Spirits in the Material World

Live's Chad Taylor and Ed Kowalczyk discuss the virtues of being connected to a higher rock and roll power.

by Vic Gabarini

"I think Secret Samadhi is not what you'd call a 'first-listen record"," muses Live guitarist Chad Taylor. "It's not easily accessible to most people. We're also the king of band where everybody says we're so much better live than on record." And hearing a band through your TV speakers is not necessarily the best way to see them in concert, but the fans who saw Live on Saturday Night Live earlier this year were mesmerized. Taylor's guitar bristled and roared as the the band launched into a white-hot rendition of "Heropsychodreamer." Vocalist Ed Kowalczyk prowled the stage, radiating intensity, and the taut rhythm section slammed the song home. No wonder Live's current summer tour is one of the most highly anticipated of the year.

Three years ago, Live were an unkown garage band from bucolic York, Pennsylvania, in the heart of the legendary (but not very exciting) Pennsylvania Dutch country. In 1994, their second album, Throwing Copper, catapulted them into the first-division ranks of their heroes, R.E.M., as well as alternative megastars Pearl Jam and U2. Radio stapels such as "I Alone," "Lightning Crashes," and "All Over You" dominated the airwaves for the next two years. This year, watchin as their peers wallowed in the great alternative slump, Live retained and expanded its following with Secret Samadhi, adding to a steady string of radio/MTV hits with radical, risky and guitar intensive hits like "Lakini's Juice," "Freaks" and even a ballad, "Turn My Head." They seemed to be a band that had everything: R.E.M.'s folksy communal spirit, Pear Jam's racous intensity, and most controversially, U2's reputation as a "spiritual" band.

But Live aren't interested in preaching to you in their conersations or their music. In fact, they see the body and the spirit, the sacred and the so-called profane, as part as the same greater whole. Sure, Kowalczyk has a personal guru he's devoted to, and other band members meditate, but they'll tell you the idea is to maifest the highest energy possible in their music. Secret Samadhi does refer to sa Sanskrit term for enlightenment they try to achieve on stage every night and share with their audience.

"It is the secret plave we travel to on stage," says Taylor. "I've definetly come out of my body sometimes and looked down on myself. But you look at a tape of Jimi Hendrix, and his eyes are rolling up in his head--that's not the drugs, he's gone. His soul is soaring, he's wandered out of his body and mind. That's the place where Live's music becomes most passionate, most fulfilling. And when an audience is present and we do it collectively as four people, the audicence is hooked for life. We give it our all."

Both Taylor and Kowalczyk sat down with Maximum Guitar to straighten out a few misconseptions about what it means to be a truly spiritual rock and roll band, and reveal the secrets to your own enlightened approach to playing and songwriting.

Maximum Guitar: Chad, your approach to the guitar is pretty unorthodox, especially your chord voicings. Is that a result of feeling an emotion and looking for the perfect way to express it, or do you go for the sound first?

Chad Taylor: Emotion, first and foremost, is everything in music. Because I'm a very primative player, I search very hard for the right combination of notes to express that yearning feeling that's inside me when I'm writing a song. I've always thought that my greatest skill or attribute as a guitar player was not knowing how to "correctly" play the ting. That's where any unique voicings and sound come from.

MG: Pete Townshend once said he wished he could play like some studio pro like Larry Carlton. But if he'd been that schooled, he'd had never come up with such and original approach.

Taylor: I agree, totally. I don't rely on patterns--I wouldn't just play a normal A chord to start a song. I'd find the right note, then find a series of notes that figure around it to create a chord that expresses what I need to say. The chords on Secret Samadhi that I'm most proud of are on "Unsheathed," though I couldn't tell you what in God's name they are. But I was just looking at some transcriptions they've don on some of the new songs I know they're not right.

MG: Ed, when Chad hands you an unusual riff like "Lakini's Juice," does it evoke a specific emotional image for you?

Ed Kowalczyk: Yes. In fact, he handed me that riff and it definetly inspired something in me both cerebrally and emotionaly that I wasn't aware of before. It spikes me in a plave that I may not be in touch with all the time. There's a well of subconscious emotion that the music communticates to in each person.

MG: Your songs can be pretty abstract, but they obviously have a meaning for you. Do you trust that the audience picks up on the general intent and relates it to themselves?

Kowalczyk: That's exactly what we're doing. Some people have given us a lot of shit about taking on big issues, like spirituality, but I don't think they've given us a true listen or come to one of our shows. We're not up on stage telling people what to think or trying to convert anybody to any kind of bullshit. It's just throwing things out and having a faith that, at some level, people will put it all together, and at the very least have an experience that'a unique.

MG: That opening riff had to be the origin of "Lakini's Juice." Another guitar magazine transcribed it in dropped D tuning. But that doesn't feel right.

Taylor: No, it's actually in what I call DADFAD, except it's tuned down half a step. And it's the first song I've ever written in an open tuning. I play differently depending on who comes up with the song idea. If I start it, it's based around the chord, as you said, or a chord progression. If Ed has the initial idea, then I'll work around the melody. With Chad and Pat it's the rhythmic structure. With "Lakini's," I was sitting in my new house in the attic at about five in the morning after a long night of drinking wine and having great conversations with some friends. I open-tuned the guitar because my body functions were moving slower than my mond, and I figured that was the easiest way to play. The whole song came to me after that chord, and I kept playing it over and over, afraid that in my slightly drunken stupor I wouldn't remember it the next day. I almost didn't give it to the band because I didn't know if Ed could write a melody over something so oddball. Now I think it's one of the songs that is going to define the direction of Live--playing with as many hectic, crazy chord patterns as we can.

MG: Are you more creative when you stop thinking and let some deeper part of yourself put the peices together?

Taylor: Yeah, if I'm in deep thought and decide to express it and pick up a guitar, the idea will instantly go away. I don't go anywhere without a guitar near me, because the ideas come spontaneously--mostly late at night when your mind can't really be too conscious anymore. It's almost my form of meditation. I'll sit around and wathc television or do a million other things with a guitar in my hand, and suddenly I'll look down and I'm playing a song.

MG: "Heropsychodreamer" is the song that best sums up Live's music for me on the new album. You seem to be acknowledging that our hidden uncoscious selves can hide dark stuff, yet can also be a pathway to a higher reality.

Kowalczyk: There's definitely that fascination with the deeper parts of the personality, becuase it's kind of a double-edged sword. At times, it's connceted with super-intelligence somehow--a Jungian well of brilliance. And on the other hand, there's a part that's a totally twisted, fucked up cesspool of nonsense.

MG: Would you say darker artists, such as Marylin Manson, are at times performing a spiritual function by showing us our own darker sides, so we can clear them, like a Tibetan or Navaho in a demon mask?

Kowalczyk: Yeah, they're what Jung called Tricksters. They push the buttons of what people hold dear, what we hold sacred or cherish in our culture. People like Madonna and Marilyn Manson come around and everybody goes, "Aah!!! What if this is evil?" Obviously, it depends on your disposition towards it. It is what it is.

Taylor: Man, you've got me pacing around, I'm so glad we're getting into this conversation. Usually in interviews it's just, "Okay, yeah, Live, it's 'evil' spelled backwards, that's how we named ourselves!" [laughs] Honestly, some sicko kid wrote that to us, and we were hysterical! This is the Western world, we're scared of anything to do with the spiritual aspects of music. Ed said it best: "If we can't taste it, fuck it, or suck it, we're afraid of it."

MG: Still, many people probably think that because Ed has a guru, and you're all spiritually oriented, that you want to escape the world, or deny your body and senses. But your music seems more about understanding spirituality as a way of integrating all these parts of yourselves into a greater whole.

Kowalczyk: Yeah, the Western idea of spirituality has always been that you have to be absolutely disassociated from the vital areas of life--give all your material possesions away, find the guru, and live happily ever after in a monastery. Or maybe do yoga once a week to feel better bodily. That's our notion of "spirituality" and it's pretty fucked. It's really just not the case. Our lives, like you said, are fully intergrated. We're incarnated in these physical bodies, and my guru and his teaching is essentially about allowing the forces of the divine to descend fully into the body, rather than us ascending out of the body with the intention to go somewhere else. So every moment is an oppertunity to confront and transcend our limitations. Being onstage is an intensification of that, with all this incredible energy being created by the band and the audience flying around like bullets from an AK-47. There's so much energy that you have to conduct it somehow. And that in turn benefits the music.

Taylor: I'm very into the physical aspect of what music does to your body. I like the sound of a really loud amp, where I can't escape the nose of the guitar, or the pulsating motions of the speaker cones. I think I play a lot of my chords based on how they make my body feel, not so much my ear. At my best moments, I want to crawl inside my amp!

MG: So can a rock guitarist, by creating music that wakes you up emotionally and mentally, communicate more effectively than actual words?

Taylor: Oh, completely. I think that music is the means of communication that's most readily available to people that's beyond words. It can express thoughts, ideas and emotions simultaneously. Words can mean different things to different people because of their past history. But with a guitar, you can use tone, sound and melody to express an idea so much more purely than with words. Even Ed, who writes the lyrics, would probably agree.

MG: There must be a dozen web sites dedicated to discussing your songs and lyrics. Do you guys, as well as the audience, learn from your own songs? Do they reveal more layers of meaning to you over time?

Kowalczyk: "Freaks," on Secrect Samadhi, and "I Alone," from the last album, are both examples of that. "Freaks" in the beginning was just this stream of images I thought was a cool collage. The more I surrendered to that piece of on stage and allowed it to be what it really is, the more the chorus in particular became like a Zen Koan, "Ever look, so high/to ever find her, so low." Those lines put me in this meditative place, just singing them and puzzling over "Low-High," neither here nor there. Somehow it helped bring me into the present moment. When I wrote "I Alone" and sang "I alone love you," I thought, "I'm not really directing it at anybody, it's not a love song, but peope will think it is. What am I really saying?" Eight months later I'm singing it on stage and I just kind of dissolved into this spave where--and this is hard to explain--but I really let go of any presumptions of what I thought it might mean, and felt the real meaning. I saw it was ultimately not me talking to anyone else. Instead, it was about the idea of union witha deeper reality in each one of us that is non-separate.

MG: Chad, was there a moment as a guitarist when you came up with some music that you knew conveyed an idea or emotion more effectively than any words could? I'm saving the easier questions for later, by the way.

Taylor: [laughs] No, no, I'm really getting into this. The most remarkable moment I can remember as a musician was a few years ago when i was writing some song during a time when something good was happening with the band or in my life. I kept playing this chord progression and the word that kept repeating in my head over and over was "Hallelujah." As goofy as it sounds now, I just recorded the progression and gave it to Ed. A week later, Ed comes back to me and says, "You know, Chad, I can't seem to write anything to this chord progression because all I can think about when i listen to it is, I don't know, something like.....Hallelujah." He said the exact word that I was thinking when I wrote it. That moment was truly an epiphany for me as a musician. I realized, my God, it totally communicated! So when people ask me if I mind that I don't write the lyrics or have a say in them, I always remember that moment. And my answer is, "Our say about the lyrical content is what we put into the music." And I mean it.

MG: One example of your uniue chordal style is the way you play barre chords on songs like "I Alone" and "Lightning Crashes" and leave the high B and E strings open to ring out. I know you admire R.E.M., and they often use folk chords with open strings. But where'd you get the idea of doing it with barre chords?

Taylor: Just by experimenting with note combinations to find what I needed to express. I guess I let those strings ring because it's hypnotizing. I find that it sucks you in. It's very similar to a bagpipe or a sitar--it keeps those overtones constantly running. And that probably is the one thing as a guitar player I could tie back to R.E.M. I remember the first R.E.M. song I learned to play was "Begin the Begin," and Live actually recorded that. And there definitely was a lot of weird drones going on in their songs.

MG: Your latest single, "Turn My Head," is a love ballad, which is pretty unusal for you guys. Although "Ghost" comes close.

Taylor: We always felt that "Turn My Head" was a song that resonated above the belt, and "Ghost" was a song that resonated below the belt. But you're right, "Turn My Head: is the closest to an all-out love ballad we've ever done as a band. But it's expressing the most pure side of love, which is ultimate, heartfelt love. "Ghost" is the completely sensual side of love, the Tantric side. It just resonates low, on all frequencies.

MG: You guys seem pretty centered about getting popular, unlike a lot of alternative bands who can't handel it. What's the key?

Kowalczyk: An ability--or maybe I should say an inability--to be anything other than what we really are. We were never in it to become famous or to make money--period. We were lucky in not coming up in a scene full of people giving a shit about the wrong things. Yeah, it's fun to be famous once in a while. But our disposition about those things is kind of flippant. There's just the discipline of being able to stick to a vision. Also, we don't put expectations and pressure on each other, and that allows what we do to stay pretty clear and from the heart. We don't have anybody dominating the scene or trying to guide it to be hip or whatever. So we've always been kind of suspiciously outside all the trends, and we still have a lot of fans. That's all I care about.

Taylor: I don't worry about the band getting bigger. I just remember what my wife always tells me: "Chad, size isn't everything." [laughs]

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