A Conversation with Recording Artist & Chef Tommy Keene – HuffPost 9.13.13

Mike Ragogna: Hi Tommy. It’s interview time!

Tommy Keene: Hey, how are you doing?

MR: I’m doing well, how are you, sir?

TK: I’m pretty good, I’m having my second cup of tea.

MR: Are you a tea guy instead of a coffee guy?

TK: Yeah, there’s a long story to that. I used to be a coffee guy but when we were making that record Songs From The Film at a studio in Montserrat, George Martin’s studio, I caught this stomach bug, which was pretty bad for about twelve days and the A&R guy got it too, but he chickened out and flew back to L.A. The woman who ran the studio told me instead of coffee to drink tea. She was British, obviously, because it was binding. So I started drinking tea instead of coffee and I never went back. Coffee’s just a little rougher on your system, I think.

MR: Yeah, I think so, too. You don’t want to know me on coffee.

TK: Yeah, it’s kind of a weirder buzz.

MR: So Tommy Keene, there’s a lot of Excitement At Your Feet, so to speak, with this new album, your tenth one.

TK: Well actually it feels like a lot more.

MR: Well, you have Keene Brothers stuff, too.

TK: Yeah, and I have live albums and compilations and re-releases. It seems to me more like eighteen releases instead of ten and I always think, “Is that all I’ve done?” There were a lot of spaces in my career where for one reason or another, I did not put out an album, and it had nothing to do with me, so the songs had built up. Just because I had written fifteen or twenty song, it felt like I had put out a record when in actuality, I didn’t. But ten’s a good number. I guess it’s still only nine original albums, because this is a covers record. So it seems to me that it should be more than that, but for circumstances beyond my control.

MR: Usually, when an artist records a covers album, the listener can be bludgeoned by the obvious. But these songs were mostly obscure, how did you choose them?

TK: When I figured out that this was what I wanted to do, I basically just went through my entire record collection. There were some obvious songs I wanted to cover for a long time, but I just looked for songs that I thought I could pull off vocally and if I could make them believable while not going too far into mimicry while still making them Tommy Keene songs. The first song, “Have You Seen My Baby?” was off a Flamin’ Groovies record that I got at some point in the seventies. I got it after it came out. I wasn’t aware of them until some musicians I jammed with as a teenager turned me on to the record. I was living in Bethesda, Maryland, and in ’78, I joined this band called The Razz, which was the biggest band in town. That’s kind of a story in itself. I was playing in another band and we opened for them and at one point, just as it seemed they were taking off, their guitar player quit, and he was also the main songwriter musically and the lead singer with the lyrics. I eventually got the gig and joined the band, but they had this great selection of obscure cover songs that they really made their own and mine as well for a long time. I got “Our Car Club” from them, which was a very obscure Beach Boys car song. I recorded that in Montserrat and it came out on the re-release of Songs From The Film. They did the song, “Have You Seen My Baby?” which is a Randy Newman song, so it’s basically a cover of a cover, and this is the Flamin’ Groovies interpreting it. It’s just a great, simple rock ‘n’ roll song and it just immediately sprung to mind for an equally great album opener.

MR: Yeah, it really kicks off the record well.

TK: The way a rock ‘n’ roll album should. You put it on and bam, yes, and you want to start jumping around the room.

MR: You have a personal connection to the Guided By Voices song, “Choking Tara,” because of the old group member. Did you do that song just because you love the song, or was it also a little nod to the fraternity that was?

TK: [laughs] When I started thinking about the selection, I thought of all the bands I really love and, of course, Guided By Voices came to mind. That’s a tricky one because Bob [Pollard] has written and released so many songs. You’re talking about my tenth record, he’s on his ninety-sixth or something. When I was playing with him, we were mostly touring to support the double album, his first solo record proper after he broke up GBV in ’04, but we were also doing a handful of Guided By Voices songs which would fluctuate. In the middle of that tour, I got him to do, with the band, “Choking Tara,” because I’d always loved the song, and it’s from my favorite GBV album, Mag Earwhig! The version that came out on the album is him doing the acoustic guitar. On one of their box sets is a full band version called “Creamy Version,” which, when I heard the song, I always thought, “God, I’d love to hear this with a band” and eventually I did, and then I got him to play the song with the Robert Pollard Band live. It’s just one of my favorite Pollard songs. It’s funny, because I’ve been doing a lot of interviews and people have been saying, “How did you choose that one?” because GBV is a band where no one can agree on their favorite song, or even their Top Ten because there are so many. I had a lot of, “Why didn’t you do this? This is the song you should do!” literally suggesting ten or twenty songs. Everyone has their favorites, I guess.

MR: You also did the Television song, “Guiding Light,” which was an interesting choice.

TK: Right?

MR: Television, Big Star, Echo & The Bunnymen and Mink DeVille…you have your finger on sophisticated alternative music. These acts all helped that genre explode, and I feel like you had your finger on the pulse.

TK: Yeah, man, I have a history with cherry-picking interesting covers. I’ve put covers on a bunch of my records, which a lot of people don’t do. I think it’s the case that I usually put a sole cover song on every record mainly for the reason that it’s the type of song that I find extremely difficult to write and I think that particular song in that situation might give the album a little bit of a break or variety. Other times, getting back to the type of songs that I find difficult to write, a great example is Alex Chilton’s “Hey! Little Child,” which we put on that first EP that sort of got national attention. The song “Hey! LIttle Child,” is not a great song. At the time, I remember people saying, “Well if you’re going to cover a Big Star song, why don’t you do ‘September Girls’ or ‘What’s Going On?’ or ‘Daisy Glaze’ or ‘Feel?'” Well that wasn’t really the point. The point is it’s just such a simple song with a great beat, it’s similar to, say, “Satisfaction,” by The Stones and it worked incredibly well in the live setting, and people liked it immediately just because of that infectious marching tempo. Once we saw the reaction to that we decided to record it and hence it ended up on that first EP.

MR: And you also nailed Lou Reed’s “Kill Your Sons.”

TK: That’s the same thing! I thought it was such a great Lou Reed song in the vein of his best, “Sweet Jane” and such, and I said one night before a show back in the first Tommy Keene group in probably 1985, “Let’s learn this, it’s so simple,” and we did it and it went over really well. The A&R guy from Geffen saw a show where we played that song and he said, “That’s great, that has to go on the record.” So that ended up on Songs From The Film, which was my major label debut album and I don’t think I would’ve thought of that or put it on the record. So in hindsight, that was one of the only astute things they suggested. But just to clarify, when people do cover songs–I remember there was one by Def Leppard that my brother really loved–and the songs are so obvious, like “Do the Badfinger song,” of course they’ll do “No Matter What,” that, to me, was just a little too ridiculous. “Let’s do a Beatles song, what will we cover? ‘She Loves You,’ ‘Strawberry Fields,'” I think it’s more interesting to take a deep cut and this record is pretty much all deep cuts.

MR: You also do “Nowhere Near.”

TK: That actually started this whole thing off.

MR: Really?

TK: Yeah, last Summer, I recorded that song here at home and a friend of mine heard it, a writer actually, and he said, “You always do good covers, why don’t you do a whole album of covers?” A light bulb went off, because I was writing these songs but I had no definitive project in mind, I didn’t know what I was going to do. Back to that original A&R guy, he always said, when he got to know me–he was a year younger than me, believe it or not–he said, “You have such a history of music, when you were a little kid, you saw all these great live bands.” I saw The Who and The Dave Clark Five and Buffalo Springfield and The Lovin’ Spoonful and Led Zeppelin, on and on and on. He said, “You should do your Pin Ups,” you know, Bowie’s cover record. And he was serious! So it’s always been in the back of my mind to do this type of record, but when my friend suggested it last Summer, I thought, “Wow, maybe now’s a good time,” because it’s just a little bit different, it is a bit of a gimmick to get people to listen to me, I think. If somebody wandered into a record shop and saw a record that said, “Featuring songs by Roxy Music,” who are a very, very big band, they might say, “Oh, I’ve never heard of this guy, but I love them.” It was sort of a hook to get more people interested in me.

MR: Tommy, what advice do you have for new artists?

TK: Hmm. Don’t be too hasty making decisions that you might think are completely obvious choices. When you’re younger, things are going so fast and it’s really difficult sometimes to take in all these things that people are telling you to do–everybody from managers to record label people to band members. There were times in the past when I made a couple bad decisions when I felt pressured into going a certain way, and in my heart, I knew I was doing the wrong thing but I just ceded to people. Believe it or not, being agreeable, sometimes labels you as being difficult. I would say to just be true to yourself and don’t let anyone influence your opinions too much, even if they’re people in power or who you think have the power to do what you want for your career. They’re just as much doing a guessing game as you are. There’s no set manual for being a rock ‘n’ roll singer. Maybe this isn’t advice to people, this is something I wish I would’ve taken more seriously as far as standing up for myself, I think. Stand up for yourself.

MR: Yeah! That sounds like good advice.

TK: Don’t be influenced too much by people who you think are in complete control of your career. Even though they pretty much are and they seem to be, you just have to stand your ground and really, when it comes down to it, say, “This is how I feel and this is what I want to do,” and then, you’ll be labeled as “difficult.” [laughs] You can’t win, is what I’m saying. Everybody always blames stuff on the artist. Everyone passes the buck, it’s never the manager’s fault. The record company’s never at fault, they just say, “Oh, well, the record didn’t sell, what were we supposed to do?” It’s funny because, back to this A&R guy who signed me, he came up to me at one point after the record was out with this illuminating, brilliant observation, which at the time, I just thought, “Maybe you’re right.” He said, “The record business is like politics. People vote with their money,” i.e. they buy your record and that’s the way it works. Well, yes, per se, but what he didn’t take into account is that the candidate with the most money and the most promotion to get his name and views and his platform out there has the best chance of getting the most votes or selling the most records. So that little adage came back to slap him in the face. The more you promote a band, the more people get exposed to it, the more people are going to buy the record. So in the end, his analogy really didn’t work because they get behind certain acts that they think are an easy sell, like Guns N’ Roses and such, and I was a more difficult sell and they pretty much gave up too soon.

MR: On the other hand, considering your two-disc anthology and the fact that your work has been compiled more than a couple of times, your music seems to have “value” with labels and is appreciated by many, many people. Plus you were out there fighting in the indie world before indie really asserted itself as the popular way to go as opposed to having major label propping.

TK: Yeah, there’s something to be said for longevity. There were bands during that time who sold a little bit more and have gotten a bit more action going, but people don’t even remember them. So yeah, I’m very proud of my body of work. I think there are some really good records in there.

MR: I have a silly question to ask you. Record labels have gone into a dance phase that they can’t seem to get out of now. Do you think indie rock may be their way out once again?

TK: What do you mean the way out?

MR: Well, we’re currently get caught in a wave of dance pop. Do you think that at some point, when the airwaves get over saturated with certain acts and no one wants to hear whoever anymore, that indie and punk, who have traditionally change up the scene, will shake things up in an underground way again?

TK: I think indie right now is at its highest point ever except for the Nirvana wave in the early nineties. I mean, they were an indie band, and they got picked up and their record unbelievably changed the ways of the whole record business for ten years. But I don’t think it had that much to do with that band, I think they were pretty overrated; I just think they were at the right place at the right time. They had the right sound to shake things up and they had this radio mix that people liked and it sounded good on the radio. Look at Arcade Fire. They won the Grammy a couple of years ago. No one’s selling records like they did ten or twenty years ago, but I think that’s pretty much the representation of indie rock right there–a Canadian band that did well on the indie rock level, and the next thing you know, they’re selling a million records and they’re winning the Grammys. I think indie rock is bigger than ever, because I look at all these bands on Saturday Night Live and a lot of them, to my knowledge, aren’t even on major labels. But then a lot of people are posing as indie rock, like Mumford and Sons has sort of a homegrown, DIY spin to it, but I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know much about them, but they are sort of this folky a la natural act rather than a big, polished rock band or dance music. But as far as the dance thing, there is always some form of popular music that is abhorrent. There’s heavy metal, disco, Saturday Night Fever, really bad hard rock, really bad dance, Madonna, Britney Spears, Ke$ha–who was the gal in the late eighties…Debbie Gibson. They sell tons and tons of records, but everyone hates it. Well, not everyone hates it, obviously, but there’s always that monster that magazines and writers can’t ignore because they’re selling so many records, but anyone that knows their ass from their elbow knows it’s completely crap. Even going back to pre-Beatles, you had Fabian and crap like that, so that’s always there. It’s a phenomenon. It’s an enigma. It’s for the lowest common denominator. McDonald’s is always right there, seriously, but what about that mom and pop Italian restaurant down the street that has twelve tables that is amazing? You’ve got your McDonald’s, but then you’ve got your smaller, quality run of distinguished organizations. It’s me against Ke$ha.

MR: [laughs] I was just thinking that sometimes indie and punk come to the rescue as far as injecting interesting opportunities for change on a grand scale. The masses engage quality music for a while, and then they’re distracted again by the dumb, shiny toy.

TK: Right. I really wish I had been a punk artist a la The Ramones or something, because punk rock and heavy metal will never die. They always keep coming back, and in fact, they don’t go away. The kind of music I do, which is pretty much melodic rock ‘n’ roll, has been in vogue maybe three times in the last sixty years. If my music was punk rock and I got the same accolades as I do, I’d be selling out clubs. Look at Social Distortion or bands like that. Or look at these heavy metal bands. It’s a life style that gets handed down to people’s kids, along with the t-shirts and the branding and the devil horn fingers in the air or the punk rock haircuts. It’s more of a social phenomenon, I guess. It’s a cultural thing, whereas the kind of music I do and love has no identifiable branding. It’s never been really in vogue except for a few little places in musical history. Punk rock is like, “Oh, look, my little five year-old has a punk rock haircut, how cute! Let’s take him to see some new band that plays loud guitars and goes ‘Hey, hey, hey!'” a la Green Day or something.

MR: Don’t forget those tiny leather jackets.

TK: And a CBGB’s lunch box.

MR: [laughs] All right, is there anything about Tommy Keene that nobody knows about yet?

TK: I’m a really good cook.

MR: Ah! What are your specialties?

TK: Well, since it’s Summer–though I live California, so it’s always fairly warm out–I’ve moved out to the grill, and my latest thing, which is nothing groundbreaking but a lot of people have never had before, is pizza on the grill. I make my own dough, and if you get it to the right consistency and lay it as thin as possible on the grill, then the underside firms and cooks and then you can just flip it over with a spatula and then you put the sauce and the cheese and all the toppings on, and you can close the grill and it’s done in about seven minutes. The crust is amazing, it tastes like real pizzeria wood-fired pizza.

MR: Wow! So the next step for you is Keene’s Grilled Pizzas?

TK: People say I should open a restaurant. That’s a tough scene, because I basically make foods that I like that don’t really go across the whole spectrum of what most people eat. I do a lot of soups, I do a lot of pasta, a lot of fun things. But maybe I should do a cookbook. I know Lydia Lunch did, I kind of perused that the other day. That had a lot of commentary about, “You’ve done too many drugs, so you should eat kale chips.” Okay, thanks, Lydia.

MR: [laughs] All right, Tommy. Please keep us all updated as far as any new music and that cookbook.

TK: I will! Try and get something going for me on that.

MR: I think you’re onto something! At least the recipe for Keene’s Grilled Pizza! If you have something like that, bring it, babe.

TK: Oh, okay.

MR: Unless you want to keep that as the Keene Family secret.

TK: I’ll go through my recipe box and come up with something interesting, a signature dish.

MR: This is getting me hungry, let’s stop here. Tommy! It’s been really great talking with you.

TK: It’s been great talking to you, too.

MR: Thank you so much for the time and all the best with the new fun record.

TK: Okay, well thank you.

Tommy Keene’s Baked Penne with Green Chilies, Cheddar Cheese and Olives

Ingredients:
1 and 1/2 tablespoons Olive Oil
5 Scallions, green parts only, chopped
3 tablespoons flour
1 and 1/2 cups milk
1/4 cup dry white wine
1 and 1/2 cup shredded Cheddar cheese
1 small can (about 4 to 6 oz.) mild green chilies, drained.
8 oz. Penne
20 green olives chopped with pimentos
1 cup low fat cottage cheese

1. Warm Olive Oil in skillet over medium heat, add scallions and saute till soft
2. Add flour and stir for one minute, slowly add milk, raise heat until boiling and whisk mixture till it thickens forming a roux. Stir for two minutes
3. Add wine and continue whisking/stirring until mixture is fairly thick
4. Meanwhile boil Penne in salted water for about 8 minutes, drain and add to roux along with cheddar cheese and chili’s. Mix thoroughly adding salt and pepper to liking
5. Grease an 8 x 11 glass casserole dish and add pasta mixture
6. Spread cottage cheese evenly over top and then sprinkle with chopped green olives
7. Bake uncovered at 350 degrees for about 25 minutes until bubbling
8. Allow to cool five minutes before serving.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne