Bob Drake  BD is a very prolific musician who's been making music since the 70s and still going. His ongoing passion for the arts and shared interest in furry creatures has made him out to be a huge inspiration of mine. Bob has had a long career in producing, performing in various bands (5uu's, Thinking Plague, The Science Group), and making albums. As of late he can be found at work on his latest solo creations, consisting of all sorts of experimental endeavors, with a deep fondness for animal oriented themes. As you can imagine, I was overjoyed when the man himself agreed to answer some questions I had.

Fractilion: This is very elaborate songwriting. What are your ways of remembering the ideas that come to mind, and what works best in conveying that to your fellow bandmates?

Bob Drake: Like a lot of rock musicians, I have no formal musical training and never learned to read or write music, so when working on my own songs I've always relied on things like portable cassette recorders to get ideas down quickly before I'd forget them. For a while I used a 4-track cassette, which was very nice and easy to work with, but I've owned several and they don't last with heavy use, so today when I'm working out ideas I use a Zoom H4n, which is a little 4-track digital recorder. I generally just use it in the stereo mode, a quick and dirty way to record the ideas. As a 4-track it's a bit awkward to work with but it does the job when you're sitting outside in the garden with a guitar or just want to sketch out an idea. Of course as you work on a song it becomes engrained in your mind and fingers, the recording device is only necessary at the beginning when there's still no form or coherent anything...just a couple tenuous snippets of ideas. By the time I'm ready to record a song I know it inside and out, while always staying open the the new and unexpected directions and ideas which always come along during the actual recording.

Conveying ideas to bandmates: My solo albums are, with the exception of the live section of “Bob's Drive-In” or a very occasional guest, performed entirely by myself, and I don't do many live shows these days. I love playing live, but it's extremely impractical because I live in the middle of nowhere so it's almost impossible to get a band together! When I do a live show, however, I don't like giving the band members too much direction, I choose people who I know will, first of all, like and understand the music and have some enthusiasm for it, and also who will bring something unique to the overall picture, coming up with their own parts and adding their own ideas so we get a real group arrangement and not just an attempt to re-create what I did on my own. There may be a few parts I want played in a specific way, or a certain harmony vocal I'll ask someone to sing, but generally I want band members to do it their way. That's how we did the live section of my “Bob's Drive-In” album. I sent the band members very simple demos with no embellishments, just me strumming the basic chords and singing the vocal melody, I didn't suggest if the drums on a particular part of a particular song should be doubletime or halftime, said nothing about what kind of feel it should have, and so on. And I didn't let them hear my solo versions of the songs, which I had already completed, until after we did the live recording! That way they wouldn't be influenced by my version.

Fr: I've heard various musicians express either praise or disdain for music theory. A common thing i've heard is "I learned music theory so I could disregard it." A lot of your work seems very much into being amelodic while seeming to have a lot of awareness of music theory. How constrained are you to established conventions in your creative process when it comes to figuring out melodies?

BD: As I said already, I have no formal musical training, I just try to make the music I enjoy hearing. As for learning music theory so they could disregard it, I have known and do know musicians with formal training who say they find themselves feeling trapped by it, but I also know as many with no formal training who feel trapped by that too, so in the end I think all that really matters is that one follows and trusts one's own ideas and digs deeply into that. Having musical ideas doesn't depend on having formal training, the training is useful if you want to score for an orchestra, but I suppose even then a person could come up with their own way of doing that if they were so inclined.

The term “amelodic” is certainly not accurate, especially in my recent work. The melody has always been the thing, and I aim for that to the best of my abilities at any given time. Melody has definitely become more and more important and fascinating to me. “Amelodic” implies no melodies, or anti-melodies, whatever those would be! I do understand that some of the groups I have been a part of such as Thinking Plague or 5UUs, or the Science Group, the melodies written by the group's composer are often a bit convoluted upon first listening, I know because I had to learn them! but they are certainly there, not necessarily the kind of melodies I would try to come up with on my own, maybe also not easy to pick up on by listeners to whom that sort of music doesn't appeal. Myself, I aim more and more for a melody which excites me and gives me that thrill. And if you look at the songs on my last few albums (Bob's Drive-In” and “Lawn Ornaments”) I don't believe anyone could called them “amelodic”. A few, such as “The Lonely Manor”, or “Elsie”, for example, are nothing BUT a melody!

To answer the last part of your question – I don't feel constrained by established conventions when coming up with a melody or music in general for that matter, although what I do is certainly “traditional” in many ways, in that I play traditional instruments (drums, guitars, keyboards, etc). I suppose if you want to get technical about it, like anyone else I'm constrained by my own experience and imagination, and those are always growing and expanding, being refined, learning as I go along...

I love the melodic pop song format, what I think of as a compact, self-contained song that does what it does with no extra filling, and where the melody leads the way through, like a string from start to end. As time goes by I realize how much I love a deceptively simple, great melody. It's like magic. I really get a thrill while at the same time wondering “damn, how did they come up with THAT!?”

Fr: So you were exposed to stuff like Henry Cow in the 70s. How was availability of obscure music different in the 70s from the modern age of the internet? Was stuff like Henry Cow being sold in the record stores, or did you have to go by other means to get it?


BD:
I grew up in a tiny rural town in northeast Illinois, a very isolated place back then! I loved Yes, my older sister gave me their album “Fragile” in 1972, that's what made me start playing bass guitar. And I grew up with the Beatles and the pop music of the 50's-70's, and the rock bands of the time. And in the early 70's there was great stuff even on the midwestern AM radio top 40: Edgar Winter's “Frankenstein”, Focus' “Hocus Pocus”, The Faces, Kinks, Led Zeppelin, Yes, The Who, lots of really good rock stuff, not to mention the Motown music in the late 60's-early 70's. I loved all of that and soaked it all up, but none of it, with a few exceptions, would ever get quite as “strange” or go as far outside the borders as I sometimes wished it would. So even though I didn't have any early role models for it so to speak, from the moment I had my hands on a tape recorder and an electric guitar, maybe around 1969, I instinctively used them as tools to make weird sounds, and had always loved incorporating noise and crazy things into my playing right from the start.

I was always looking for records by bands I'd never heard of, always in the hope of finding something different. In those days of the early 1970's that meant going to a record shop and looking through the records, and one day in 1973 while riffling though the LPs in a store called “The Shoppe” in Kankakee Illinois (a medium-sized town about 30 miles from where I lived) I came upon an album that fit the bill : “Unrest” by Henry Cow. Never heard of them, but it had a funny name and inscrutable cover art, that was promising! Took it home and put it on the record player and loved it from the opening note. I thought: now here are some people who are doing something outside the typical rock band sound of the time...the songwriting was superb, they were obviously accomplished players but not stuck to the “normal” ways of playing, it had humor and strangeness, great, sophisticated arrangements as well as utterly chaotic and even silly moments, it was for me a kind of affirmation that I was on the right path.

Later when I lived in Denver Colorado (1978-1989) there was a record shop there called Wax Trax, they were really plugged into the independent music scene and could always recommend interesting or bizarre new records, I discovered a lot of crazy stuff there, the “no wave” scene, and everything that came up in that post-punk scene of the early 80's. I felt I was naturally a part of that.

Fr: There's this part in the title track of your album Moonsongs by Thinking Plague, where a small voice clip is looped repeatedly. What kind of gear did you use for that sort of thing in 1986?

BD: Around 1982 or 83, a musician friend of mine had a cheap Electro-Harmonix effect box called “Instant Replay”. It was basically a primitive, lo-fi sampler which came with a little pad you could use to trigger a sound which you'd put into it. You'd plug a microphone into it, make a sound (it had to be about ½ second long maximum!) and then you could replay that sound by tapping the pad. That seemed radical enough, but it also had mysterious jack input on the side, and my friend discovered that if he plugged the control voltage from a keyboard into this jack, he could “play” the sound on the keyboard. I'll never forget that moment, we were astounded! That's how we did those funny little samples on Moonsongs. That kind of thing was still VERY exotic in those days, fancy samplers were so expensive and extremely rare, light-years away from anything my pals and I could touch. It seemed so exciting, and on that same Thinking Plague album we also used a Linn Drum machine belonging to a local recording studio. We'd been influenced by the productions of the time such as mid-80's Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush albums, where they combined real drums with obvious samples, and used sounds from nature on the keyboard etc. However I quickly lost interest in using samplers and drum machines in my own work, and have never used them since!

Fr: This is probably kind of a loaded question but…what are your thoughts on the music industry? Do we need big contracts in order to get our stuff out there, or are we better off staying independent as artists? I imagine that you've experienced a lot of change in your time.

BD: Even though I've spent my life devoted to making music, and for a few years, 1990-1994, I lived and worked in LA as a freelance recording engineer working on some very well-known projects - albums by Ice Cube, the Boyz 'n the Hood soundtrack, Latin Alliance, George Clinton, projects with Shirley MacClaine, Lily Tomlin, not to mention a Charo album, etc etc, and loads of early 90's house and hip-hop - despite being in there working on these projects, I was never interested in the business side of it and due to my lack of interest in the commercial side of things, I managed to stay completely outside of that. So I am not the most informed person on the subject!

Do we need big contracts to get our stuff out there? It depends on what you mean by “out there”.
In the old days of big labels and contracts, your record would get distributed (and possibly even advertised) far and wide. Copies would be sent to radio station, and tours would be set up. Those were some benefits of big label contracts. Today it's unimaginably different than it was then. Anyone can record anything they want on any kind of recording device, then immediately upload it to Bandcamp or other sites, so it's instantly available to anyone on the planet who has an internet connection. That's pretty radical. Obviously no one needs any kind of contract to do that. And you can never know what's going to grab the ear of the general public: a stupid song you've done as a joke and uploaded to Youtube might get a zillion plays.

Big contracts of course had their positive and negative aspects too: In some ways, it wasn't completely a bad thing in the old days when there was more of a “filter” for an artist to get through in order to make a record. On the other hand, with that system, people like myself or bands like Henry Cow (especially in the late 70's, early 80's) could never be taken seriously by a big label because the few people who made the decisions didn't understand the music, or didn't understand that audiences DO in fact enjoy something a bit odd or novel or adventurous. I must also say that nearly everyone I have known personally who did have a “big contract” ended up regretting it; they were never paid, or were worked to death on tours, lost all rights to their own work, ended up owing the label outrageous sums due to clever wording in the contract, and worse! And if you've agreed to, say, an album per year, that sounds like a great idea, but can you really come up with an album's worth of good songs, rehearse, refine and record them in time to fulfill the contract? While still being sent out on the road touring? That's why you'd often see bands burning out so fast in the 70's, doing a couple of great albums and then literally running out of ideas with no time to slow down and come up with new music. Of course it can be a positive thing too, but I really do think we are better off with smaller independent labels. And I think labels are good because then an artist can concentrate on what they do best which is making the music, and let the label take care of distribution, promotion, setting up tours if that's going to happen, all the business side of it, and be able to trust one another because it's a small business done on a more personal level. I know there are some musicians who are also very sharp business people, but I'm not one of them and they are very rare.

Fr: How is the business of producing/engineering in recording studios different now than it was in the 70's and 80's? It has been said that profits in the music biz ain't like they used to be, yet at the same time, recording technology today has also become much more affordable. Assuming you feel qualified enough to make such an assessment, would you say there is still much opportunity to be had for newcomers trying to get involved in the industry?

BD: I moved to my place in France in 1994 and since then have been pretty much working my own way and having no contact with ordinary studios, so I really can't say anything about what the studio world is like today. Looking back though, on the technical side, for sure it's changed drastically from the way it used to be. The most radical changes probably happened in the early 2000's, as computers became prevalent and reliable, and high quality recording software really started to improve and become affordable. Even as late as 1994 when I was still working in Los Angeles, studios were still using 2” 24-track tape machines and 1/4” tape to mix to. You rarely saw a computer in the studio, and if there was a primitive computer or the choice of a mixing desk with computer-automated faders, people tended to avoid them, those early computerised systems were so complicated and fiddly, very unreliable. And no one there to tell you how they worked, so you'd be there for ten minutes trying to understand how the hell to re-do some accidental bit of fader automation you'd done by mistake! Just before I moved from LA to my place in France, some studios were starting to use Alesis digital ADAT machines to replace the analog multitrack machines, but computers were still pretty rare in general. That “digital revolution” happened so fast, and there was no one to explain how to get the best out of this new digital gear, it would just show up one day in the studio and we'd be expected to carry on the session as if nothing had happened, we had to learn by trial and error during actual sessions, making records! One thing I realized after a year or two of working with digital recorders was how much we had always depended on the equipment – the mixing desk, the tape machine, etc, - to add something to the sound. What you got back from tape was not exactly what went in, but it could often be even a bit better because of the tape saturation and all the electronics that the signal was passing through during its input and playback. You don't get that with digital recording, not ideally anyway. It's transparent at best. I suddenly realized that for generations we'd learned how to use and work with tape, not even aware of how we'd allow for the subtle alteration of the sounds we were recording. Then all at once, literally overnight, the tape machine in the studio is replaced by a digital tape recorder...everything you had always done suddenly didn't quite sound the same or as strong, it took a while to learn to use that stuff and some albums of the late 90's and early 2000's suffered in sound quality because of that.

What's available today are powerful and inexpensive computers, and even free recording software which is quite good, and on the top end really great software such as what I use, called Samplitude, which is certainly affordable by most people, the hardware such as analog-to-digital converters and microphones are getting better and better and also less expensive, so almost anyone can afford a great little recording setup at home. I have always preferred recording at home, or in places like big empty factories...never cared for the sterile atmosphere of studios...but yes, today any artist can have a fine little recording setup at home. This is great but also can result in not-so-great productions, because a band or artist is not always the best producer or engineer for their own work. You do find a few people who are actually good at doing all of that, like myself (not bragging, it's just the only thing I actually know how to do!)

As for whether I think there is still good opportunity for newcomers in the “industry”: do you mean engineering or producing, being a technician, being a studio musician, being an artist making music... I think there are probably different answers for each case! And as I have already said, I was last involved in anything remotely connected to the music industry and studio scene in the early 90's. I have no idea if most of those studios even still exist. Nor could I guess at what it might be like for a young group or artist trying to get some recognition. Other than “probably as hard and as unlikely as it always was”! The big change today is that now with everyone able to record themselves cheaply at home, for better or worse, and make it instantly available on the Internet, there is an unprecedented quantity of music being made available constantly. Is it harder to be “recognized” or to find something exciting amidst that constant flood of new music? Hard to say, isn't it! Most important though is that if your goal is to make a lot of money, there are surely better and easier ways to do it than making music. But if your real passion is simply the making of music, then I couldn't suggest a better way to spend your life than by making music, and don't even need to tell you because, like me, you'll just do it anyway.

Fr: Tarkus! Tarkus?

BD: I wasn't a big ELP fan, though Emerson was truly a prodigious talent on the organ. I did like some of the Brain Salad Surgery album back when it came out, but the other albums didn't grab me. 


Fr: You grew up in a time before there was a furry fandom. Why do you think stuff like that didn't begin to emerge until around the late 90s?

BD: Obviously we were always around, and always suspected there MUST be other “people like us” out there, but there wasn't a good way to get organised until the Internet, which made it possible for people with similar interests to quickly get in touch with each other. Also, at the beginning, the Internet was still relatively anonymous, if you didn't want your real identity known you could sort of do that. Furries who were afraid of what their family members or boss might think, for example. When I first heard about the Internet and got my first computer (1996!) I did consider coming up with a nickname so I could carry on keeping a lot of myself hidden from my close friends, but decided I'd had enough of that over the previous 30-some years so I just used my real name. So in a way the Internet was a catalyst for me to stop hiding aspects of myself from others out of some imagined, unknown fear. A very positive thing. And now look at what we've got, wonderful conventions and a huge diverse community, who would have imagined!

Fr: in 2005 you were involved in an album called 'Songs for Adults' by NIMBY. Could you talk about that?

BD: That was a one-off album with some friends, it has a funny story. The guy who wrote the songs (James Grigsby) usually writes the most complex, "modern-classical" rock music imaginable (check out the group U-Totem) and he had just finished writing another album's worth of super-complex music and couldn't find a group willing to learn and play it. So he decided to write a bunch of pop songs instead. Turned out great!