Main
Updates
North Coast News
Interviews
Articles
Albums
Movies
Shows
Pictures
Letters
Archives
Guestbook
Contact Us
Staff
Links

Tony Maimone is probably best known to NE Ohio rock fans as the bass player for Pere Ubu.  He’s also played with Bob Mould, and was a member of the first ever “full band” version of They Might Be Giants.  Now, along with Joel Hamilton, Tony co-owns the Studio G recording studio in New York.  It was at Studio G that Tony and Joel, along with Matthias Bossi, Carla Kihlstedt, and several guest musicians, conceived and recorded the debut album from Book of Knots.  I recently had the opportunity to talk with Tony by phone about Book of Knots, but I couldn’t resist the chance to ask about some of his past projects as well.  

Utter Trash:  You’re originally from Cleveland, right?
Tony Maimone:  I grew up around Miles and 101^st Street.  Then my folks moved us to Garfield Heights when it was still just becoming a suburb.  There were a lot of woods out there, so it was nice to grow up there.  I spent a lot of time in Cleveland.  After I got out of school I moved downtown, and spent most of the time from the seventies to the mid eighties living, like I remember most of the guys in Pere Ubu lived at 32^nd and Prospect at a place called the Plaza.  I moved to New York in 1986. 

UT:  What’s the time frame when you were in Pere Ubu?
TM:  Well, the first recordings I made with Pere Ubu were in July 1976.  PEre Ubu had already cut their first single, “30 Seconds Over Tokyo”, and then the second single was “Final Solution”, they had just cut that.  One thing led to another.  I played the first Friction gig with Peter Laughner and Anton Fier.  We played at the book store on Coventry and Cedar, I think it was called Coventry Books.  The guys from Pere Ubu were there, and they asked me if I’d be interested in jamming, and I said sure.  Peter was going off to New York City; he was writing with Creem Magazine and trying to get into Television [the band, not the broadcast medium – ed.].  I jammed a few times with Pere Ubu, and before I knew it, we were on the road. 

The last record I worked on was ‘Story of Our Life’, which came out in 1992.  At that time, I decided to take a break from Ubu.  I had already done some work with Bob Mould, and we were going on tour then.  That led to working with They Might Be Giants.  It just got to be too much, so I thought I would take a break.  Funnily enough, I’m going to be playing with Pere Ubu next month in New York.  We’re going to be playing along to the movie ‘X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes’.  It’ll be the first thing I’ve done with Pere Ubu since 1992.  I can’t believe the time went that fast. 

UT:  How is Dave Thomas to work with, and was Pere Ubu always pretty much his band, or did you and the rest of the guys have input as well?
TM:  Everybody in Pere Ubu always had their own sense of what it should be, so there were lots of heated discussions all the way through.  I feel like David is a seriously brilliant guy.  I think he’s an amazing performer and a great writer.  But people that are great are not always “easy” to get along with.  But as we get older, things that caused so much of the heated discussions don’t seem quite so important.  The edges maybe soften a little as you mature, I don’t know.  But no one could ever argue that David isn’t brilliant.  Yeah, he’s not the easiest guy to get along with, but I have my days, too.  In Pere Ubu especially, we all did.  Everyone in that band, specifically that band, has a dark side.  So you can’t put it all on David. 

UT:  What Cleveland bands did you play with other than Ubu and Friction?
TM:  I used to jam a lot with people.  I remember playing with the Polystyrenes.  My good friends Russel Sherman and Gary Lupico and I had a number of musical projects.  Jim Jones and Scott Krauss and I had a band called Home and Garden.  Scott made a bunch of Home and Garden records with a bunch of different people.  Some of those records are still kicking around.  I played with The Numbers Band a lot over the years.  I was their substitute bass player, and sometimes I was their bass player when they were between bass players.  So I’ve done a lot of playing with Bob Kidney.  He’s one of my favorite musicians, hands down.  More people should write about that guy.  He had a major influence.  Just an amazing artist.  I played a lot with a lot of people, but sadly most of it didn’t get recorded.  We were just getting together to play because we wanted to.  It was before digital recording, or easy access to recording.   

UT:  When you joined They Mignt Be Giants, that was the first time they had a full band, right?|
TM:  Yes.  I was in that band for two years.  We did two world tours.  Japan, England, Austraila.  We went to Mexico.  We criss-crossed America a couple of times.  Europe a couple of times.  I lived with those guys for two years.  It was fun being with They Might Be Giants.  It was a good time for me to do that.  It allowed me to save some money.  When I got back, I had enough money saved, and the little payout from Geffen for the Pere Ubu box set, and I put it together and that’s how I started Studio G.  So I have to thank the Giants for that. 

UT:  Before you and the rest of that first touring band came along, They Might Be Giants had always just been the two Johns.  How did the fans react to the full band?
TM:  It was massive.  It was like a really, really orchestrated huge thing.  The Giants would still do a few duo things.  It was a long show.  We’d do the whole band, break it down to just the two guys, then we’d come back and do some more with the band.  Then we’d do a couple encores.  The people loved it.  And they’re still touring with a band.  They never went back to the duo. 

UT:  Are the Johns pretty funny guys offstage?
TM:  Funny isn’t really the right word.  They’re definitely humorous, intelligent guys with overactive minds.  Probably form drinking all that coffee.  They’re busy beavers.  They’ve got a million ideas, and they’re acting on at least half of them.  They got a Grammy a couple years ago for their soundtrack to ‘Malcolm in the Middle’. 

UT:  Book of Knots grew out of the studio you have with Joel, right?
TM:  Joel and I have Studio G here in Williamsburg.  The band grew out of a desire to commit to some of the recordings we were doing whenever we’d get a spare moment here in the studio.  We decided to take it one step further and make a record.  Joel and Matthias grew up together on Cape Cod, so they go back a ways.  Because of that, we had the idea to make the record with a nautical theme. 

UT:  Do you consider Book of Knots to be a “real” band, or more of a project?
TM:  It’s a band in that we play together in the studio; we compose music together and work on mixes together.  In the sense of going out and doing gigs, it’s not a band, at least not for now.  But we’ve decided to make another record, which we’re in the midst of now, and we’ll see what happens.  If somebody makes a nice offer to us, we’ll put the crew together.  But Matthias and Carla, they’re headquartered out of Berkley.  Joel and I are here in New York.  The other thing is that Matthias and Carla are on the road quite a bit with Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, and Joel does a fair road work with Player’s Club.  On top of that, Joel and I are really busy with the studio.  So we thought to ourselves, let’s just make a record without worrying about when we’re going to tour.  It’s not out of the question; it’s just not in the cards right now. 

UT:  Will the new album you’re working on continue the nautical theme?
TM:  We’re doing rust belt this time.  Cleveland, Detroit.  It’s about the rust belt.  It’s about blast furnaces and coke furnaces, and just the industrial reality so many people have to live with.  We don’t have a lot of lyrics written yet, but we’ve already got about a dozen songs.  The idea with this one is just to record a whole bunch of songs, and then pick the dozen or so that are the best.  Carla and Matthias are coming to Brooklyn next week, and we’re going to work on the tracks we’ve already recorded.  I’m sure we’ll also cut some new things.  It’s an ongoing concern.   

UT:  Are you and Joel writing most of the music yourselves?
TM:  It’s actually a collaboration between all of us.  Surprisingly, Matthias and Carla are coming up with a lot of text.  Some of the music on this last record started out, like I know one song in particular Joel had a sequence he brought in, and Matthias played to it.  Then I put my bass on.  Other times, Matthias and I will just go in the live room, and we’ll just record for five minutes, and that becomes the basis for a song. 

One of the songs that Carla came up with, she had the chords already written out, and I just followed her chord pattern.  What happens is, once we record something and go, “okay, that’s good.  Now what’s going to happen?”  It’s kind of like whoever hears something puts a part on, and then things get edited as the song progresses through its evolution. 

t’s nice too, because we’re always recording other people’s things.  It’s fun to have a project where you can do anything you want.  I remember we were talking about using a pan of water to make a snare drum sound, and we ended up doing that.  I remember we put a microphone under water and recorded either Joel or Matthias tapping the water, and you can hear that on the record.  It’s fun, and it’s very easy to experiment.  That’s the most enjoyable aspect of Book of Knots, there are no rules. 

UT:  Speaking of unusual instruments, what’s a marxophone, and how did you wind up playing one on the Book of Knots album?
TM:  It’s like a hammer dulcimer, but the hammers are very thin metal arms.  Depending on how hard you hit it, it can have a really ghostly sound.  One of our friends, Alice Lee, who we recorded at Studio G, was the one who bought that marxophone.  She left it at the studio for us to use.  It sounds so cool that we’re always playing it.  Anyone can play it, it plays itself. 

UT:  Is it hard to work your own projects in at your studio, since you’re so busy?
TM:  We set aside Thursday, Friday, and Saturday of next week for just Book of Knots.  It’s really not that hard at all.  A lot of people get the idea that it’s drudgery recording people, but I actually really like to record.  It’s fun helping people realize their dreams.  Recording someone’s record, they have these ideas, and they’re trying to make them concrete.  That’s what we do.  And sometimes working on somebody else’s record will fire us up to do something for our own record. 

UT:  Is it tough to strike a balance between your more experimental tendencies and writing a good melody?
TM:  I think that everybody involved in Book of Knots all love melody.  We all like rhythm, we all like noise, we all like harmony, and we all like dissonance.  We try to use it all in what we do.  In other words, give a huge sound of drums and bass just plowing through and making a huge racket, but then put a soft, melodic voice on top of it.  That’s interesting to me, you know?  Dissonance and experimental music is all well and good, but I think when you combine it with melody, kind of putting some sense of order to the chaos, I think the ear just naturally goes for it because of the dynamic involved.  There’s a conscious effort put into making the songs complete in that way. 

UT:  There are a few songs on the Book of Knots album, notably “Back on Dry Land”, that in a better world would be on the radio.  Does it bother you that the industry is in such a state of affairs that that can’t happen these days, or do you just not care about that sort of thing any more?
TM:  That song is a great song.  John Langford just kicked that thing.   Imagine that song without his vocal on it.  It’s a really good sounding piece of music, but when John put that melody and those words to that piece of music, it truly became a real song.  That’s the kind of thing that I live for. 

John wrote some of the words on the way to the studio on the plane.  The second verse, about the dirty bed sheets mashing the street lights tonight, he was at the studio and said, “I think we need one more pre-chorus.”    He sat down and wrote it right there.  It’s moments like that.  That’s truly why we have Studio G and why Joel and I are doing music.  So I don’t let the state of the industry bother me that much. 

If we wanted to hustle, we could get that song into a movie.  If we wanted to really promote our stuff really hard, we’d probably get a little more action from the industry.  But I think we’re more inclined to focus on the creative end, and just let the output speak for itself.  People are going to find us.  I’d love to see our shit on MTV, but I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.  And I’m truly not going to be on the phone all day and night trying to get it to happen. 

It’s like the old adage of when you set out on your journey, and before you know it your destination overtakes you.  You can’t just take your single down to the radio station and get it played like you used to.  But you can still go into a cool studio and make some music with people who have an affinity for what you’re trying to do.  It’s that part that I’m embracing. 

With the Book of Knots, it’s not like we’re treading on tip toes, but we try to let the thing speak through all of us.  With varying degrees of success, but I think for the most part, we were pretty successful in putting these elements together and influencing each other.  Now that we’re well on the way to the second record, I’m pretty excited about that. 

When we were finishing the record, it was 3 in the morning, and I had this feeling.  I told Joel about it, and I said, “Tonight, I feel a lot like I did when Ubu finished ‘Modern Dance.’”  Like we had started something that has its own language.  Hopefully, we’ll have a lot more time and a lot more to say with it. 

UT:  You had a lot of guest performers on your first album.  Are you doing that again on the new one?
TM:  Norm from The Swans is coming through Thursday, and John Langford is definitely going to be on this one.  Meghan is going to be on it hopefully.  We have a couple of other surprises lined up, but I don’t think I should say anything right now because I don’t want to jinx it. 

UT:  Since this one is more about the Rust Belt, something you have a background in, will you be writing more lyrics this time?
TM:  We haven’t really written that many lyrics yet.  A lot of it is just music.  There’s a couple where we collaborated.  There’s one song about a blast furnace that’s been taken down and put on a train, and it’s being taken to another blast furnace where they’re going to melt it down.  It’s called “Old Number 6”.  The four of us kind of collaborated on the lyrics.  I love collaborating.  I don’t write a lot of lyrics.  I’m sure I’ll write some for this record, but in answer to your questions, no, not necessarily. 

UT:  Do you have a regular band that you play out with?
TM:  I have a reggae/dub project called Flood.  The genesis of that was some recordings I did with Doug Sharon form H.I.M., and Christian Duarte.  He and I still play some Reggae and Dub occasionally.  We use a different drummer now.  I do that, I play with Meghan Riley.  Sometimes I play acoustic bass with three women who do old blues, and I DJ on Friday nights at the old Knitting Factory.  I still do a lot of stuff, but I’m not just in one band.  I do a lot of different things. 

UT:  Anything you want to say in closing?
TM:  Tell Cleveland I said hello.