Talking with Tod A. about Firewater vs. Cop Shoot Cop
June 13th, 2008 by Chad Radford in Music news
A couple of weeks ago I had a chance to talk with Tod Ashley (A.K.A. Tod A) in preparation for the record release party of Firewater’s new full-length, The Golden Hour, which is taking place at The Earl on Sat., June 14.
Chad Radford: I recently watched the short film about the making of The Golden Hour on Bloodshot Records’s website, and I never realized how much of a politically inspired record this is.
Tod A.: “Hey Clown” never struck you as being in any way political?
I didn’t realize how much it was part of an over-arching theme. This is an album about being expatriating yourself, and all of the songs tie together to address your political woes about the state of George W. Bush’s America. I was looking for some sort of spiritual enlightenment or something like that … I should preface this by saying that in my mind everything you do with Firewater is forever compared to with Cop Shoot Cop. What you were doing in those days was much more bleak, nihilistic, Kafka-esque and very sharp. It’s hard for me to hear Firewater and not carry the Cop Shoot Cop baggage. Overt political statements didn’t ever seem like your thing, and without the film spelling it out for me I wouldn’t have looked for it. Now I don’t see how I missed it. I was looking at it more in terms of a spiritual journey.
The album was motivated by really being sick of participating and paying taxes here and feeling like I was living in a place where the government was not representing me. I also wanted to go to these places and be a sort of one man ambassador and meet these people and say that not all Americans are war mongering idiots. In my own small way kind of reach out and show the other side. It wasn’t a spiritual journey as much as it was just a time to get the hell out of the country.
Did you do much research into the local cultures of places where you went?
Not really. I was traveling around for about two years. I spent a year in India and I figured that I would just learn by going there. I just decided to go and live there for a while. I was more trying to put myself in a situation where unexpected things would happen, and they did. I was tired of knowing what was going to happen the next day. When Bush got reelected I could just see four years stretching out ahead of me on this endless road and it all seemed so predictable and depressing to me so I wanted to go where I didn’t know what was going to happen the next day.
Was there a place that you were particularly by, or did you have a favorite place?
Thailand and Indonesia are really nice. In a weird way I grew to love Calcutta. I got kind of stuck there and it is considered to be one of the hell hole cities of the world, but it really grew on me. I spent a lot of time walking around and taking pictures of these decaying buildings and the culture was very interesting. If you’re anywhere it grows on you and you develop an affection for the people that live there.
One thing that I’ve always picked up on in your songwriting is a connection to the landscape and urban decay. In Cop Shoot Cop you were really feeding off of the grotesque side of New York City. It wasn’t Sinatra’s New York, but a place that was much meaner. Do you think that you were affected by places like Calcutta in a similar way?
Yes, but also in a different way. I lived in New York for 20 years. It lost some of its excitement for me and became Disneyfied and too clean, too safe … homogenized. I was looking for somewhere that had the same buzz again. Something that was a little bit different, exciting, fresh. I feel that America pushed me out so I was looking for a new home along the way; something that would be welcoming and was on the way up instead of on the way down.
Did you have a hard time coming back to the states?
I’m not really back. I’m here to tour, but I’m still moving and based in Indonesia at the moment. Not sure how long that’s going to be. I’m in Bali.
Have you picked up the native language, Balinese?
I’m a really bad student. It’s easy to be lazy there because a lot of people there, at least in Bali, speak English. It’s a tourist destination, but my girlfriend is taking lessons and she is brow-beating me into being a little more … I’ll learn it eventually if I stay there long enough. I know about 30 words. It’s an easy language because there are no verb congregations. They don’t have tenses: I go to the supermarket today. I go to the supermarket tomorrow. I go to the supermarket next week. Everything is so much easier.
How do you feel about The Golden Hour now that you’ve had time to ruminate on it? Don’t take this as an insult, but I think it is the best Firewater record that you have done…
Why would I take that as an insult?
To say so kind of dismisses the previous five records that you have done as Firewater.
It’s successful because it was done in a totally different way than the other records. There was no pressure to get it done. When I started this trip I wasn’t even sure if I was going to keep making music anymore. I was leaving more just for my mental health. But gradually after about a year of traveling around songs started coming into my head and before I knew it, I had an album and a half’s worth of material so I decided that I should start recording it. So I did it on the fly. It allowed me the freedom of saying today I’m going to record, tomorrow, maybe not. Maybe I’ll go to a museum… Today maybe I’ll just go wander around. There was no time frame, no deadline and no clock ticking and so it got done when it was done… That’s why it took four years! I was traveling, so if I got something on tape that day it was a bonus. If I didn’t, I was still out seeing some amazing things.
I never got much out of the previous Firewater records. I bonded with Cop Shoot Cop’s records Ask Questions Later and Release in such a hardcore way, maybe because of the times, or just being a teenager when they came out, but they became pretty special records for me. There was a level of energy and enthusiasm that I didn’t find in Firewater.
I didn’t want to repeat myself with the next band. It was great while it lasted, but I felt that we had reached the limit of what we could do without becoming total noise or turning in a total rock direction. In a way I felt that people never really got the humor of the band. It was taken very seriously. But also, it wasn’t doing it for me anymore. I can totally understand why you didn’t like the new stuff. A lot of old Cop Shoot Cop fans didn’t make the transition, and that’s fine. There are plenty of other bands that will make the kind of stuff that will make those fans happy. But for me to carry on with something that I didn’t believe in 100%, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t fake it.
That seems pretty noble.
Not noble, just honest.
So you ended on a high note. At the time I thought of Cop Shoot Cop as an industrial band, but I know that’s not the right word. I [laced the groupin this context that included everyone from Foetus to no wave bands like DNA and Mars. But there was always an emphasis on the art of the song itself. It wasn’t just noise or feedback and clatter. You did those big noisy things, but you were also a good songwriter. I didn’t have an appreciation for songwriting back then. I liked hard, fast, loud noise and punk rock. However, I think I came to appreciate more acknowledged songwriters like Gram Parsons and Will Oldham because of your songwriting.
Wow, that’s really ironic! Discovering songwriting through Cop Shoot Cop!
There is a thing that happens with good songwriters where they learn subtlety and they learn how to keep things vague. There’s a huge difference between a song like Fugazi’s “Merchandise” and Rage Against the Machine’s “Bullet In Your Head.”
It’s a matter of being obvious and blatant vs. leaving a little bit to the imagination and using a little bit of poetry. I consciously try to leave something to the imagination. A song can be about any number of things at the same time and you have to leave people a little space to inhabit it. Give them space to get inside it and make it their own and not tell them what to think.
That kind approach was so different from anything like Foetus or Einsturzende Neubauten or anything else to which Cop Shoot Cop could have been compared. You hit people over the head with volume and rhythms and clatter, but they were part of a very considered song.
The whole idea was to inject some new life into rock and roll, which at the time was all about these huge conglomerates that were taking the music of their youths and shoving it down your throat. We wanted to destroy that. Rip it apart and if nothing else reassemble it in new ways that would inject new blood, new ideas. We ran our course fairly rapidly and the ending was meant to be. The sense of humor was dark. People took it very seriously. For me there was always a very black sense of humor and it may have been too dark for some people.
When I was in college I bought the “Piece Man” 7-inch at a junk shop. It looked like someone had spilled coffee on the sleeve. I bought it anyway and I later read a story in Thrasher Magazine that talked about this rare and valuable first Cop Shoot Cop single that was splattered with pig’s blood. I thought it was awesome, but I was worried that it would give me hepatitis. I looked into it and ran across some rumors about how you got the pigs blood. According to one story you guys stole a pig and hung it upside down and slit its throat…. So I suppose now is a good time to ask if there’s any truth to that.
We didn’t kill any pigs. We spread all of the records out on the floor of the rehearsal space and did it with a Windex bottle. We bought the blood at a slaughterhouse. The problem was that while we were spraying them the blood kept clogging up, so we had to keep adding water. It’s true. It’s really blood, but we purchased it. I had to drive all the way to Queens to get it.
Good to know. Do you see yourself ever moving back to New York?
I do come back every once in a while but it’s more as a tourist or as a visitor and I can enjoy America for what it is, rather than feel like a prisoner. But now I’m enjoying being rootless and going where the winds blow me. The change of scenery is really very therapeutic. I was thinking some really bad thoughts before I left. I was either going to take a long swim or get on a plane to somewhere.
Well it has done wonders for Firewater.
I’m glad that we were able to put out a record that got an emotional response from you on a level approaching Cop Shoot Cop.
The Golden Hour has made me go back and reconsider The Ponzi Scheme and Get off Of the Cross… They are both good records. Sometimes the best records really take you a while to get your head around. I think about the first time I heard Joy Division or even something like the Dead Kennedys… I didn’t like them at first either, because it was so alien to me.
That’s very true. Sometimes the things that take you the longest to appreciate are the ones that stick with you the longest.
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