Popcorn Youth: As a guitar player, how much and to what degree have people like Bartok, John Cage, Stockhausen influenced how you play the guitar — technical things like note selection, harmonies, chords, tunings, or maybe more conceptual things like structure, atmosphere.
Roger Miller: That’s a very good question. One that I am very rarely asked. That’s a great big question, really. I think in the way that I write, there’s two ways. How I write my songs, I tend not to enjoy regular verse-chorus-verse type structures. It mainly has to do with my interest with why I like the Rite of Spring or the compositions of Bartok. I sometimes reduce Mission of Burma songs to piano. I play these funny versions of them and when I do them, to my mind, they’re still very complex music and I find that very interesting. They’re still very different to Clint’s [songs] which are more straightforward, because he didn’t go through that whole process of assimilating Bartok and whatnot.
As for the actual playing, I grew up in the late 60s. That’s when I started playing the guitar, and I was influenced by what I thought was “psychedelia.” And that’s totally a fact: Jimi Hendrix, Syd Barrett, that whole thing. But it wasn’t just psychedelic drugs. (Laughs) There was a reason why these sounds were available at the time. Like Karlheinz Stockhausen was already doing very open-ended sonic experiments. John Cage was doing the same thing, but very differently, but opening it up so that any sounds were good sounds. And even Marcel Duchamp, the visual artist, who coined the term “ready mades” — that leads to the found object or found sound in the sense that, ok, guitar feedback which was always considered to be a no-no, a total bad thing, accept it. It’s kind of a parody, but you also start to wonder. So I also consider that a direct lineage of 20th century art thinking. All the fringe elements that people didn’t like, you start to incorporate them into the whole.
And everything isn’t perfect, like these are the right ones, these are all bad, well it’s not really like that. There are ways to incorporate everything into [music], a slightly more holistic approach. And certainly having gone to music school was a part of that. And the guitar solo in “Max Ernst,” it’s in the mode called “whole tone.” There are no half steps, it’s all whole tones — hardly any guitar players play whole tone guitar solos (laughs) because in general when you play guitar in rock music, you play coming out of the blues idiom. So that sort of compositional thinking like Bela Bartok’s use of harmony and structure, that’s definitely influenced the way that I play the guitar. And also Stockhausen and John Cage which opens things up to any kind of sound; I like to pursue the edges of guitar.
Popcorn Youth: Is the guitar — as an instrument with a certain amount of strings, frets, and so on — is more sonically limiting than say the piano, which you were classically trained on?
Roger Miller: It’s just very different. I actually consider myself quite a bit of a better piano player than a guitar player. I really don’t consider myself that good of a guitarist. Technically, I’m no master. There’s a lot of guitarists that are technically more proficient, but that’s not what I’m going for. If I really wanted technique, then I would sit around and practice scales all day. What interests me in the guitar and which makes it somewhat different than the piano, is the type of sounds that you can get out of it you can’t get out of the piano. (Pauses) That’s really a difficult question, because when I play the piano, lots of times, like with my other group Binary System, when we are just drums and keyboards, and when we are smoking in an improv of just drums and keyboards, it feels very similar to me as when Burma is smoking. I don’t use the term smoking literally. (Laughs) So it is funny how they cross pollinate.
Popcorn Youth: Do you play the guitar in standard tunings?
Roger Miller: Almost always. There are a couple of instances when I have parts that are unplayable on a normal guitar, so I tuned it with three strings — there is a low E and the top three strings on G#, so you have a major third, and that’s definitely influenced by Branca, which led to Sonic Youth and that whole thing, but people have been using strange tunings forever. And I use that on the ONoffON song “Wounded World,” “Absent Mind,” and “Fake Blood.” They all use that guitar. If you listen to them, you realize there’s a different kind of sound to it. Clint’s songs “Academy Fight Song,” the top three strings, instead of being G B E, which is a E minor, been modified to a G minor, so it’s a B flat and the top string is an D. That’s the only other odd tuning we’ve done.
But people sometimes wonder if I use odd tunings, but it’s really the way that I play the guitar is odd. (Laughs) I don’t play a traditional way.
Popcorn Youth: Is there a reason why you choose not to play the guitar in Alloy Orchestra?
Roger Miller: It’s not appropriate there. There’s a thing about keyboard that’s really an amazing thing. You have two hands (laughs) that are both making sounds. Whereas with the guitar, one of the hands is reduced to making sounds activate. So if you’ve been trained as a keyboard player, or if you’ve just been naturally trained that way, my left hand can go about it’s own business and my right hand can go about it’s own business. So I have the bass line melody and chords all happening out of one instrument, and that’s a real asset when everybody else in the band is primarily a percussionist.
And Mission of Burma, you’ve got the bass covered by the bass guitar, so it’s not an issue. But to play guitar in the Alloy Orchestra, in general, you would miss something, whereas the keyboard can change from piano to strings — it’s more of an orchestral-type sound. Though we did do a score to the Shackleton film “South” which is a documentary of the expedition to the South Pole that failed in 1917, I think. Normally, I play that with a grand piano because I don’t like to use a synthesizer in it, but we performed it in the Ozarks Film Festival in Arkansas, and they didn’t have a grand piano so I brought my guitar and my electronics. Because it’s mostly ice (laughs), there’s a lot of free-form songs, and guitar with electronics can make a lot of nice “ice” sounds. So that was really the only time I used guitar in the Alloy Orchestra.
Popcorn Youth: When you’re scoring music to films, are you thinking more about creating a certain kind of atmosphere, or are you more concerned with creating a linear narrative, a more literal interpretation of what’s going on in the movie?
Roger Miller: Well the “South” film has no real plot. It’s a documentary, and it’s mostly its very abstract and atmospheric and that’s why we chose to go that route with that one. Most films like “The Phantom of the Opera” or Buster Keaton films, they’re quite traditional in the sense that you get introduced to the characters, the story unfolds, the climax happens (laughs), almost all of them are very linear films. And so we take a more linear approach, and it’s more like a leitmotif, like “Here’s the love theme for the film, here’s the trouble theme,” and within that context, we are definitely telling a linear story and helping people feel it. Within that, there’s atmospherics. Like in “Phantom of the Opera,” when he’s in the cave, it can be really scary and Terry plays the musical saw, and it can just be creeping you out. In that sense, you kind of blend the two, the atmosphere with the linear storytelling.
Popcorn Youth: Mission of Burma has been called the “American Wire” or the “American Gang of Four.” How has that British post-punk sound influenced your band?
Roger Miller: If you listen to our music and the Gang of Four, it’s almost the exact opposite. Their music is very tidy and tight, and ours is just a mess. Same with Wire. Like Wire’s early stuff, everything is in its proper place, and nothing’s in its proper place in our music. (Laughs) When we first started playing, that was a common problem with us. People said that it would be great if we “all played the same song at the same time.” (Laughs) That’s what people said in the early period when we started playing. Because you know we’re not very . . . we all had this thing, where if anybody wants to do anything, they can do anything at anytime, so it was very chaotic.
In a sense, sure, I think the thing that drew us to Wire and Gang of Four was blending of actual thinking and raw energy. And that’s, I think, one of our hallmarks, is that on first listening, if you go to our concerts you’re sort of overwhelmed. It’s loud as hell, it’s hard to figure out what’s going on, these guys are obviously kind of like wild animals, and once you start to pick out in the chaos, you go, “Wow, this is really highly structured.” And you listen to the lyrics, and there’s a lot of thought going on to these words, much more in general than most rock bands.
But I think that’s where the similarities between us and Gang of Four and Wire end, it’s much more an aesthetic that doesn’t actually manifest in the music itself. It’s more of a philosophical agreement. And despite that people say we are like Wire and Gang of Four, it was the Ramones that made us want to play punk rock. The Ramones were the thing that started punk rock. Even though people don’t talk about that because it’s such a given, that’s what made us want to play punk rock.
Popcorn Youth: You definitely allude to that influence in your documentary.
Roger Miller: Yes. It was the Ramones that started it, and then after that you go, “Well now, where can we go from here?” It isn’t like we listened to Wire and went, “Oh, we’re going to start injecting intellect into rock music!” (Laughs) You can’t just force yourself to do that; it was already there.
Popcorn Youth: Around that similar time in the early 80s, there were strong musical movements in L.A. (SST, Black Flag, Greg Ginn), NYC (no-wave, Branca), D.C. (Dischord, Rites of Spring). Was there something similar in Boston?
Roger Miller: Yeah, definitely there was a really great scene in the late 70s, early 80s. There was a band called La Peste that was really good, and the Human Sexual Response. Again, anytime there’s a musical revolution, like I’ve been through a couple of them in the 60s, you could go see three bands, and one would be a jazz group, one would be a country band, and one would be pure psychedelia, and you’d appreciate them all.
Nowadays, people go, “I’m going to a Goth concert,” and they all sound like Goth. When these revolutions are happening, things actually get blown open. So La Peste was very much a kind of speeded-up Black Sabbath and we played with them a fair amount; Mission of Burma, I don’t know what the hell we were, Human Sexual Response was more operatic art rock, but somehow were a punk rock band also. (Laughs) The Girls, one of my favorite bands of all time, three guys, later on four, were really minimalistic and chaotic. They were playing in every rock club in Boston.
Popcorn Youth: So it wasn’t necessarily what everyone sounded like, but more an agreement about how you could approach music?
Roger Miller: Yeah, I guess; it’s in the same way as we felt about Wire and Gang of Four. We didn’t sound like them, it was more a philosophical basis of, 1. Fuck you. That’s honest to god one of the things, you know, “Fuck you all, I’m going to do what I want, and I’m going to do it now, because I have some people that are going to help me do it.” Nothing like that could have happened four years earlier anywhere in the United States. And all of a sudden I came to Boston, and there was this energy. And even though this bands sounds nothing like my band, I love that band for what was behind it. And when you have to have something to fight against to cause a revolution — that’s what it was. There was so much despicable music out, and nothing that was really good, and the Ramones and the Sex Pistols had this little key, they opened the door. And all of a sudden, it was like, “We’re going to show them what for!” You know? That was really what it was about. And so in Boston you had not only a club scene where you could see a lot of cool bands, there was also a loft art scene which was comparable to the No New York, there were a lot of whacked-out performance artists and stuff like that. So Boston was a really, really great place to be.
Popcorn Youth: And in Boston there was a cross pollination between fine arts, music, filmmaking, and the rest of the arts?
Roger Miller: Yeah, yeah, that’s a really important thing also. That kind of thing was definitely going on. Like, people would get really creative with their posters, and posters would start becoming … (laughs) sometimes the posters would be this simplistic rock stuff and then it would go from there to really advanced art, you know colored Xerox with collages and stuff. (Laughs) It really covered the whole gamut.
Popcorn Youth: You’re written about in books, talked about in films; this process of being documented and even mythologized, as going down in history as being part of this important subculture, happened to Mission of Burma. What does that feel like to undergo that process? Do you feel a responsibility to maintain a certain kind of integrity?
Roger Miller: A lot of different questions there. First of all, it feels completely bizarre. It’s gotten like, “Well ok,” and then our documentary comes out, and its like “Well, how could that possibly be?” And then I just kind of laugh about it and well, that’s cool, and I’m not stupid, I’ve learned how to talk in public (Laughs), like, “This’ll be interesting.” And that’s how I look at it . . . it’s just so odd. It’s nothing we ever expected. That’s the first thing.
When the band reformed, it was overwhelmingly emotional, the fact that people were so excited about us playing. Back in the day, we were used to people being in general, completely baffled by us, or ignored us. It was very overwhelming actually. As far as the responsibility, I don’t owe anybody anything. I did this shit, but on the other hand, I’m just going to be exactly what I am. I’m talking to you about this stuff, but I’m not talking to you because I feel a responsibility — but that’s tricky also. (Pauses) I’m really doing it because I believe that I have information that is useful to the world. (Laughs) If people are asking for it, then it must be interesting to some degree.
Popcorn Youth: Which leads me to my next question. I’ve read your tour diaries on both slate.com and pitchforkmedia.com. (Miller is laughing throughout) Is there a similar principle operating behind this self-documenting and then sharing with the public?
Roger Miller: Yeah, it’s a weird mixture of I take it very seriously and completely not seriously at all. I mean I think about Bela Bartok — if I found a book of Bela Bartok’s journals, I would be excited as hell. Or Syd Barretts’ tour diary, I would go, “Wow, I really want to read this.” (Laughs) I assume that there’s someone out there who likes Mission of Burma that would find it interesting. When I do them, I try to be very clear in my writing, because I do other kinds of writing that’s very, very abstract. So I try to be very easy to understand, yet whatever kind of warped sense of humor that I have is going to come through. And I don’t know if you’ve read in the tour diary, on quite a few occasions, I was messing with the medium. (Laughs) Like the three breakfast days in a row that are all the exact same thing with a different word plugged in.
Popcorn Youth: I thought something seemed strangely déjà vu about those entries!
Roger Miller: I was trying to express that it was very tedious and not that interesting to write about, but I don’t mind it. I always try to play with the medium, because I mean even with music, it’s like, “Ok, instead of this thing, I’m going to do it this way. But it’s not for intellectual reasons, its just because it makes me happy to do it that way.
Popcorn Youth: Your problems with hearing loss have been well documented. During live shows, your visual trademark has been wearing headphones. Do you ever feel like you are missing out somehow?
Roger Miller: I actually use rubber earplugs that are just a solid wall of rubber. They’ve been custom made to my ear and the’yre making them out of material that really clings to the ears so once they go in they really don’t go out, not even during a performance. So for a lot of recent tours I haven’t been using the headphones.
Now it makes absolutely no difference to me how I felt about the music, whether I had the headphones on or not. It’s just that I got a little sick of seeing people say, “Hey, there’s the guy with the headphones.” (Laughs) And with these new earplugs I thought, maybe I’ll try it without [the headphones], maybe I don’t need them right now. The headphones didn’t matter to me.
When I first started wearing the earplugs, it really did feel like you were in another room. But on the other hand, and it’s partly me, I’m a very adaptable person, but I believe that human beings in general are adaptable. And so the first time you put them in, you go, “God, I can’t do this.” But you just keep putting them in and pretty soon you just think it’s normal. It’s like you wear those glasses that turn everything upside down, and if you wear them long enough then your eyes adapt. (Laughs) It’s not exactly like that but its something similar to that.
And it got to the point at the end of first round of Mission of Burma, I could help Martin EQ Pete’s drum kit while I had earplugs in, and he respected my opinion on that. You adapt to it. When it was first bothering me at the end of Mission of Burma, yeah, it was really scary. All of these sounds would come in my ear that I knew would never go away, and I said, “Well, I want to hear when I’m 50,” so I stopped. And now I’m 54 and I’m talking over a cruddy cell phone (laughs) and I can hear you perfectly well.
So it’s not like I can’t hear, I mean I hear ringing in my ears all the time, and I can hear it now, if I want to. But you just ignore it, you just kind of phase it out. But it is really scary and it’s interesting — I believe that the reason that music gets louder and louder is to compete with the external sound of the world. You walk on the street and it’s all beeps and bonks and sirens; a hundred years ago, the ambience of the world was much less and as those ambient sounds get louder, so does the music. I think it’s a direct reaction.
Popcorn Youth: As pioneers in music in the late 70s and early 80s, what has it been like to reunite in the 21st century, to come back into a very different cultural atmosphere?
Roger Miller: When we were first touring the first round, we assumed that people wouldn’t like us. I’m sure there are other bands that felt that, that eventually went on to be liked (laughs), but we kind of were nipped in the bud. But I feel safe now. Going into a club, I know that people are going to like us, people respect us, it’s a much more comfortable environment. I don’t consider that the music now is any better than it was when we were younger; there’s just more of everything, and I don’t know if that makes anything any better.
Popcorn Youth: Well, now we live in a world where you can click on your mouse and buy the entire Mission of Burma catalog on amazon.com or buy an exclusive iTunes-only release of an EP. What are the implications for that kind of increased accessibility in the music industry today?
Roger Miller: Partly — to be a little perhaps even crass — Mission of Burma basically feels like we’re not really part of this world. (Laughs) It’s like we’re from another planet and we just happened to be dropped into this musical environment. You know, we do what we can and we pay attention to ourselves, but none of us, I think, feel an extreme affinity with the musical environment.
Here’s another one of my theories — let me rephrase that — my biggest concern about the availability of everything at all times on the Internet is that, well, 1. There’s just too much information. But 2. I believe it will stop any revolution from happening. Revolutions always have to fight against something, like in the British Invasion in the 60s and all the hippie stuff, there’s a big clump of people that had to fight back because music was really lame; and then it got classic rock in the 60s, and there was no outlet for creative music and that was the punk rock explosion.
And now anybody can put something on the Internet, and someone can siphon it off and not only siphon it off, but assimilate it into the entire community. There’s no chance for anything to be held down long enough to build up the momentum necessary to blow up. That’s what I think is potential biggest negative of the Internet. It’s no problem to me, everyone can buy all our music if you want, who cares, or if you can talk instantly with somebody in Australia, that is not a problem to me, but these other things are. I think things kind of get watered down and diluted, because there’s so much.
Popcorn Youth: Do you feel like there are any recent bands that are doing something similar to what you guys strove to do in the late 70s and early 80s?
Roger Miller: There are bands that are interesting, but when you say what Mission of Burma was doing in the late 70s and early 80s, it wasn’t just Mission of Burma, it was also The Girls, La Peste in Boston; James Chance and the Contortions there, and The Minutemen there and the Wire — and so I do not see a philosophical revolution happening now, if that’s what you mean. A lot of those bands are nothing like each other, but there was some sort of abstract philosophy that made them all unified, like the way they approached things rather than the sound.
And as much as I think there are bands now that are doing interesting work, I don’t think there’s anything resembling a “movement.” There’s no surge, its not like, “Oh, I’m going to follow this thread and see where it goes.” I mean you hear the first Ramones album and you go, “Whoa! What could happen next?” (Laughs) There’s nothing out there right now that’s going to make me go, “What’s going to happen next?” Mostly it makes me go, “Ok, I’m going to go home and read a book now.” (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: Has the process of aging affected the compositional or creative aspect when writing the most recent Mission of Burma albums? (Obliterati and ONoffON)
Roger Miller: I have no idea. I think a bigger change was Bob Weston [of Shellac], who has been doing more of the engineering, and when we did Vs with Richard Harte that was the first record that we made that really sounded like we wanted it to sound, and that was a really long time ago. And he wasn’t the producer of either of the new albums. We we’re kind of growing. Really, it’s as if we went from 1983 to 2002, and you just put those two years together as the next thing, you know? You don’t feel that much difference.
I think my songwriting, from my perspective, is slightly less woefully abstract, it’s a little more fundamental, simpler, more direct perhaps. I’ve noticed that with the both of the last two songs, almost all of my songs have melodies (laughs), whereas you listen to Vs and “The Ballad of Johnny Burma” and “Fun World,” there’s no melody in the vocals, it’s just talking. There’s absolutely no melodic hook. And now, all of my songs have melodies. And some like to call that “maturity,” when you are a little more … (laughs) but I wouldn’t put too much weight on that.
Popcorn Youth: And the collaborative songwriting approach in Mission of Burma is very different from Alloy Orchestra?
Roger Miller: Yes, it’s completely different. In Burma, I mean the way Burma started and when we were in the band Moving Parts, or even the first band I was in, in 11th grade, where I wrote music for — I have a really long history of writing songs and leading bands, so when we started [Burma] was my songs. And then Clint, out of the blue, wrote “Peking Spring.” It was the first song that he had ever written sprung fully formed like Athena out of Zeus’ thigh. Where the hell did this come from? (Laughs) And it was like my ego was somewhat taken back. (Laughs)
Ultimately, it by far was the greatest thing that could have happened. If it had been only my songs, we would have just been an interesting avant-garde band, and that was it. So from the very beginning, each person brings his own song in, and that’s how we’ve always done it; when Pete started writing, he would bring his songs in. But once they’re put into the band, everybody chips away and comes up with their own parts, or not; we chip away at it so that it ultimately sounds like Burma.
Whereas with Alloy Orchestra, we watch the film together, we’re in the same room, we improvise collectively and then record it, and say, “Yeah, that was a good theme” or “You should have done this here” or “Maybe you shouldn’t use the strings” and then we go back and record again with another improv. We are just actually 100 percent different from Mission of Burma.
Popcorn Youth: And you’ve said in the past that the two complement each other.
Roger Miller: I’m always playing in lots of bands. (Laughs) I have another band called the Binary System, and that’s somewhere in between the two; I generally bring in ideas, but lots of time the drummer and I come up with [ideas] . . . we do improvisations that form the kernel of the songs. And then I also play with Lee Renaldo and William Hooker, where we improvise the entire thing from scratch, entire concerts. So there’s all these incredibly diverse ways of going about music, and I find them all interesting.
And as far as complementing, Alloy Orchestra is a very reasonable type of music group. (Laughs) It’s something that you would associate with maturity. (Laughs) We play concerts, we’re treated well, they take us out to dinner, they put us up in hotels. Whereas [with] Burma, same age group, but you would not associate with maturity, you would associate with out of control youth. So when we play those concerts, it’s late at night, you’re zonked out of your gourd, yet people will be screaming and yelling. Alloy Orchestra concerts, people give you standing ovations and come up and talk to you afterwards. It’s a very, very different kind of situation, and if I only had one of those, I really like Mission of Burma. It’s an incredibly zonked out experience. It’s really satisfying, but if I did that all the time it would probably wear me down, so Alloy Orchestra is this incredibly reasonable way of going out and living this life as a musician. But it’s much more level. So between the two of them I survive. I mean, there are other things to keep me surviving, too.