Martin Simpson defies classification as an artist. This fact delights him almost as much as the audiences worldwide that he mesmerizes with his dazzling fretwork, enchants with his storytelling, and devastates with his interpretations of songs penned by others as well as his own compositions.
At the top of any short list of the world’s greatest acoustic guitarists, Simpsons’ instrumental collections of traditional melodies and Irish Airs (Leaves of Life and When I Was On Horseback) released by Shanachie Records in the early nineties have been hailed worldwide for their timeless beauty. After another instrumental collection (1994’s “A Closer Walk With Thee”) Simpson answered the prayers of his many fans with the release of his take on the Blues, “Smoke And Mirrors”. This title created a storm among Blues enthusiasts due to its use of non traditional instrumentation and raised the ire of many due to the bungling record company which erroneously credited Mr. Simpson as the writer of several Blues classics.
1997 has found Simpson in much more capable hands with the good folks at Red House Records and two more brilliant titles are on the shelves; the mostly instrumental “Cool And Unusual” and the aptly titled “Live”, taken from a single show and a beautiful showcase for the many talents of this Acoustic raconteur. Not only is Simpson a wonderful performer but he is a patient and insightful teacher as evidenced on his 3 instructional videos for Homespun Videos and his brilliant book on altered tunings for Accent on Music. I met with Simpson following one of his many guitar clinics/master classes held in a guitar shop which the night before had served as his stage for two standing room only shows.
Your recently released CD “Live” would seem to be a perfect place for someone unfamiliar with you to get a glimpse at many of the different sides of Martin Simpson.
MS: Yeah, there are a million stories to tell about that record. I have really felt that over the last four to five years that I should make a live record because I really like what happens when you play live, but the difficulty in recording live is that it’s difficult to get something that you’d want to listen to. It’s really much more difficult to record a live album than you would imagine. The previous tour I did over in England I took great mics and recorded the whole tour and didn’t like any of it. The engineer was great , the performances were fine, I just didn’t like the sound of it. Three quarters into the tour I had played to the point where I was really feeling very good about my playing, and that room (the Holywell music room in Oxford) is a very beautiful room which is inspiring. The sound guy asked if he could record the show and I said “sure” and so he used a chrome cassette in a deluxe ghetto blaster and that’s how this album was recorded! I love that aspect because it was never meant to be a record.
Do you think the fact that you have been so varied in your music over the years has held your career back because not being able to be labeled and typed has made marketing you a bit of a chore?
MS: Yeah, but one of the essential ingredients of my life is the freedom to do the breadth of what I feel I need to do. I have thought a great deal about the question of being marketed and I am not an idiot , I am willing to be marketed. I have deliberately chosen to focus very hard at times because it makes it easier for people if you focus on one style. I don’t actually have any interest whatsoever in curtailing what I do, and in a way I have expanded in the last couple of years. I do what I do, and it all feels like me, and I seriously think that someone into the music who hears a half a dozen notes whether it is an Irish Air or Blues they’re gonna recognize it to be me.
You seem to be a workaholic, you have put out a brace of CDs , instructional books, and videos, as well as maintaining a seemingly endless touring schedule. Can you give us a breakdown of your year?
MS: I am just beginning now,with the help of my wife Jessica, to get to the point of planning anything in my life. I have lived in reaction since I was seventeen and first became a professional musician, and in my entire career I think I have missed only three gigs. I am just getting to the point now where I don’t want to live in reaction any more and I am trying to change. The end of last year found me on the road for thirteen weeks out of the last four months, which is most of it , and I didn’t like that. The first three months of this year (‘97) I mostly stayed at home and worked in the studio almost completely finishing my newest record “Cool and Unusual”, but having said that for the rest of this year I am going to be almost entirely on the road.
When you play in town it is almost always heralded by a large article in the Los Angeles Times stressing your wonderful artistry, and yet the gigs are still guitar shops etc. Do you believe you can break out and make it big or have you accepted that this is it and made peace with the level of audience awareness and acceptance that acoustic based folk artists have to live with?
MS: You know the way I feel about that is that I started playing guitar when I was twelve years old and at that point I said to myself I wanted to do it for the rest of my life and if I do anything else but this it will interfere so I must do it for a living. I am now 44 , so for almost thirty years professionally all I’ve done is what I love to do , and as far as I am concerned that is such a privilege. My last tours of Canada and England were 90% sold out and yes, some of the venues are small but I’m my own boss, I am a privileged human being. I would love to land a big soundtrack or something that would make a big financial difference because the main problem is not in any way artistic at all , every once in a while you think “hey I’d like a little more security”.
With the variety of your product available (CDs, books, videos) merchandising at your gigs must be a marvelous source of income.
MS: Oh yes, and I am putting together a mail order company which will be quite efficient in getting Simpson product out.
What would you change about your career?
MS: The only difficulty that I have is in manipulating what is basically a closed system. The music business as gone from being semi-broad based, I mean in the early seventies someone like me could have been signed to a major label not that its something I am interested in doing, but now the music business is utterly in the hands of these two people over here and those two over there, and it makes it difficult sometimes. I would change my ability to work the system, and I am doing that so I am a happy boy.
How has your relocation to Northern California worked out for you?
MS: Oh yeah its great, there are a lot of good things about it. It is expensive to live in California , but you can charge accordingly for the things you have to sell. The atmosphere where I live (four blocks from the ocean in Santa Cruz) and the air ....(laughing) people need to understand that I was born in a steel town in the North of England and have moved all my life, so when I walk out on my little porch on the Northern California coast and stand in my little garden I am thinking “beat this with a stick!”.
Your song “Pourmouth” seems to be your take on the recent crop of singer-songwriters?
MS: It was written after seeing a guy perform Blues, a middle-class white guy like me, and this guy had thrust himself so utterly into the suffering life style to get his Blues thing together and it annoyed the piss out of me! I looked at him and thought , this is bullshit, the guy was so unaware of anything other than his involvement in this music that he had to go to that extent to suffer. Anybody who is even conscious, much less aware in this world, is going to suffer because this is a stupid, violent, brutal , greed driven society we live in! Why are you going to go looking for trouble? That was what that song is about. It really isn’t about song writing per se, it was about life style.
You’re views on arrangements of other people’s work is unique. It is certainly unfashionable for most artists to NOT write their own songs.
MS: That is entirely a product of the Music Business. There isn’t enough money to be made unless you sign somebody up and make a deal to get their publishing. There is very little place in the mainstream music business for interpretation, which is a joke.
Often in conjunction with a concert you will do a guitar workshop, how does that work out for you, and what have you learned from them?
MS: I love it, one of the reasons that I teach is that it forces me to examine what I do. I have always gone back and examined my work to find out what I’ve done because I am a very instinctive player and arranger, so if I back track to decipher the theory behind what I did, I learn a huge amount. I learn a great deal when people ask me to examine what I am doing. I am very,very proud of my open tuning system (a system which allows for a greater understanding and transfer of knowledge between tunings presented very clearly in his book for Accent On Music, and in his Homespun instructional videos) which still has me in shock that I am the person who has come up with as I think of myself as not very systematic.
Do you get a lot of response from those you’ve educated?
MS: Yes, actually my favorite bit of feedback was from Adrian Legg, who said he just loved it and that it was so clear. That made me happy because Adrian thinks very, very hard. The reaction from students is incredible.
You seem very firmly based in the Martin Carthy, Nic Jones style of accompaniment, at least that is what struck me when I first heard you years ago.
MS: It is an interesting view, I think genre more than style would be a better description.
Well, I guess I am referring to the tradition of song accompaniment wherein the music and musicianship serves the song, not the reverse.
MS: I just don’t like music that exists for the sake of hot licks, It’s great once, but what’s the point. It is not about mechanics , it’s about heart.
What was your starting point for the Blues?
MS: Big Joe Williams was the first Country Blues that I ever heard, and it just set me on my ear! The Arhoolie record called “Tough Times” and I still think it’s his best record, and a solo one as well, so powerful. I heard it when I was eleven or twelve, and I saw him when I was fourteen, and by the time I saw him I had heard Blind Willie Johnson , and Robert Johnson, and I was hooked but he is one of the reasons my playing is so percussive. He was beating the shit out of the guitar and hitting it! That was his style of percussion, hitting it! (laughing)
It took you one heckuva long time to finally make a blues based record (“Smoke and Mirrors” for Thunderbird Records) though, were you happy with the results?
MS: Partially, I think that some of that record is really right on, yeah I think it’s a really good record. I was really enormously annoyed with everything surrounding it, I mean the record company did so much damage trying to become a record company. One of the things I would really love to get into print again was that they did the publishing credits all wrong. It was very interesting to me because I knew that some of the Blues purists would hate it because it has cello on a Blues record. Hank Roberts is one of the very best players on any instrument that I have ever heard , and it was very interesting playing at the Edmonton Festival last year and doing a workshop with John Hammond and Keb Mo, and when Hank kicked into “Spoonful” on the cello John Hammonds eyes just got wide and he loved it! Blues Review Quarterly , in particular, even though I talked with their editor/publisher and told him that the record company had messed up with the publishing credits, they allowed a real dirt bag kind of stuff to be printed about me saying that I didn’t care about my sources and that the record sucked. Living Blues gave me a glowing review, and that made me happy. But it made me very, very annoyed that a publication (Blues Review Quarterly) would allow the publishing of something they knew wasn’t true.
So they jumped on the mislabeled songwriting credits and made that the crux of the review?
MS: They published a letter saying “How could anybody do this ? He is disgusting,and he should be ashamed of himself” and they published it knowing it wasn’t true.
When I first got the record and was listening to it and reading the liner notes I knew , knowing you, that it had to be some kind of screw up with whoever wrote the liner notes. After all your years of tirades against Jimmy Page I knew you were the absolute last guy who would appropriate a song from a long deceased Blues artist.
MS: (laughing) I think it was karma! I have never said anything against Jimmy Page since then, I should have just kept my mouth shut. It was very upsetting , their attitude extended to saying things like “he’s a folk singer” , and to me that kind of attitude is like saying Ray Charles can’t do Country music, I despair sometimes at how stupid and uninformed people are. It is important to realize that American traditional music , which is basically what I am involved with is, has been, and continues to be a constant cross fertilization between black and white music, and almost seamless in a sense. If you look at it intelligently you realize that for instance the banjo was a black instrument, which by the end of the nineteenth century had become a classical instrument played by white people. So you have the tenor banjo , which I think is the African Americans revenge on white people “ho ho ho we get the guitar , they get the tenor banjo” and by the end of the nineteenth century the guitar had gone from being a polite parlor instrument to being the major musical vehicle for the Afro-American acoustic music.
Speaking of Guitar, what do you look for in an acoustic guitar, sound wise, playability etc.?
MS: Clarity, is one of the things I look for in a guitar and tonal separation. Increasingly I’ve realized what makes it easy for me to play a guitar is the width of the strings at the nut. The single most important comfort factor to my playing is 2 and 3/8 inches of width under the right hand.
Dana Bourgeois Guitars have recently introduced a Martin Simpson signature guitar which I believe is a twelve fret to the body style, why is that?
MS: Because I actually think that puts the bridge in the right position in relation to the center of the lower bout. My Sobell , which is a fourteen fret to the body guitar, has a lot of wood between the bridge and the sound hole. A lot of the fourteen fret guitars have a small distance between the sound hole and the bridge, and I don’t think that’s how it should be.
Does that increase the sustain?
MS: I think it moves the top better, and mechanically the instrument works better as a result of the bridge being positioned there. I am increasingly flexible in regards to the subject of tone woods. The thought that Brazilian Rosewood is the be all and end all of tone woods is very wrong, it’s very good, but there are a lot of other good woods. I get a blast experimenting with the same guitar made with different woods.
I have found that some of the best room guitars record poorly, sometimes because they overwhelm the mics, while some of the smallest sounding instruments record unbelievably sexy.
MS: Absolutely, what is a “live guitar” to be in a room with is not necessarily the best guitar to record or take on stage. Their are guitars for different purposes.
You use a Highlander pickup for live performance?
MS: Well, I literally have done the exhaustive study, I have used everything and commissioned stuff, I have worked so hard to get a great sound. When it comes down to it the sound that pleases me the most and the sound that allows me to express myself is the Highlander pickup. If you EQ it right it is virtually quack free, it has really , really good balance and doesn’t have the piezo ping, and if it is there it is at 4k and you can get rid of it really easily. I find it such a pleasure to work with that sound live, it is so present, and my slide tone played through a big PA really works!
How do you choose the different tunings you do for the different songs you are interpreting?
MS: It is really hard to explain why you choose a particular tuning but often one of the most important elements is “how can I make this as easy as possible technically to play so I can put the most expression in it”. You should not be playing things because they are difficult , you should be trying to make them as easy as possible to play, because then you can make them musical!
MARTIN SIMPSON selected solo discography
COOL AND UNUSUAL - Red House Records 1997
LIVE - Red House Records 1997
SMOKE AND MIRRORS- Thunderbird 1995
A CLOSER WALK WITH THEE- Gourd 1994
THE COLLECTION- Topic/ Schanachie 1992
WHEN I WAS ON HORSEBACK- Shanachie 1991
LEAVES OF LIFE- Shanachie 1989
NOBODY’S FAULT BUT MINE- Dambuster 1986