Summers' Eve

Flashing back on my worst-ever interview

I long ago lost count of how many musicians I’ve interviewed in my 30-plus years as a professional music journalist; it’s gotta be well over a thousand at this point, which is why I sometimes forget that I’ve even interviewed certain folks until I stumble across an old tape, clipping or transcription. Of course, I never forget the really great ones, like my epic Lemmy encounter… and I also never forget the really awful ones, try as I might.

Yesterday, my friend Dave hipped me to an episode of a podcast by the author/musician Josh Alan Friedman, which revolves around the 1978 interview Friedman did with Lou Reed for the SoHo News. Reed, an icon of cool who was for whatever reason rarely cool with journalists, is in especially dyspeptic form here, and the tape is pretty painful to listen to. “I can’t believe any human can be this foul,” Dave marveled, before asking me, “Ever have anyone act like this?”

Well… yes.

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The vast majority of the folks I’ve interviewed over the years have been — at the very least — pretty pleasant and cooperative. I don’t go into interviews trying or expecting to make friends with my subjects, but I am always looking to have an interesting conversation that will further illuminate the artist, their work or both, and usually it works out great. I suppose it helps that I do my homework and try not to ask stupid questions, but most of the folks I’ve interviewed seemed like they’d be pretty chill even if I asked them how their band got their name or what their favorite color was.

But then there are the difficult ones. I wrote last year about my various encounters with Love leader Arthur Lee, which included one truly cringeworthy phone interview. That experience stung for a number of reasons: One, Arthur was a real hero of mine; two, it was the first-ever phone interview I’d ever done with anyone; and three, the interview was an attempt to get my foot in the door at MOJO magazine — and the editors there were distinctly less than impressed by the perfunctory answers I managed to cajole from the man behind Forever Changes, perhaps the greatest rock album ever made. But, as you can read below, I eventually got over it…

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Love is More Than Words

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Another hero of mine who turned out to be a pretty uncooperative/disinterested interview subject was David Johansen, whom I interviewed with Sylvain Sylvain during a New York Dolls reunion tour in 2009. But at least David Jo was funny about it: “Are we almost done?” he asked with an exaggerated yawn and an even more exaggerated Staten Island accent. “‘cuz this is like havin’ teeth pulled.” Thankfully Syl, a sweetheart to the end, was more than happy to answer whatever I asked them.

And then there was Scott Weiland, who was an utter dick to me the couple of times I interviewed him during his Velvet Revolver days, and he wasn’t even funny about it. But hey, it’s not like I ever dug him or his bands anyway, and thankfully Slash and Duff McKagan had already been talkative enough for me to build a solid feature around our conversations. And the guy obviously had his demons, so I didn’t take his behavior at all personally.

But none of the above came even close to the level of unnecessary biliousness I experienced from Police guitarist Andy Summers; our brief, deeply unpleasant phone encounter in the late 1990s easily ranks as my all-time worst interview. And it wasn’t even an interview, per se…

In the interest of candor, I’ll admit here that I was never a Police fan. I can tolerate some of their early rockers like “So Lonely” and “Next To You,” but I've never been able to stomach Sting's pretentious lyrics and faux-Jamaican vocal inflections, or Summers’ effects-saturated — albeit massively influential — guitar textures. (And while Stewart Copeland is obviously an immensely talented drummer, his playing has always been far too fussy for my taste.) Still, one has to give them credit for minting an instantly recognizable sound, and for evolving from New Wave no-hopers to “Biggest Band in the World” in just a few short years. Lots of folks whose tastes I respect totally love ‘em, and that’s cool. Different strokes, etc…

But while Summers’ Police guitar tones have generally left me cold, I actually do like some of the stuff he did back in 1967-68 while he was a member of Dantalian's Chariot and Eric Burdon and the Animals. In fact, “Madman Running Through The Fields” — a track Summers co-wrote and recorded with both acts — is one of my all-time favorite songs from the first British psychedelic era. Credit where credit’s due, right?

In 1998, the Experience Music Project was stockpiling video interviews with many of Jimi Hendrix’s former colleagues and jam partners, and they hired me as an off-camera interviewer for several of their L.A. shoots, during which I interrogated folks like Jack Casady and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter about the various times they’d crossed paths with Jimi.

So when the EMP folks told me that we were probably going to do an interview with Andy Summers, I was all in. The specific object of this interview was to pick Summers’ brain for reminiscences of the London music scene circa 1966-67, especially with regards to Jimi’s interaction with and influence on said scene. Summers had supposedly jammed onstage with Hendrix on Jimi's very first night in London, so the EMP folks figured he'd probably have some unique recollections to share. And since that particular era in British music is easily among my favorites in music history, I was genuinely looking forward to our interview.

I got my first inkling that this assignment wasn’t going to go as planned when my contact at the EMP phoned me out of the blue and gave me the number of Summers’ home studio in L.A. “Do me a favor and call him,” he said. Errr… okay…

Usually, the EMP folks would set up the interviews and hammer out all the details in advance, and I would merely show up to the shoot with my list of questions. But in this case, Summers’ people had apparently told the EMP that he wanted to screen the interviewer beforehand, in order to make sure that said interviewer was sufficiently knowledgeable about his career.

Well, fair enough — I don't like having my time wasted by idiots, either, so I agreed to give Summers a call. I figured between my polite manner, easygoing charm and fairly-extensive knowledge about his work before the Police, I’d be able to put him sufficiently at ease that he’d agree to go through with the interview.

The call did not go well, however. I name-dropped Dantalian's Chariot, the Animals, Kevin Ayers, Kevin Coyne, etc., but to no avail. After several awkward moments, Summers finally admitted flat-out that he was not interested in talking about Jimi Hendrix, or about anything else other than the solo album he happened to be working on at the moment. “The music I'm making right now is very, very contemporary,” he sniffed, “and I don't know how I feel about being seen as some sort of museum piece.”

I tried to explain that, while I understood his point, he had been a participant in a particularly significant moment in music history; and as such, he was in the position to give us an eyewitness account that no one else could really offer. The silence on the other end was so frosty, I could practically hear icicles forming on his receiver.

“Have you talked to Clapton for this project?” he finally hissed.

Um, no, no we hadn’t, I replied, not really sure where he was going with this.

“What about Jeff Beck? Or Jimmy Page?”

No, I told him, we hadn't interviewed them yet, either. We would probably be doing so in the future, whenever we could get a crew over to England. But at the moment, I explained, our crew was on its way to L.A., he lived in L.A., and thus he was the person we were most interested in filming at the moment.

“Well,” he huffed, “Once you’ve talked to them, get back to me. You have to understand — I’m a guitarist of a certain pedigree. I can't be expected to do just any interview.” And then he hung up on me.

Suffice it to say, the interview didn't happen. Which sucked in and of itself, but what really sucked was that, instead of just telling the EMP people that he was too busy with his current project to sit for their cameras — or making some other gracious “Thanks, but no thanks” excuse — Summers apparently went out of his way to inform the EMP folks that I’d offended him during our call, and that he was therefore no longer interested in doing the interview.

Not surprisingly, I never got another EMP assignment. Essentially, I lost a sweet freelance gig just because a knob “of a certain pedigree” was in a particularly pissy mood that day and felt like gratuitously punching down. Say what you will about Sting, but I highly doubt he’s ever pulled any shit like that.

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