I had trouble coming to terms with the Vincent Gallo who made films, and said unwholesome things to doubters.  There was a vague menace about him.  All those emotional abstractions that were so seductive in his performances had footing in the off-screen version of him.  Or maybe it was that the roles were just thinly veiled permutations of who he was, and who he couldn't shake..  Maybe he didn’t know exactly why he felt the way he did.  There was an inexplicable conviction in his actions.  It was no matter that neither he nor his most devoted audiences could not pin those motives down.  They just were.  And they felt right.  I thought he’d hate me if I made shit up about him, like an interview wherein he and I would discuss something other than his face and the things it said, the way it looked alone in a bath tub, or in a casket.  But really, what choice was I left with?  Pittsburgh had yet to acquire a single theatrical print of Trouble Every Day, his latest film.  There was a good chance that it had some racy cannibalistic sex scenes.  I kind of got lost in Paul’s CDs looking at the photographs of blood baths, a ballerina-like figure inspecting herself in the liner notes of the soundtrack.  She was really beautiful; I couldn’t help but fantasize about whom she had danced for, screwed, and eaten.

Tindersticks cut yet another soundtrack for one of his films, though it was probable that the liaison of this match-up had been director Claire Denis, and Gallo was none the wiser.   I saw the blood-bathed ballet cannibal, and I knew he’d hate me for being a fucking square anyway.  No big deal though, it went alright.  i horked down a quiver of martinis to dull the anxiety and condescension...

It had been raining for a little more than a month and even stationary things were beginning to float.  I had been celebrating St. Patrick’s Day since mid-January, and didn’t mind that Demerol, the martini bar he chose for the interview, was infamous for a drink serving that could fit comfortably inside a contact lens, at a price that Vanderbilts alone could afford.  Plus, Gallo would smell me a mile away and, luck be a lady, understand whose hand the tab was going in.  I knew he would be at least twenty minutes late.  It was to let me know that presence and anticipation were variable things when it came to folks like him.  He showed up a little more than a half hour after our appointment was scheduled to begin.  I’d been ingratiating myself with a few patrician vodka-martinis and pretzels, announcing,  “Gallo’s got me.”  He’d hate me anyway.  He showed up late and found a cocktail waiting at the bar.  I figured he would ask the bartender what time I showed up.  Like, if the bartender told him, “You came in on his heels” Gallo would just drop a large bill and hit the exit as if I didn’t exist.  My anticpation would've fallen flat, like he wouldn't be the same fucking guy if he just showed up on time like us nobodies.  I held up my third martini in a facetious toast, “To when I got here!.”

ME: First of all I didn’t see the movie.  I want to talk about the soundtrack.  But the way I see it not having seen it, and trying to get an independent grasp on the music might provide some otherwise obscured insights.

VG: I went to the premiere just prior to coming back for a new project.  It was the only time i heard the music.  Claire gets along with them, I guess.

ME: There’s something cinematic about that music.  I saw a woman covered in blood, a photo in the liner notes.  Critics were calling the movie shocking and excessive.  What really surprised me was how the music bespoke a quietness.  Like no matter how violently your behavior, or whoever it would've been behaving like that,  spraying that blood around, there was a quiet reckoning waiting.  Listening to the soundtrack brought back memories of Buffalo 66, as i tried to put you into the same context as that music.  You know, having not seen it yet.

VG:  It really isn't something i think about.  You're bound to say that i'm being egotistical, but the role is what I came on for.  She [Claire Denis?]  could've used just about anyone's music.  I don't think it would have had too much of an impact on my part in it.  If  you're going to take anything away from it, that's assuming you'll ever get out of here long enough to see it, it will be in spite of eveything else around me,  that you get anything from what I contributed.

ME: I suppose I grew up hating those florid scores to Hitchcock movies before Bernard Hermann stepped in.  So much of the contemporary score music throws back to that stuff.  It’s as if there’s an absence in the drama, so the composer fills it in with gratuitous orchestration.  With Hitchcock it sort of grated against an otherwise tight film—you know like Rebecca.  But these Titanic folks are just sort of whitewashing over already obscure artistic choices. You know?”

VG: Well you dont really need death metal to underscore a killing on film.  That would be just way too obvious.  But I think what you were saying about scale, and the smallness, just happens to coincide with that skrunken-in feeling when you get vulnerable.  But seeing as you haven't seen the film your frame of reference and mine aren't really going to line up flush.  Are they? (He looked to the bartender for the drink he'd left there.  It was brought over to him.  I think it was carrot juice, or maybe a bloody mary with carrot juice.  It wasn't normal-looking.)

ME: “The Maid Theme” from the film, for example, comes out of that same darkness of their Curtains record.  “Rented Rooms”, and “The Ballad of the Tindersticks” sound like short films unto themselves.  They have a dramatic consistency that owes more to narrative intensity than any popular musical convention.  You get this gust of a string section that launches “Rented Rooms”.  Musically it has all the attributes of a cinematic, or literary  narrative.  It's not at all like a lyrical ballad or anything like that.  The sound resembles the story Stuart is singing.  It's sort of gaudy and promiscuous.  They appear to possess a perverse ambition to overturn the moody Sinatra/Riddle aesthetic, show the licentious off-stage side of things.  I suppose that’s what, to me, always made their music seem so harmonious with your films.  It takes a great deal of courage to make yourself look like an authentic asshole in from of others.  Very few artists pull that off.

VG: Okay, yeah.  But you're overstating the fetish of action..  You see, that asshole, as you call it, in those films I did is not exclusively me.  Christ, why do you think people like you can relate to them?  Anyway, I always went for Dean Martin over Sinatra.  That bruised hearted baddass stuff is just to get pussy.

ME: I don’t think I ever mistook it as an exclusive thing, like exclusively Vincent Gallo..  That’s the kind of thing movie stars do.  I’m just a line cook.  It’s all about anonymity.  Sameness.  Everyone eats a burger.  But what I was leading for was that mundane, I guess you could say inevitable quality to the score the Tindersticks have created.  Like I was saying a moment ago, about the “The Maid Theme”.  There's something of a wallpaper quality to it.  It's almost timid.  It's watchful.

VG: Yeah (he points to the speaker as it plays).  It's like that theme to Jaws, tipping you off that something was going to happen.  Still, It's slasher movie stuff.

ME:  You dont think you get these moments in the day-to-day.  I mean, however outrageous the sex and people-eating gets in this film, its still a music that corresponds with everyday sensations.

VG:  A good score is like a good acting role.  If its real--forget realistic/unrealistic--if its really real its not going to be obvious.  People live quietly.  In general.  Most of the best aspects of a role, or a song or whatever,  are so mundane that people overlook them.  But in a shitty movie you pick up on it right away, on the sham going on.

ME: It’s plain, "The Maid Theme”.  Forget overstatement.  It’s almost like not stated at all, the way Faulkner said you could “smell noon”.  That’s how sensitive.  So naturally it would take some doing.  A sense of refinement.  What do you think of the main theme, the song?

VG:  This?  (The bartender sets the album to the first track, and it begins.  We sit quietly through "Opening", and then "Closing".)

ME: So what about the main theme?

VG: Well first things first, they’re not the same song.  The tenor is very different.  And the story itself takes a turn.  I mean, stylistically it has an Isaac Hayes quality.  Like the player who came in from the cold.  You know?  .  It feels like a mass-requiem for Shaft.  That line, “look into my eyes/you see trouble every day”.  I don’t think I could even tolerate it, while watching a movie.  But I guess it's paced slowly enough that you donit consciously divide your attention between the screen and the sound.  I don't think i notced when i saw the film played back. (He leans forward, listening more intently.) All that blaxploitation shit where Isaac Hayes made his mark, as a score composer, gets a real close going over in this.  This one ["Closing Titles"] is another story.

ME: A little more optimistic?  It is a dialogue after all.

VG: Yeah.  When you go about wanting something like this, it prompts a serious question.  Is it the doing or the getting it over with that he’s thinking of?  So he’s ready to get this unresolved romance back on track, “before the days become nights, before the years become lives”.  These are people obsessed with time.  It’s their fetish.  Whether it brings them any joy is anyone’s guess.  So I can’t say that its any more optimistic than it is pessimistic.  It’s just an available expression.

ME: So what about you?  How do you feel?  Is it a curse or a blessing?”

VG:  I did the acting.  It was a little scary because I always, no matter what, take that shit seriously.  You decide.  You seem to be in love with this stuff.
 

(I watched him get up to go,  squaring us with the house.  "The Maid Theme" played again, just then, as the bartender was wiping up after someone's drink circles and spills.  It was just a harp playing, and a taut pulse of wooden percussion, sounding like a frightened heart. Then it drew to a close.  Gallo slipped out the door into the bad weather.  It had become difficult getting him to talk at all, even if i was making it up for the both of us, stuck in Pittsburgh without a single reel of Trouble Every Day to see what it was really about. I closed my eyes, listening to the soundtrack once more, trying to make sure I'd actually said something, instead of just filling up space on a page. I could imagine a space beyond the door of Demerol, where the rain, and the intermittent sound of that wooden heart, and Vincent Gallo walking were all indistinguishable things.)