David Torn is a tough man to pin down — literally and figuratively. One day he's in his upstate New York project studio as a solo artist/avant- guitarist working on the follow-up to his latest batch of cut-n-paste/jammin'-in-space brilliance known to the world as SPLaTTerCeLL. The next he's headed to a UK scoring stage to record a London Orchestra doing Bollywood-style string parts for a film score he's composed for a big budget Hollywood film [The Order]. Soon after I get a call from him as he steps into the role of producer/remixer of Jeff Beck's most recent album, Jeff, transforming tracks into post-modern, pan-cultural extravaganzas — resulting in a 2004 Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental Performance for the song "Plan B". Of course, this is the same David Torn whose serene, ambient, and finely textured soundscapes have gone on to become über-successful mainstays of the sample CD and film music world.
Weeks pass and the next time I hear from him, he's been summoned to a New York City studio to record guitar for Tony Visconti [Tape Op #29] and David Bowie, who goes on to call David "the Yo-Yo Ma of guitar." By the time I finally catch up with him, he's back at home, preparing to produce a new album for guitar tapping phenom Kaki King, to be followed by another film-score composition assignment [Friday Night Lights]. Of course, he's also trying to squeeze in a favor for a friend by mixing an album for another well-known musician, one of the many who call upon David's talents as guitarist, texturalist, producer, remixer, composer or mastering engineer to grace their projects.
When we finally sat down to catch-up and chat, I did what I always do when I find myself in the presence of this grinning, wise-cracking, forever- excited musical genius: I sit back, smile from ear to ear from the laughter that always follows, scratch my head a few times as I try to figure out what David's come up with next, and most of all, prepare to listen with both ears and both sides of my brain.
On producing/remixing Jeff Beck
So how did your involvement with Jeff Beck come about?
I got a really nice note from Jeff in October/November '02 or something like that, that had nothing to do with working. It was just like, "I love your stuff. Thanks for making the SPLaTTerCeLL stuff, it drives me crazy." Terry [Bozzio] called and said, "Jeff is insane about this SPLaTTerCeLL stuff, he's absolutely nuts about it." Then his manager called in November before I went to London, and tried to get us together while I was there and I obviously couldn't 'cause I was 24 hours a day on that film score [The Order] while I was there. It just never happened. Then in January, his manager, Ralph [Baker], called saying, "You should really talk to Jeff because he's really unhappy with his record and he thought you could save a track or two." [laughs] So Jeff called and said, "Whatever you wanna do. I don't care. Use whatever you want, don't use whatever you don't want." I asked, "Do you mind if I'm rewriting?" I hadn't heard the material at this point, and he said, "I don't care what you do, go as far left as you want, as far right as you want, just completely reshape it." I got the first track, "Plan B", which ended up being the single, and I went, "God, how am I gonna fix this?!" I went into the multitrack, I got the multitrack, and I thought, "I can't do this! I don't know." So I rewrote four or five different versions and it was driving me insane. I was going for a week — let me try it with this tempo, this key, these chord changes. Then I tried the little thing with the tablas, and the new chords at the beginning, and I thought, [whispers] 'Fuck, shit, I can't get it!' I put it to the side and went back to it a week later and I just went, "Okay, I'm going back to my original idea with the tablas at the front with the new chord changes," and kinda started organizing around that, and I was kinda still hating what I was doing. There weren't any spaces in it at all, so I started working on that, and then Craig Street came over and I played it for him and he's like "Dude, you're like Mr. Electronic now!" [laughs] As he's walking out the door he goes, "Sounds like it needs an acoustic guitar," and I was like, "Fuck you, Bitch!" Right? [more laughter] And after he left I went, "Hmm, acoustic guitar..." I put the acoustic guitar down at the beginning and then at the end, with the tablas, and I thought, 'Wow! This is a good setup. I like this, that's good!' Then I sent the track to Jeff and he said, "Do another one." He sent me another track, so I did another one. There were no substantial changes he made to anything except he would call back and say [in British accent], "Is there something new we can do to the guitar at the end?" That would be it. The third track was like the week before the album's release, and they called and Jeff asked, "Can do you one more track, can you do one more?" and I went, "Yes." To work with Jeff Beck, "Yes, I'll do one more track." That was the last one and it didn't turn out that good. I rushed it and never really organized what I thought it might have become because there really wasn't the time. I probably would have been able to do it if I spent two weeks on the one track because you're handed material and you're not being asked to do a remix, you're being told, "This is what's going on the album!" So you have this restriction of your writing but you have to write as if you're in a remix mode, and then you're picking out material from the original tracks you really dig, but writing around it, and I just didn't have the time for the third one.
What was it like, as a guitarist, to rework or rewrite the guitar parts of Jeff Beck?
A part of me was saying, "I don't even know if I can work on this" because it's almost as if I put any attention at all he's gonna love it because the writing was not around his guitar playing and also didn't sound cool. It didn't have anything that felt like where we are today. I don't mean it like you have to have digital manipulation. But if you don't have the playing and the writing, there's gotta be something in the organization of the concept that has some excitement to it, that has some enthusiasm to it. Just the root of the thing was that it wasn't around him. So I restructured everything. The main guitar lines were from outtakes. They weren't in the original track. The things that I ended up using as central pieces — there were 30 tracks of Jeff, and they were in the last four spontaneous tracks that he did. There'd be ten unbelievable guitar phrases that were melodies in and of themselves but weren't even in the track because it had been about the vocal. So it was a weird one.
On producing the next Jeff Beck album
The first time we met was after it was all done, [laughs] and he did very sincerely ask me to do the whole next record, which I wouldn't want to do this way. I'd like to just see him in a room playing with people, and then leaving. Just the idea of him playing with Terry Bozzio and Me'Shell NdegéOcello, or Terry and Melvin Gibbs, or ?uestlove and Melvin, and Jeff with [John] Medeski on keys, or Craig Taborn or somebody like that! Just some whack-ass group! Then organize it afterwards. We talked about a lot of different shit, like if he wanted to take this route. Really just go in this direction where somebody's clearly writing around his playing. Then I prefer that he just record an hour of his guitar everyday and email it to me and then I could structure the tracks around real spontaneous playing, 'cause, I can put shit in time [laughs]... you know what I mean? I like the idea of being in a room, seeing him at least with great players. I think it would be very exciting to see him with players who challenge him and who are a lot younger than him. The whole thing with Jeff is he's continuously changed his element. He hasn't necessarily always been at the leading edge of the curve, but he is one of the leading electric guitar players of all time. I know! [laughs] I sat in a room with the guy and I haven't a clue how he does what he does. I wanna do more with him. He said to me, "I honestly wish that you had been in on the project from the very beginning, because I think we could have got it done with a lot less pain to me." He said very publicly that there's a lot about this record that he hates, you know?
On listening in mono
In 1992 David required surgery for a life-threatening brain tumor that left him deaf in his right ear.
I recently regained hearing in one of my ears after a month-long sinus infection and I couldn't imagine mixing without being able to hear in both ears. How are you able to make that work, especially with so much spatial stuff happening in the sound stage of your mixes?
You get used to it. Like if it's permanent, and you know it's permanent, then you make a huge effort. You know it's a lot different than somebody who for their entire life has heard things in mono. When you talk about that happening to you and you talk about that happening to me, after 40 years of hearing in stereo and mixing, or being involved in the mixes of many, many records, films scores, etc., and always having a sense of movement, specifically when we're talking about movement in the stereo field. For me now, it's a question of exercising my imagination enough to remember what that was and activate it in my current mixes. I listen in mono. That's the way I listen. If I were another person, I might actually always turn off one speaker and really listen to everything in mono, but I don't. I actually monitor in the full stereo that I was used to before I was deaf on one side. Recently, I've gotten into, in my mixes, kinda actually analyzing the stereo field, looking at the phase scope, seeing what's moving around, what frequencies, because I can use a digital scope now, I can see which frequencies are in motion. It's an exercise of the imagination — an imagination that's based on what I remember I heard before I was 39-40 years old.
So you're imagining, as opposed to actually hearing, the mix in stereo in your head?
Absolutely! No question about it. The physical reality is that I hear in mono, but in my head, like if you turn the music off, and I go lay down, and I'm listening to a mix in my head, inside my brain, to me it's all in stereo. There's an imagined feeling of a stereo, or even broader than stereo field. It's the sound I hear. "Boy, wouldn't it be cool if this was over here, and yet, it trailed out over this way?" All that stuff is stuck in the brain somehow.
There's a more texturally developed and layered sound to your records in recent years. Did that coincide with the changes in your hearing?
It started when I lost my hearing on my right side, and started with my guitar sound, and that's still in motion because I have progressively looked for something less shrill, fatter, and I think that applies to my mixes as well. A fairly wide sound stage, but a pretty fat, grittier kind of tone in general that applies to my guitar as well as generally applies to my mixes. I'm consistently looking for something less shrill and thicker and more animated on its own as it relates to the guitar sound. To that end, I've been working on this new Bogner tube guitar amplifier since January, and we're getting pretty good on it, we're getting pretty close. We have the sound, and now there are the features that kinda go along with it. For any musician there's never — I hope there's never — a moment where I can say, "This is my sound," and when I say that, I mean it not just for this moment in time, but for ten years from now. I hope it's a really animated sound, but I hope it's always really moving. Neil Young's mixes don't sound the same now as they did 20 years ago, and frankly, I don't think his guitar sounds the same either. It sounds better. It sounds 100 times better.
On recording guitar
How's your guitar setup looking these days?
