Archive Interview of Steven Hall about Arthur Russel by Daniel Wang

Lets keep this short. When Mr Daniel Wang came to us with the idea of interviewing Arthur Russell’s long time collaborator, guitar player and friend Steven Hall, we jumped at the chance: Puerto Rican boys, Beat Poets and the lowdown on It‘s All Over... Dig In! 
Daniel Wang: How did you meet Arthur Russell? How did you become friends? 
Steven Hall: I heard about Arthur from Allen Ginsberg. Before I met him and Arthur, I was going to the Poet’s Building on East 12th street when I was 16 and 17 to visit my poet friend, Larry Fagin, who lived there, and he introduced me to Allen, who lived in the same building. Arthur also lived in that same building. Allen told me there’s this guy who writes songs and he’s like William Carlos Williams. Williams is a poet from New Jersey. Allen was saying the lyrics of the songs were very high level, which was unusual. He took me to a restaurant that had a small stage on Third Avenue near Sixth Street to hear Arthur. He was standing up playing the cello and singing the song, “Many lights, many lights are out tonight.” I met Arthur then. I was about 18, so maybe 1979. 
How old was Arthur? 
He was a few years older than me. If I was 18 he was maybe in his early twenties. He had just moved to New York from California. The three main parts of his life were growing up on a farm, but being an intellectual farmboy because his father was mayor of the town. The second part of his life was straight hippie, living on a commune in San Francisco. Then the time of moving to New York was the same time he went through the period of becoming queer. I guess he never went 100% queer, but he certainly got into guys a lot. He just went crazy at first in New York. 
He was still romantically or sexually interested in women late in his life? 
There was a long term relationship with Joyce, the singer, which was very intense. He had very intense relationships with all his major players, especially the singers – me, Ernie and Joyce, and then a very intense relationship with Peter with production and Mustafa with production and with percussion. 
Poet’s Building, where is that? 
437 East 12th Street. 12th Street and Ave A. Several of the poets and musicians are still living there, like Larry Fagin and the poet John Godfrey. Richard Hell still lives there. Greg Masters, who was a great drummer. Tom Lee (Arthur’s long term boyfriend) of course still lives there on the top floor. 
When you met Arthur he was already living in this building and he actually never moved away from this building until his death? 
Correct. That was partly an economic thing because it was a rent controlled apartment, it was a very cheap rent so Arthur could survive – well, basically he was supported by Tom. Tom was like a regular working guy and so Arthur could just goof off and work on music all the time. The rent was very low and they could both live there very cheaply. 
What did Tom Lee do for a living? 
When I first met Tom I’m not sure what he was doing at first but later he was involved in the art world and he had his own framing business for a while. He did artwork for a lot of Arthur’s covers and silk screened a lot of them. He did them by hand. When that went out of business he was working in a photography gallery in Soho and after Arthur died, he went back to school to become a teacher. 
Do you know how they fell in love? 
That was a very freewheeling time. Arthur had another boyfriend before he met Tom called Donald Murk. Donald was Arthur’s manager, he set up a couple of gigs for me and Arthur. That was a very wild relationship. There was a lot of threesomes and a lot of fighting and very dramatic emotional scenes. With Tom it was completely different because he was like a rock, he was very calm and gave Arthur emotional weight so that Arthur still had the freedom to fool around and meet or look at young guys that might inspire him and... Arthur’s obsession was with Puerto Rican boys. Well, me too. We used to spend a lot time walking around, listening to different mixes on the walkman and looking at Puerto Rican guys. 
What kind of Puerto Rican guys? Where would you do this? 
This was in the East Village, because the East Village at that time was mostly Puerto Rican because it was a poor area and it was maybe 75% Puerto Rican and 10% Ukrainian and Polish. So there were gangs on 12th street. There was a gang that controlled 12th street, so you had to be pretty careful walking there at night. Allen was mugged on that block. It was a very rough block when Arthur moved in there. The poets and musicians were living there because it was really, really cheap. 
What about drugs? In that area there was a lot of drug use, right? 
That was right in the centre of the heroin distribution area, which was done right on the street in front of the building there, and the Puerto Rican gangs were involved in that before the Jamaican gangs came in and took over. 10th street was also a major grass distribution centre and also around Thompkins Square. The Puerto Rican’s controlled all the grass business. They had some candy stores that were fronts for buying grass and there were two or three famous places on 10th Street between First and Second where one side of the block was all different little stores you could go into to buy grass. It was going on day and night. They would have one guy on the street who was watching the block, each store would have a guy watching their store front, and then there would be people going in and out of that block the whole time just buying grass. It was very, very open. 
Was Arthur into grass or soft drugs, or harder drugs? 
When I met Arthur I wasn’t into any kind of drugs. He was a real hippie coming out of the Humbolt County homegrown grass scene where it was also a big political thing. He took Allen’s ideas very seriously about freeing yourself because he was also freeing himself from his own background and people who didn’t understand him. 
The basis of our early relationship was getting stoned every day, making pilgrimages to the Puerto Rican candy store to buy it. Usually Tom would leave Arthur enough money, five or ten dollars, to buy enough grass for the day and a little bit of food as well. They were really into the organic stuff so Tom would cook something and leave it for him with some change to make phone calls to DJs or people in the business. The ritual was we would get stoned together and play acoustic guitars together for hours and hours and then he would teach me his songs. Although he was only a couple of years older than me he was very much my teacher. He was also much farther than me in terms of studies of Tibetan Buddhism, which he was very serious about, and he would talk a lot about the idea of integrating the ideas of Buddhism into popular music in the way that Allen was trying to write Buddhist songs as well. 
Let’s talk a bit about your emotional relationship with Arthur. Was he in love with you? 
He was in love with me and Ernie in a similar way. Both Ernie and I were very cool in our look and in our attitude in a way that Arthur wanted to be. He became cool by doing very cool music. [It was] the idea of doing music to meet guys. His music had a serious side to it, but the other half of it was also about the explosion of sexuality in his own life. This was happening at the same time where sexuality was exploding like fireworks everywhere, he was very much in tune with that and not only expressing that in his music but verifying it and saying that it was ok to be wild. 
You and Ernie are both tall good looking WASP males who went to Ivy League schools, was there this sort of funny mutual admiration envy? You said Arthur was shorter, he had bad acne pockmarks all over his face and he kind of considered himself to be a farm boy. Was there this tension, this difference? 
Arthur worked the farmboy trucker thing, he was way ahead of that style of wearing farmer hats, but he would wear real farmer hats - not second hand ones. I think a bigger part of it was he was thinking of himself as a producer and song-writer, so he was thinking of the best people to deliver his songs because he didn’t have conventional good looks. He was very sexy in his own way, and had no problem meeting guys, but his idea was that someone like Ernie or me or Joyce could deliver his songs to a wide audience because we had conventionally acceptable looks. He went to the best school for music, the Manhattan School for Music, and also studied electronic music at Columbia, but he always had an inferiority complex about his own writing skills because he hadn’t formally studied writing. 
Do you mean classical score writing? 
Poetry writing. Thinking of himself as a poet. Which is kind of absurd because he was hanging out with Allen Ginsberg, who was the best writing teacher in the world at that point. He [Ginsberg] was also my teacher for writing. Initially we both played in Allen’s band, I had met Allen at Earlber when I was studying with him. We were the back-up band for Allen’s chanting Buddhist stuff and pop songs about boys. 
Was Allen a romantic figure, and father figure, was there a romantic thing with him in spite of the age difference? 
[It was] very much of a father and son thing. When Arthur first came to New York, Allen became like his father as well as his teacher. Consequently Arthur was Allen’s music teacher. He taught Allen how to write basic song forms like the 12-bar blues and taught him about raga-forms, because Arthur already had a very sophisticated musical background, having studied Indian music, Balinese music and Gamelan music. He was already into the west coast composers like Lamont Young and Terry Riley. He hooked up with people like Philip Glass before he was famous - when he was a taxi driver and plumber. 
The meanings of some of these lyrics seem to refer to Buddhism and to boys, etc. For example, Is It All Over My Face, is that about ‘fluids’ on one’s face? 
That song is basically a parody of disco songs. It’s basically a very dirty joke. Arthur was shocked that that song became successful. We used to giggle about it because, of course, it’s about cum on your face. 
What about the ocean thing? There’s the Ocean of Sound, Let’s Go Swimming, and Arthur refers to himself as ‘the killer whale’... 
The whole idea of the ocean is both real and metaphorical because it ties in very well with the Buddhist concept of endlessness and cleansing. There are also a lot of images of light. Going into the light is also a Buddhist thing. The ocean is a literal thing because every year he would go whale watching at his parents house in Maine. The highlight of Arthur’s year was whale-watching. One of the nicknames for himself as a producer was Killer Whale and a lot of his songs talk about the ocean. There’s one song called the Gulf Stream, an unreleased song, where he is singing “I’m in a different world now, the ocean world, take care of me.” It was just a very romantic theme in his work. 
Earlier you said Is It All Over... was a joke. The Arthur disco song that he is best known for... 
Well there’s a whole world of difference between Pop Your Funk and Is It All Over My Face. I would think Arthur would have thought Pop Your Funk was actually a serious piece of music. 
The whole process of making that song was quite radical. He was using himself as a performer there and using a cello to play the bass. It’s so far removed from Is It All Over... which uses standard phrasing of the brass, standard bass parts, and the walking octave, which every disco song had at that point. Whereas Pop Your Funk is a real experiment in sonic manipulation. 
What about, “I want to go and see all my friends at once,” in Go Bang. Lyrically, what is it referring to, and instrumentally do you feel this is a serious work or a disco parody? 
That was conceived as a serious orchestral disco piece. When no one took disco seriously, he was writing an orchestral disco piece. The idea was it was a live piece that would be a continuous groove, and was orchestrated in the sense that the instruments were chosen very carefully and the sound and the live mix would be very carefully orchestrated, but the actual components of the structure would be improvised. It would have themes in the written music but there would be a lot of freedom in the delivery of it. 
Were you guys going out to clubs together? To which clubs? 
Arthur’s whole thing was black guys and Puerto Rican guys, and what they were into. All this style in New York was coming from the black and Puerto Rican guys, and particularly from gay ones, queer ones. It was the same thing with the music scene, the really hot DJs and people who were doing music were totally underground... they were the Puerto Ricans and that was the scene Arthur was into. The Paradise Garage in particular – that was one of the centres of Arthur’s musical training. Arthur would go out every night, sometimes roaming the streets of the west village on the west side highway, just listening to music on his walkman, or checking out various clubs, and he got to know the DJs. He was into the record pool and knowing exactly what was happening at that moment in the music scene. At that time there were only three or four really cool djs, and if you knew them you knew what was happening. 
Did you go with Arthur? 
Yeah, but he was wandering out on his own. [He went to] the Ninth Circle almost every night. The Ninth Circle juke box was very important for the music scene because any of the gay djs would also hang out there. It was a big hustler bar, and the Columbia boys would hang out there, so it was a funny mixture of high and low. The Columbia boys were into the sleazy aspect of it. At that time the juke box was really a big deal. A lot of times during the day Arthur would just be walking around the east village or sitting on a pier in the west village just staring out, looking at guys and listening to different mixes of his own music. 
There’s a story about him performing at the Kitchen where they were playing 24- 24 and someone said, “we don’t want to hear disco”? 
That whole thing was completely political. The idea was that Arthur was initially involved in the avant-garde art scene, which was centered around the Kitchen. 
He was doing new music for various downtown dancers and he was doing very serious orchestral music. The people in the Kitchen, when Arthur had his disco hits, thought that Arthur had totally sold out. They thought that disco music was just trash. The idea that Arthur would turn around and bring that music back into their venue and present it as serious music was really very challenging to them, and threatening to them. 
They were mostly straight? 
It wasn’t a sexual issue. It was just a whole thing about style. This was like a downtown urban thing that they weren’t really into and didn’t really get. Hip hop was not really cool, being black was not really cool. Racism basically prevailed in the scene. It was a very straight scene and Arthur was being an anarchist. I think he sneaked in his performance because they commissioned him to do something pretty serious and once it was commissioned they couldn’t really back out of it. He kind of sprung it on them - it was quite an event. It was very powerful. I think that was the best performance of his work I ever attended. It was hot. It was like really hot dance music and nobody got it. A few people in the back got it and were dancing. They got it because they realised it didn’t need a critical text to go along with it – you could understand it just by hearing it. That was why it was an affront to some of these super intellectual people. 
This is the early eighties; did Arthur have any overt political opinions? 
Arthur was an old hippie from way back and through Allen’s influence he was an activist. Ronald Reagan made the remark, “we’ll be bombing Moscow in five minutes,” which he made a joke about on the radio, and that was taken and made into a song by Jerry Harrison [Talking Heads] and Arthur and released by Jerry Harrison. It got some airplay. That was an overtly political thing he did. All of the music Arthur did was overtly political as far as he was concerned because he was telling the truth about being gay. He was writing open songs about being gay, and that was coming from the influence of Allen’s honesty. The Buddhist politics that were inherent in his lyrics – that was a political thing for him. It was not aggressive, but it informed all of the work that he did. 
Arthur helped some people such as David Byrne, Brian Eno, but he’s often not credited for his work with these people. 
Arthur was very paranoid about people ripping him off, and that was sometimes justified. We had a joke between us which was the phrase “justifiable paranoia” – the idea that sometimes people do rip you off and that’s the nature of the business. But Arthur was pretty wily in dealing with these people. He generally protected his own ass and copyrights pretty well. Arthur was an honorary member of the gay mafia who controlled the dance music scene at that time. I mean labels like West End had a virtual monopoly on the hits at that point because they controlled what was being played in the clubs, and consequently, what got on radio stations. That was the only time that gay culture had a tremendous amount of influence on culture in general, from gay dance clubs, through gay DJs, through gay promoters, through gay men who owned labels and distribution companies for the first time.
David Byrne and Arthur were hanging around the downtown CBGBs artworld scene at the same time. Both of them were very jealous and very competitive of each other. Each of them thought of themselves as a kind of entrepreneur impresario – they would discover and present other downtown talents. Each of them was assembling an interesting group of people, so David played on some of Arthur’s early disco stuff and Arthur did session work for Talking Heads and Jerry Harrison. One of the secret things that was never heard about was Arthur’s early work with Vin Diesel, where Vin did a rap. He did a rap record with Arthur that no one has ever heard. 
Who are some of the song-writers Arthur admired? Did he listen to other seventies disco like Salsoul or MFSB? 
Arthur was really into guys who produced themselves because that was his thing – it was hard to produce yourself and get that sparkling sound. He would sit and listen to Bohannon and try to figure out how he could get that slick sound and still maintain his musical integrity and of course all the Philly Sound stuff. But I was much more into Philly than Arthur. I was always pushing Teddy Pendergrass, the O Jays, that kind of stuff, but Arthur was more into classic soul like Aretha Franklin, Martha Washington, and even earlier stuff. 
Let’s go back to his relations ... 
Both Elodie and Mustafa have been neglected in terms of their influence and relationship with Arthur. Mustafa has been greatly underestimated in terms of his influence as a co-producer because Mustafa was often in the control room when the pieces were being put together so Arthur heavily relied on Mustafa’s ear in terms of where the groove would be placed. 
For example the levels of the kick drum, the snares, the congas, percussion, and the bass? 
Arthur was into the technical side of it, but he would be listening to Mustafa’s input in a more abstract, lyrical way– and this is something that comes with Steve D’Acquisto as well – which is just looking for the feeling, sort of a search for where the magical sound and the magical feeling come together – and then your head and your ass start moving together. 
Steve was one of the very first DJs in the whole scene. The whole idea of Steve was, “let’s have a party in the control room, this is where it’s all happening, and if we are having a good time, the people who are hearing the music later, and who will be dancing to it, they will get it; they will know we were having a good time and they will feel that in the music.” He was totally into going for that feeling. And he was relentless in making Arthur actually finish things, which was Arthur’s big problem. Without Steve D’Acquisto there would be no disco hit, or it would have come five years later. 
Let’s talk about Elodie a little bit. 
Elodie and Arthur had a very deep relationship in that Elodie was the only one who had an understanding of music, in terms of the technical aspects of it, written music, different modes and actual composing techniques. They actually sat and wrote down music, they had formal studies with very good teachers in different compositional techniques, so they had that vocabulary in common, and Arthur and Elodie had Buddhism in common along with their studies of alternative techniques of composition. Elodie is now writing a book about her own techniques, like using chant techniques for composing, using the I-Ching as a way of composing music, using microtonal tunings. If you’re listening to a recording of Arthur singing one of his own songs and he’s singing a note that doesn’t sound quite right he knows that that note is not quite right because he is actually singing a microtonal note. What to a normal listener might sound strange is just a way of getting in between the notes to look for more feelings. In jazz the blue note is the note that slides, or goes between regular notes, that’s microtonal singing, that’s the same thing as these composers are doing. 
That’s from Elodie’s influence? 
Elodie and Peter and Arthur had formal backgrounds in 12-tone and had also studied Indian and Indonesian Balinese music, so they knew about alternative musical scales, they knew about historical modes in tunings and non-western tuning. They were bringing a tremendous sophistication, including a background in jazz, to dance music, to what was ostensibly very simple dance music. Rock and roll people who were making fun of dance music for being stupid, were making very ironic statements, because people like Arthur and Peter and Elodie, who were involved in making dance music, were working on a very high level, even in terms of the recording techniques. In fact often their recording techniques were way ahead of the music they were producing. The idea of using the recording studio as an instrument – Arthur’s instrument was the recording studio and every instrument he could play and every effect and every person, engineer and player that he could manipulate in that studio. He had total control, including of all the people. 
Do you think this goes to things like the Beach Boys or Lee Perry King Tubby dub? Was he aware of these people? 
Yes, he was totally into Lee Perry, totally into the Beach Boys, totally into Brian Wilson, totally into the idea (which comes from the beats and from Allen), where what’s in your own mind is enough. 
Was he also aware of the dangers of the infinite possibility of multitrack, which in a way destroyed Lee Perry and Brian Wilson at various stages (see David Toop’s book Ocean Of Sound)? 
No, because when I met him he was recording at home on a two-track, reel-to-reel. By the time he got sick it was going up to maybe 48 track digital and protocols was just starting to happen. So in his case, infinite possibility was not really a problem because he studied electronic music when electronic music was totally open, when it was totally free. His idea of composition was very open. 
But with hindsight did multitrack keep him from finishing more completed works? 
No, his own indecision would have kept him from releasing any works even if they were simple electro-acoustic live things. He had the same problem in releasing a live acoustic piece as he would an orchestra of fifty that had multi-edits and multi-track recordings. His problem was his own anxiety. He would often spend a whole day with two cassettes on his walkman going back and forth between one and the other. Everyone he encountered on his walk from the east village to the gay side, the west village, to uptown to visit some DJs, past some music shops to stop and visit some musicians, he would play them the a and b mix and he would ask their opinion, “which one is better,” he was going around taking a poll. But ultimately the one that he would really listen to was Tom. He had listened to it so many times he couldn’t hear the difference any more and then he would play the mixes for Tom and then usually Tom would decide. 
But Tom was not a music buff, or a trained musician, was he? 
No, at that time Tom was totally into the music scene, he turned Arthur onto a lot of pop stuff that he liked. They would also go out and see bands together. Tom listened to everything that Arthur did. At the end of the day Arthur would go home and play the stuff for Tom’s approval. Everything was done for Tom’s approval, and he would have a big influence on which songs, which mixes and which lyrics were approved. 
Did Arthur have things that he was unusually proud of? Were there things he was especially dissatisfied with? 
I think what he really wanted to do was music for movies and that never really happened. That’s something that was talked about and never really pursued, Hollywood movies. He really liked Tangerine Dream stuff, he thought he could have a legitimate career doing music for movies. I think if he had still been around that could have happened. I think what we had the most fun with was doing songs that had sexual references. That was the most fun we had, giggling about sexual references in songs, because that was something that was very immediate to us. And then for his own stuff – well, he had very serious orchestral stuff that was really heavy for him but if you asked him, I think he would say Pop Your Funk was just as serious as any orchestral work he had written for an opera or for a formal dance. He certainly didn’t think that the pop songs were less than anything else. I think he would think they were all the same. 
Your personal relationship with Arthur? 
Well the first time we met he asked me to sleep with him. We met in Arthur’s apartment and Allen’s was upstairs. We met in Allen’s apartment, Arthur’s was upstairs, and he asked me to go upstairs with him and then I was kind of shocked, that he would ask me the first time I met him. He was very shy but suddenly very aggressive, just asked me directly. He was very flirtatious in his own way, he was very sexy in a quiet way, and then once we got over that hurdle and I said no, then we just became really good friends. 
Why did you say no? 
Because he wasn’t my type. Even then I was already mostly into Asian guys. And then the first time I went to Arthur’s apartment he played this song for me called, “don’t forget about me,” a song he wrote about Tom, which was about being unfaithful. It was saying basically, if sometimes you’re tempted to go with another guy that’s ok, go ahead, but just don’t forget about me. When he played this for me I thought how could anyone write such a beautiful song and also for their own boyfriend? If someone can write this song then I’ve already found my teacher. I played that song for Joey Ramone a couple of years before Joey Ramone died and he said that song is a prayer. 
Towards Arthur’s death he was still writing songs? 
There’s a song, I don’t know when it was written, but he sang it when he got sick. He used to sing it every day, even when he could barely sing any more, he still kept singing it and he made tapes of it for Tom. So he would be sitting at home playing this song all day and then Tom would come home and he would play this song for Tom. It’s a really gorgeous song. 
That’s Love Is Back, isn’t it? 
The key line in that song is “Put your little hand in mind, feeling sad is not a crime”. He’s basically saying to his boyfriend, yeah, I’m dying, I know I’m dying, but that’s ok, I know you’re really sad, but that’s ok, it’s ok to be sad and it’s ok that I’m dying. That kind of grace that he had was very obvious, even when he was dying. 

Source: Steven Hall interviewed by Daniel Wang, originally published by Keep On Magazine in July 2004.