Messiaen. So I’ve been listening to a lot of Messiaen. It’s been going back and forth between Messiaen and live Pavement and They Might Be Giants and Neil Young. Lately when I get to the bunk there’s a little DVD player, so my leisure time has been heavily occupied by old SCTV reruns. I should also mention that I’ve been listening to mp3s of the Thom Yorke solo performances that happened in L.A. a couple weeks ago and also his new single. I’ve been really delighted by this explosion–I don’t know how tuned in you are to what Thom Yorke’s been doing but I think it’s established that I’m crazy Radiohead fan, and he put together a presentation of his solo material w/ Flea on bass and Nigel Godrich and Joey Waronker on drums and a Brazilian percussionist named Mauro something (Refosco) … and it was really exciting to hear him in a non-Radiohead context working out all this stuff.

Radiohead has been taking a very sort of episodic approach to the release of music this year. They’ve put out a lot of stuff, but they haven’t put out an album. They’re just like letting things leak and insinuate themselves into the atmosphere. I think that’s a fun way to acknowledge that the landscape has changed musically. I’m happy that (Thom Yorke) is so invigorated by working in a new context that he seems so creative and happy right now.

A recent Keneallist newsletter noted that Scambot is “dedicated to anyone who still listens to entire albums with their headphones on.” What are some of your favorite headphone albums?

There’s an album by Negativland called A Big 10-8 Place, which is sort of a collage approach similar to We’re Only In It For the Money or something, but it’s almost all collage, almost all juxtaposition and hardly anything that you could describe as music. I find that an incredibly delightful listen. An album by Crass, called Christ, The Album is a big favorite for headphone listening. Initiation by Todd Rundgren is a great album for headphones; OK Computer is a great album for headphones. I like jazz recordings where you get a palpable feel of the room, like the Plugged Nickel Miles Davis recordings or certain John Coltrane recordings where you just feel like you’re plopped right in the middle of the stage or the recording studio.

Can you cite a favorite Genesis album?

Lamb (The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, 1974) was the first thing that came to my mind, so I guess you really can’t question that.

What XTC album should everyone listen to right now?

Right now? I think Black Sea. It’s not necessarily the one that comes up first—Skylarking gets a lot of mention. I think Drums and Wires was a real seminal record. But I think Black Sea, in a lot of ways, is an intensely perfect statement and incredibly well-produced—that’s another great headphone record. Melodically and groove-wise and band unity-wise, to me that album is a peak for them.

Who is your favorite Zappa drummer?

I love Chester (Thompson). I love Aynsley (Dunbar). I love Vinnie (Colaiuta). I love Terry (Bozzio), I love Chad (Wackerman). I am loathe to necessarily single anyone out at the expense of anybody else, but Chester was the first guy I thought of, so maybe it’s Chester.

Do you have a favorite album cover or album cover artist?

Wall of Voodoo put out a single that was called, “Two Songs by Wall of Voodoo.” Side one was “Mexican Radio” and side two was called. “There’s nothing on this side,” which was a 10-minute piece where they just keep saying over and over again, “there’s nothing on this side.” The front cover was like a bunch of doll heads and stuff impaled on spikes in this overgrown, weed-ridden garden or something like that and there was no text on the front cover, it’s just this strange, redolent-of-a-place disturbing image. It’s not an album image that’s iconic–hardly anybody knows about it–but I think it’s an incredible use of that canvas. As far as an album artist, I think what Cal Schenkel did in enhancing and commenting on Frank’s body of work was fantastic. I love the idea that Frank’s work was interchangeable with Cal’s and that they informed each other–one couldn’t have existed without the other. I thought Cal’s work was genius, but I also love Atticus’ (Wolrab) stuff that he does for me. I feel just as Frank was fortunate to have Cal, I feel fortunate to have Atticus. He’s done a beautiful job with my catalog.

It appears that you’re a Rock Band junkie—in Mike Keneally’s world, who would be the next band to have a game dedicated to them?

I want an XTC Rock Band, I want a Radiohead Rock Band … fuck man, I want a Frank Zappa Rock Band—that would be a blast. Now you can download the software to program your own stuff—I would love to do “Cause of Breakfast” for Rock Band.

Maybe Normalizer?

Yeah—anybody who can play all the drums on Normalizer gets to own the company.

I thought your answer might be Gentle Giant.

Oh yeah, but there’s no keyboard on Rock Band. They have to develop a keyboard component if they’re going to do Gentle Giant. I mean, I love the guitar parts and the bass parts on that stuff, but the keyboard is the shit.

Special thanks to Mike Keneally Scott Chatfield, Todd Zimmer, and Aaron DeMent for making this interview possible.