Bradford Robinson Interview

I spoke with Brad on the phone mid-way through his tour to find out just who this man was. He related to me a history of his music and his travels.

New Lemming (NL): It seems to me that your solo career began from the inside of the music industry, is that accurate?

Bradford Robinson (Brad): In a way. I was pretty much trying everything, working with managing whatever band I was in, doing a lot of the booking. I've owned a studio for a number of years and kind of moved it around as I moved around. So, I've always tried to be on the inside, you kind of have to. Most of the the big-time musicians that I've talked to have said when you ask them "What did you do to get there? Should I practice more? Should I take lessons? Go to school?" Almost all of them say "Get a degree in business."

Everybody assumes that the more they practice, the farther they'll get and for the chosen few that's true, but for guys like me who are just average or above average and really still want to make it, you've got to have that extra edge. If you're descent with business, it really helps. That's allowed me to get a lot further.

NL: How did you start your career in music?

Brad: I started playing when I was ten. I saw a friend of mine play, he was a real prodigy, he was ten years old and he was playing stuff I still have trouble playing. It was just phenomenal. I thought, "I want to do that." That's what it usually takes, seeing somebody that blows you away and seeing how the audience reacts, and think "I'd love to do that sometime."

So I started pretty seriously when I was ten. I Luckily started with his guitar teacher, who was really good. That helps a great deal to have someone inspirational who takes the time to work things through with you and is not just there for the job or the paycheck.

NL: Have you always wanted to be musician from then on?

Brad: Yeah, I've really worked at it pretty hard since. It's been discouraging, the business defiantly slaps you around a lot. I've been periodically discouraged. For about two years I was living in Austin, Texas, that's the live music capital of the world and there's a lot going on there. I did get pretty discouraged and quit playing for those two years. I went out and saw a lot of music and met a lot of musicians. I still loved music, I was just discouraged with my music. It was a tough place for someone like me to break into. I had pretty much developed my career on the East Coast and had no problems there.

NL: Is that where you're from?

Brad: Well, actually I was born in Denver.

NL: You're a Coloraden then.

Brad: I guess so, it's hard to say because I moved around so much. When I was seven I moved down to LA and I began playing there. Then when I was fifteen I moved to the East Coast and lived there for a while and then Spain, I traveled around quite a bit. Ended up in Texas for three years and I got discouraged. I was married at the time and went through a divorce, that pushed me in the direction I really wanted to go again. I decided to finish up this album which I had on the shelf for a couple of years, get it out and start working at music again.

NL: It's Ironic But So Is This reminded me of Lloyd Cole, is there some influence there?

Brad: Yeah, there must be. It's interesting, no one has said Lloyd Cole, although I listen to his stuff a lot. Most people have said Bruce Cockburn. I just went to see him about a month ago, talked to him a little while and gave him a CD. It's the first time I had seen him, although I do like his stuff a lot. I've had so many people compare me to him, although I've never really studied his stuff. But Lloyd Cole is definitely an influence in some way or another, I love his music.

NL: Were you working as a studio musician before you released your album?

Brad: No, I was more a studio engineer, just running my own studio. I had played on a number of releases.

NL: On albums produced in your studio?

Brad: Right. And being in one area, which for me was the East Coast, for long enough that you meet enough musicians who want you to play on their stuff. I wasn't paid for a lot of it, but I have been on more than 20 CDs, I don't really know how many, and a number of LPs and tapes and stuff.

That's something I would love to do. That's a difficult hierarchy to get into. It's pretty tight knit and located in either New York City or LA and some in Nashville. The Nashville scene is probably the hardest to get into. I think it's something I would love to get into later. Once I develop a real name for myself then it would be a lot easier to start playing on other people's stuff.

NL: Where are you located now?

Brad: Colorado. I moved up there last October. After my divorce I needed to get away and think it over. It's never easy.

NL: Are you primarily a guitar player?

Brad: Yeah, I'd say so. That's been my main study. Although mandolin has been quite a bit in the last year or so. When I got to Colorado I started playing mandolin with a lot of different people. There's a lot of demand for that because there's so many guitarists out there. A lot of guitarist want an accompaniment of some kind so mandolin's just really easy. It's easy to drag around to bars and sit in, so before I know it I was playing more mandolin than guitar. I'm not as versed in it as the guitar but I've been playing it a lot more it seems.

NL: Is it close enough to guitar to be easy to play for you?

Brad: Well, that's tough. The way it's tuned, it's almost the mirror image of a guitar. It's actually the exact opposite of a bass. The bass is the four lower notes of a guitar, if you took those same four notes and flipped them around then you'd have a mandolin. It's tuned the same as a violin too. Once I got used to that concept of playing the mirror image in cording of a guitar, then it became a lot easier to follow. At first it just drives you crazy.

NL: You spent time traveling through Europe. Was that to travel or to play music?

Brad: When I was 20 and 21 I took six months and went around the world. Then when I got back I saved up some more money and moved to Spain for a while. Both those times I was in Europe and traveling around and playing on the streets everyday for traveling money. I ended up playing a bunch of clubs too but it was mainly I just had to play on the streets. I was playing pretty much 3 or 4 hours a day almost every day. I did a lot of that in other countries; Australia, New Zealand, some in Japan, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Malaysia. Just kind of traveled around a bit and played for anybody I could.

NL: What was that like?

Brad: There are few things like that, you get some really bizarre things that happen. I played in Spain most, because I was living there a longer period of time. You'd have some change in your case and inevitably someone is going to come by and grab a whole handful and run. I was playing in Geneva one time, I was playing with another guy at that point, the entire case was full of change after about four hours. People were tossing in just about everything you could think of; cigarettes and candy and drugs ands coins and all kinds of stuff. By the time we finished my case was bursting, it was amazing that it survived it at all. I had to carry the case and he had to carry everything else. We went to a couple of different shops, as many as we could, it was getting late at night. We went to a restaurant and paid with all the small coins and we stacked them up over the whole table and tried to get rid of as much change as possible. We kept stopping and eating somewhere and paying in small coins until we could carry the case around.

One time I was playing in Majorça, an island off of Spain, it was right after the Olympics in California, Carl Lewis and couple of other olympians walked around and sat down in front of us and watched us play. One time we were playing in front of this radio station and Michael Jackson walks out. It was just us and him. And his bodyguards and there were just there. The five of us. We were playing and they were watching and then they just walked away. We looked at each other and said "Did that just happen?"

NL: You said you spent some time in China too, how was that?

Brad: I had taken a train from Hong Kong to China and had fell asleep when we crossed the border. When I woke up I was in a third world country. It was quite a shock. The difference between Hong Kong and China is 150 years. I remember walking around Shaing Hai for a while and this guy came up to me and wanted to practice his english. The last question he asked was "Do you think America is any different than China?" After all the questions he'd asked about America and the way we live, I found it really surprising that he didn't get it. He didn't seem to understand that America is incredibly different than China. Almost opposite in so many different ways.

NL: What's an example of that?

Brad: In downtown they have about 10 times as many bicycles as cars. One in every thousand people have cars. They all pretty much wear the same things.

NL: Are they required to wear uniforms?

Brad: No, under chairman Mao they were. Now they're allowed to wear pretty much whatever they want supposedly. But there's very little available and there's very little money. A lot of the younger kids who are their form of yuppie, who are actually making a fairly descent salary, are going out and buying one or two outfits a year is about what they can afford.

So this guy was saying "Do you think there is any difference between America and China?" I didn't even know how to answer that. I was there just before the Tianinmen Square ordeal. You could just see being there what was going to happen. I actually thought it was going to be worse then that. I really believe it's going to happen again in a larger area.

There are two different kinds of stores there, only foreigners are allowed in one. There have two different currencies, there is the foreign currency and the chinese currency. If you're a foreigner you get to go to certain stores that the chinese aren't allowed to. I could go into this one store and buy a Coca-Cola at that point. And they couldn't, in their own country! It was crazy. You do that kind of thing long enough in a country and people are going to say "Hey wait a minute, why are Americans allowed to go into those stores and buy Coca-Cola and we can't?" It's definitely waiting to explode.

NL: After that you came back to America and started your studio?

Brad: I decided I really just gotta go for this. I've been pretty serious about it since then. That was back in '84.

NL: What kind of following do you have now?

Brad: Well, it's kind of sporadic, the last band I was in was an alternative rock band, Those Melvins, we had a good following. We got out there a built, we charted nation-wide for a few weeks. We did alright. We never got signed, we came pretty close. We played with some big bands and toured quite a bit. It just didn't happen, we never got that big break or anything.

NL: What year was that in?

Brad: That was for six and a half years. Pretty much right after I got back [from Europe] I got into that. It was probably about '85 to '91 or '92.

NL: Just at the point were alternative music was getting really big.

Brad: Yeah, somewhere around there.

NL: At least you can say you were doing it before it was cool.

Brad: Yeah, we were ahead of our time, you can always use some crazy excuse like that. It just wasn't hip to be really popular.

NL: How many albums did you release with Those Melvins?

Brad: We put out one official CD with 18 tunes on it and we put out a few other releases that were EPs or smaller releases.

NL: Did you get any confusion with The Melvins?

Brad: Yeah, oddly enough, Nirvana and Kurt Colbane were kind of the demise of Those Melvins through a series of odd events. The Melvins had broken up when we started, The Melvins had been around for a long time. We had done some name searching and making sure that Those Melvins was OK to use. They had broken up and they really hadn't released anything or made a name for themselves at that point. So we thought "OK, no problem." Then Nirvana got on the scene and everything they're saying, in all the interviews and anytime we saw them, they were talking about how The Melvins had made their lives worth living, oddly enough. So The Melvins got back together and started releasing albums and started warming up for Nirvana and getting a big name for themselves. That kind of hurt us. So for a while there was a East Coast and a West Coast Melvins. When we started touring more and they started touring more, there was one tour where for an entire month we had booked the same clubs. We were playing two days after them. We were so different in music styles, it was confusing a lot of fans. Our fans were crossing. It was throwing a lot of people off.

At that point we started doing more serious stuff, the fun kind of left. I moved on, and the bass player left, those guys are still playing.

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