A Conversation with John Waite – HuffPost 8.21.13

Mike Ragogna: All right, you have a new album, Live All Access. Can you tell me everything about it, leaving absolutely nothing out?

John Waite: [laughs] I could tell you a lot about it, but it’s pretty simple. We got a new guitar player about eight months ago, Keri Kelli, and we started playing gigs. We didn’t rehearse, we just ran through a couple of songs. Keri got the job, we said, “Meet you at the airport,” and we started to play gigs. We were playing fairly small gigs, then we’d play pretty big gigs, private gigs, but we really kind of threw him in the deep end. After about two months, everything changed. Being in a three-piece band is a whole different world, and I love that. I want to keep it like that. It reminds me of all the bands that I love, from the periods where you didn’t need to double-track anything or put synthesizers in. Everything I’ve done has been pretty much guitar-driven anyway, but there was a point where Keri just started to fly. He was playing all the right notes in the right places, but he would jam on, which is the whole point. He was that familiar. I felt suddenly very clearly that I had to get it down taped because the band was playing as a whole. The rhythm section was now playing like they were in Free or one of those great bands from the seventies, it was all locked, and I was singing better. I thought, “Why not record it?” You can always give it to radio for promotion and if you don’t do something with it, put it on the end of an album. We hired a church in South Philly that’s been turned into a recording studio called Philly Sound. It holds about four hundred people. We recorded two nights there, you could come for free; I bought three kegs of beer a night and we recorded it in two nights and we got a couple of shows and I started to mix it and realized halfway through that some of it wasn’t what it could be, but some of it was absolutely great, you know? But it was so hot in there because it was so packed that some of the tuning was a bit weird. We hadn’t quite found our footing, but we did get three great songs. For some reason, we got three great songs. Two months later, we went back on the road recording and we’re on to play Manchester, New Hampshire, in this beautiful new theater, had a really bad sound check, but decided to record it anyway and we walked out and bang! It was one of those gigs that you just look back on and say, “I don’t know how we did that, but it was one of the best gigs we ever played,” and we’ve got it on tape. So it’s not meant to be a greatest hits and it’s not meant to be a piece of product. I’m not trying to sell you anything, I’m trying to share it with you. It’s what we are and it’s something I’ve been trying to get for a long time, it’s pretty pure.

MR: As you mentioned earlier, this is the way rock was made. This was the way people were doing it before they were thinking over-consciously of making meticulous records.

JW: Yeah, I think rock went from, well London in the seventies where every band sounded different, from Free to The Small Faces to Humble Pie to Bad Company, The Faces, The Stones, The Who, and unbelievably gifted people making different music and they didn’t have the luxury of recording onto tape, if you call that a luxury. What you saw was what you got. There was a tremendous sense of performance when you went to see them play live. The Who would put the beginning of “Baba O’Riley” through the speakers, which Townsend had sort of been a mad doctor somewhere and cooked up, and it made it fantastic. It was almost like mystical. But when synthesizers came into it, I think it took rock ‘n’ roll by the scruff of the neck and dragged it into the business world. I think rock ‘n’ roll, at the moment, there are some bands that are just tremendous, but there are a lot of the old guard just playing along, and I don’t want to be part of that. I’ve got complete autonomy, really. I do what I want to do and what I want to do is play this kind of music. If you like, it that’s great, and if you don’t, there’s always something else to listen to.

MR: When you guys went back to the basics, I bet there was a different flow of creativity.

JW: Yeah, it bounces off each of us almost literally. It’s like there’s a musical conversation going on that’s really clear, there’s nothing in the way. The guitar player has to stay up and cover his end of the stage as does the drums and the bass and the singer is in the middle and that’s all there is. Everything’s imperative. You can’t glide, you can’t duck and weave, you deliver. It’s like looking somebody in the eyes and whether you’re playing for ten thousand people or a hundred people in a small club, it’s always been about that. This works. I’m very proud about it because it works. It’s my ideal. The Babys are the absolute best at their most stripped down version. We got produced all sorts of different ways, but that’s why we were successful live, because we could deliver live and we didn’t need any real production. It kind of made me feel anti-production, and producers get in the way.

MR: And we’re also probably in an era where things are the most produced they’ve ever been, with layering, pitch correction, every compression man can think of for every EQ bandwidth, all that.

JW: If you listen to Bad Company–not that I’m trying to liken myself to Bad Company–they’re unique to themselves, but I mean that’s about as blue collar and raw and unproduced as you can get–a three piece band and a singer. Led Zeppelin is the same thing. Great Stones records do occasionally have a keyboard in there but it’s guitar-driven to the point where it’s really just a guitarist playing into the rhythm and then the singer carrying the song. But I like that, I’m a purist, really. I don’t know, all this other stuff just seems corporate, like it’s not really music, it’s something else…which is great, that’s fine too. If you go into a bookshop and all the books were the same plot, you wouldn’t be coming out with a book. You need to have all these choices. There’s always been great art being made and art being made that’s very simple and then you’ve got very complicated art being made. I just choose to do it the simplest way because it’s the best way I know.

MR: Since we’re also on the subject of this not being a “greatest hits” album, you do “Change” and “Head First,” which are my favorites on the project. How did you come up with the track list?

JW: The best songs! The best songs! I tried to imagine if I was in the front row, or in the back of the hall at eighteen. I saw Free twice with different bass players, and I saw The Who. I saw bands that you can’t really imagine. I saw them play live in my hometown. I imagined what it would be like to be stood there again and those bands would open with something you hardly knew, then play something they just made up, jam for half an hour and then play you a big hit. It became such an exchange with the audience, it was challenging. They were all defiant. All those bands were defiant. They hadn’t time for being on Top of the Pops; that was sneered at. I was just going for what the best performances were. It wasn’t like I was trying to be ornery or obscure. I want to reach you, but I want to reach you through music, not product, and I want it to be energy-driven. The songs that made the cut were the ones that were just raving. I think this version of “Evil” is probably better than the version that’s on the Rough And Tumble album. And I think “If You Ever Get Lonely” is as good, if not better, more emotional than the original. So I know that I made the right choices. I have no doubts whatsoever about how good this record is. There isn’t one thing I’d change about it.

MR: Is there a particular concert of your that still sticks out in your mind as an amazing moment in your life?

JW: Well you know, you have a lot of those. You have so many of those you just go, “Thank God.” I mean, really. It depends on where your head is at the time. Some of the Unplugged dates, when it’s just you and an acoustic guitar and somebody’s knocking away at a box and we have the bass player up there and the guitar player playing electric but I’m playing acoustic and it’s just a more intimate evening kind of thing. Sometimes in that, it just takes off. I can’t really describe it, it happens a lot. I shoot for that. It’s not like I go out there and I’m like, “Oh right, now I’ve got the first four bars, I’m going to do this!” I’m trying to take it like you take a jigsaw puzzle and throw it in the air and whatever comes down, comes down. I want every performance to be different. I’m not looking for consistency, I’m looking for greatness. I really want it to be exciting every night and different.

MR: And improvisation?

JW: Right! When you listen to “Mr. Wonderful” on the album, that melody didn’t exist before that performance. And sometimes you get so lost in the song that you start making up different lyrics, because you’re in a different headspace. There were a couple of times last year that made me laugh. I was in Philadelphia and I was so into singing “In Dreams” that I went completely blank and I kind of left the stage mentally. I was looking at Tim, but Tim’s just laughing at me. I was singing the hell out of it, I was really lost in the song, and then the guitar solo came in and I was listening to it like I was in the audience. I was elsewhere and I forgot to come back in. If you can do that… It’s about getting lost in it, you know? It’s not knowing where you are after year one, two, three, four. You’re supposed to be somewhere else but very present. I can’t really describe it but it’s a hell of a place to go and it’s a great place to be.

MR: Do you have a favorite live album of all time?

JW: It would be Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! by The Rolling Stones because I think there’s something about that. I think the first time I ever heard that record I was on LSD, so it was larger than life. “Midnight Rambler” off of that is unbelievable, it’s so great. Also Free Live! There’s a version of Free Live! on the box set, there’s a version of “Mr. Big” that’s even better than the official live release. But those two albums would be desert island discs.

MR: What are your thoughts about the height of celebrity you’ve reached?

JW: Well, I’ve been there a few times, and then you become like a legend. You get above it all and it’s like you’ve become royalty in some way and your music speaks for itself. When I hit number one with “Missing You,” I was in New York City. I’d been living on the West Side in this tiny crash pad and the little old ladies with their dogs and cats and I used to be friends with half the people who were selling you oranges and bottles of cough meds. I was a New Yorker, and then I was a New Yorker with a number one. I felt like a real success because people I had met on the way up were still going like, “Congratulations, man, that’s great!” But beyond that, you walk into a club and you’re meeting a lot of people you know who want to say hello to you and who want to sit next to you and who want to have their picture taken with you, then they want to come home with you. And that’s great, depending on who it is, and it’s a life that you lead when you’re interested in seeing what everything’s like, but I was already a New Yorker going into having a number one, so I was pretty worldly. But you know, it’s superficiality, it’s the complexion of something. There’s a huge culture now behind music, even in country. There are country stations on TV, and it’s like watching a game show. Somebody runs out in overalls and a pitchfork and starts singing about how they get up at five o’clock, but they don’t! It’s become very, very commercial, but there’s still great country music being made somewhere. It’s becoming more and more product. Everything is more product. I think celebrity is kind of interesting. If I walked into a small bar in New York City and saw an actor that I really liked and said, “Hey, how are you doing?” I’m the kind of guy that would sit there for three hours and drink martinis and talk about movies. But actually, going through the mill of trying to be interesting and hang out with celebrities, I treat everyone the same way. I can’t really see the difference anymore. I’ve always done that and that’s pretty much how you find me.

MR: Speaking of country, “If You Ever Get Lonely” recently has been a hit with Love And Theft. How do you feel about that?

JW: I’m kind of very taken. I had a country hit with Alison [Kraus] a couple of years ago with “Missing You,” and then we did another tune called “Lay Down Beside Me.” I love country music and I love bluegrass. There are people like Larry Sparks and Del McCoury that are up there with Elvis; they’re just important to me. But a young country act took that song and they had a number one song last year. Obviously, with that being on this release there’s the opportunity to have at least a top twenty success with version of here to get lonely, and because they were number one last year I guess there’s a chance of it being number one in the country market, too. I watch it. I go online every morning and I look on iTunes and I sort of see where it is because it’s a great song. And the video is very good. They kind of got it right and I just wish them the best. I hope people just go and listen to it.

MR: It always boils down to the song, doesn’t it.

JW: Those songs you write on occasion that really just lay bare what needs to be said, they could be happy songs or sad songs or political songs, but they articulate. The Stones have that in spades, really. The Stones have an articulate mind and a rhythmic soul. They’re like two things at once. When you get it right, you get it right. It’s very powerful.

MR: What is your advice for new artists these days?

JW: Usually it’s “get a lawyer” because it’s funny. But it’s not that funny because the simple lawyers that you get, you need a lawyer to watch them. I think if you love what you do, then you’re blessed. I’ve made my way through my life, through all the highs and lows and the peaks and valleys and all that kind of stuff, but I’ve loved every minute of it because I loved what I did. I could sit there in the corner in a restaurant or in a coldwater apartment with a pen and pencil and write something down or I could read Walt Whitman and just be so turned on that I wrote something else. I could hear Bo Diddley and just go “Jesus Christ!” It’s something that comes with an enormous amount of extras, being a musician. If you’re paying attention, there’s just a myriad of things that are going to come to you because of the music. Just love it. You don’t have to do anything else. Just take your hands off the wheel. Don’t listen to anybody else and follow your muse.

MR: You’re also going to be touring to promote the live album, which is sort of synchronistic.

JW: Yeah. It’s wild, we’ve been playing a lot of smaller places. The last album, Rough And Tumble, we got to number one on classic rock with the track “Rough And Tumble,” which kind of blew my mind because I had no idea it was going to be released as a single. I had no clue, and then it went number ten, then seven, five, and then it went to number one and I’m looking at the competition and the competition was incredibly heavy yet it went to number one. But the fact was that we were going out and playing small clubs for peanuts, barely making a living and paying the band and the hotels and stuff, but we just went out like troubadours, just to play because we loved it so much. It was either stay at home or go out and play. At the end of the year, I’d made a small fortune, really, but I also paid it all back to the taxman and the American Express. That’s how much it cost to get to those people, but every morning, we’d get up and go on some Clear Channel station, the biggest station in town, play live, knock people out, make them laugh and then we’d go straight to Fox TV and do Fox. That’s how you get a number one single, but I can’t do it for another year or two because we just couldn’t make it work financially. So we’ve changed agents and we’re just playing bigger places this year and hoping that’s enough to bring it forward. It works great on a big stage and the band is the right band for a big stage now. We are in fact doing very well. The gigs that are booked are selling really well. I think we’ve got a sold-out gig next week in Ohio in an amphitheater. It’s just one of those things; one minute you’re thinking, “Is ‘If You Ever Get Lonely’ going to be a hit?” and the next minute it actually is and then the minute after, you’re playing bigger places. It happens overnight.

MR: The obvious question now is when is the next Babys or Bad English reunion that includes you?

JW: Oh Jesus Christ! I have been in touch with Tony and Wally and I wish him the best, I got an email from him yesterday, there’s nothing but best wishes for the Babys reunion and I hope they knock him dead and they have a great time and if any two people deserve to play together, it’s Wally and Tony. They are really like an engine together and I think they’ve waited too long to do it. They should have done it twenty years ago. But God bless them. I would never do any kind of reunion. I said when I was in the band that I would never come back and do it after we called it a day. Finish when it’s finished.

MR: Last question: Is there something we need to know about John Waite that we don’t know yet?

JW: Apparently I’m a loner. I’ve been married and I’ve been engaged twice and I thought I was going to be surrounded by kids living on a farm somewhere, or at least I thought I might go back to University and write a book. But my life’s been music and it’s lead me down some different paths. I’ve got the life, I’ve got the exact opposite of the life that I thought I was going to get. So it’s still interesting, every day is a new one. It’s like a mind-blowing experience, I don’t know what’s coming next.

MR: What you described is not all that lonely.

JW: Oh, I’m absolutely surrounded! I’m in a pretty great place. I feel like you never stop growing, you know? To the last minute of your life, I think you’re always learning something. A couple years ago, I discovered Bill Evans, the keyboard player, and I listen to a lot of Bill Evans, he’s marvelous.

MR: Is jazz in your future?

JW: Well it occurs in “Mr. Wonderful,” back to your question. “Mr. Wonderful” takes off into germanic theatre bebop jazz, and that’s when you’re taking off and you’re going into some sort of place that you’ve never been before. But it’s still rock! That’s an interesting way to be going, but it was meant to be interesting when it was written. The melody goes completely off the wall every night. I try to take it as far out as I can. I don’t know what I’m doing, actually, when I’m singing that song. It sings me.

MR: All right, I guess you’ve got things to do so I’ll go away now.

JW: I’m doing my laundry, actually!

MR: Very important work. Cleanliness is next to godliness.

JW: I’m walking around in a pair of shorts! I’ve had a chest cold all week, I took a Z-Pak on Sunday and I’m still taking them, but yesterday I slept for like fourteen hours and I woke up about midnight, took a sleep tablet, went right back to sleep with another hit of penicillin and I woke up today feeling well for the first day in five days. So I’m pretty happy at the moment, but I thought, “Well, I’ll do my laundry. Hey, I’ve got an interview! So I’ll do my laundry and an interview.”

MR: John, you’re awesome, as always, I really appreciate your time and I do hope you get more than your fair share of laundry done today.

JW: Thank you. Cleanly put, my friend! Cleanly put.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne