Mike Keneally Interview

by Mark J. Rabuffo.

While over the almost 20 years since his stint as Frank Zappa's last so-called "stunt guitarist," Mike Keneally may not have become a stadium headliner, he's carved out a strong niche of Keneally-music fanatics who believe the important arena lies between the ears. "You are as useful as a urinal in a convent," Keneally sings on the track "Ugly Town" from his 1992 debut solo album, hat. Welcome to the musically mercurial world of guitarist-composer-singer-songwriter-keyboardist-producer Mike Keneally.

"...Mike Keneally is one of the most creative and gifted musicians God has graced us with. I have witnessed him do things on various instruments (at the same time occasionally) that defy reality, and though his technical command of his instruments is extraordinary, it’s the profound voice of his inner ear that is truly the trump card of his brilliance." Impressive words; made even more so by the fact that they were written by fellow Frank Zappa alumnus Steve Vai on the inside jacket of the solo piano album Vai Piano Reductions Vol.1 – Performed by Mike Keneally (2004, Light Without Heat).

However, this being Modern Guitars – not Modern Pianos - last summer we spoke to Mike primarily about the recent (May, 2007) re-issue of his first two solo albums, hat. and Boil That Dust Speck on Keneally's own label, Exowax Recordings, and a bit about his time with Frank Zappa and his association with Dweezil.

Mark J. Rabuffo: Congratulations on the re-release of hat. and Boil That Dust Speck. Tell me about the CDs and the events that lead up to the re-releases.

Mike Keneally: Those were my first two albums; hat. was recorded in 1992 and Boil That Dust Speck in 1994. They were both recorded while I was still involved with the Zappas doing different projects. I was a member of Dweezil and Ahmet’s band, and also involved with various projects with the family. I was really steeped in the Zappa mindset at that point and I think both those albums are heavily influenced by that.

At the time, I was signed to an independent label called Immune Records in San Diego and we just put those albums out for the world and didn’t know what was going to happen. Over time, they found their audience. After a while, Immune Records went out of business, and those albums became unavailable. They were going for unnecessarily high prices on the Internet, and so my label, Exowax, was able to obtain the rights to all the old masters early last year and these titles are the first two reissues of my old, long out of print albums. I am really glad that guys like you who were curious to hear that music for so long and never had the chance now have the opportunity to check it out without having to pay too much.

Mark: There’s the Dr. Seuss reference to Boil That Dust Speck, but how did you come up with the title for hat.?

Mike: That was derived from concert that I did with Frank [Zappa] in Birmingham, England, in 1988. After the show, I was out on stage gathering up some of my belongings and some guy came up to the front of the stage and said, “I sure do like the way you play,” or something like that, and he was wearing this purple and green felt hat – obviously handmade. And I said “I sure do like your hat”, and he just took it off his head and threw it up to me. I just thought that was a remarkably selfless and immediate gesture; he didn’t hesitate to throw this hat to me. I put it on and walked backstage and the very first thing that happened was that Andy Partridge and Dave Gregory from XTC were standing back there, who are guys that I idolize completely. I thought, “Wow, the hat has magical properties.” So, I began wearing it non-stop and it became inseparable from me and it turned into kind of the best thing I could come up with in terms of a sartorial trademark on stage.

When I first started thinking about the first record, I wanted a simple, concise and hopefully memorable title, and I thought that I would just emphasize this connection with the hat. That’s why, in the liner notes of the original version and the reissue as well, I gave a special thanks to the guy in Birmingham. I said, “Where are you? Who are you?” Finally, many years later, he emailed me and got in touch. He indicated that he’s been keeping track, and he appreciated the fact that I was so appreciative of his gift.

Mark: On the DVD that accompanies the special edition CD for Boil That Dust Speck, you talk about "willful ignorance" and "closed mindedness" by the antagonists in Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears A Who. I read that book recently to my son, who is in kindergarten, and I remembered the cartoon and the Boil That Dust Speck chant…

Mike: That actual phrase isn’t even in the book, but the fact that it’s a mantra and it’s very kind of disturbing in a way - that always stuck with me; I always thought that it was just a striking phrase.

Mark: Your comments on the "willful ignorance" and "closed mindedness" seem especially poignant in this day and age – probably even more so than when you originally recorded it. Was there something in particular that caused you to choose that title originally?

Mike: I don’t remember there being a specific event or some kind of world trouble or narrow-minded policy that was the single thing that spurred me to that. It more just that it felt like it was a darker record, a more troubled record than the first album. The first album was much more of a showcase for various peculiarities and eccentricities and Boil wasn’t as light-hearted as the first record. The album was definitely made in an atmosphere of personal turmoil, and I think that I was looking for some kind of a catch phrase that would capture some of that, but one that would also make it something a little more universal while at the same time being fairly obscure, which seems to be the combination of things I always go for. [Laughs]

Mark: You have several songs about cows on hat. and songs about dolphins on Boil That Dust Speck. What inspired you to write those songs?

Mike: I am not sure what it is that makes that a constantly appealing topic or just an inspiration, but there’s always something interesting to me about writing about animals rather than people. It also presents the opportunity to do some interesting things with words, and also I just think that, because we don’t have the luxury of being able to speak with these creatures, it makes them very intriguing to me in a way that people aren’t [laughs]. I know people too well; I guess I know all their tricks. And the cow thing – it always just seemed like – well, the cows have a secret. There’s no doubt about it. I think there’s something enigmatic about cows and the image of cows rising up. Then, a few years later, there came Mad Cow Disease and that kind of felt like a cataclysmic revenge plot.

As far as the dolphins, I never expected dolphins to become such a critical, central image – or that I was going to have a band named after them [Beer For Dolphins]. I just thought that "Them Dolphins Is Smart" would be a funny phrase, and a lot of times things just derive from weird phrases that land in my head. Somehow, that phrase painted a picture to me of the type of person who would say that. They’re speaking glowingly of dolphins but can’t even find the right words to express it. That, to me, is amusing. And even though I don’t know the guy who would say that, I can imagine all kinds of interesting character traits of somebody who would say that.

Sometimes I’ll put down something like that to suggest a background for a character that we don’t even know, just to add a little extra dimension to the word. And then, once I realized that theme - "Them Dolphins Is Smart" – was going to be the framing device for this medley, I thought just to make it even more ridiculous the reprise would be, "Yep, Them Dolphins Is Smart, Alright," and so, that whole three-song medley became "Dolphins" for short. And then, when my drummer at the time, Toss Panos, said, "Do we need beer for dolphins before we start recording it?" Beer For Dolphins became a major thing.

Mark: Tell me about Exowax Recordings and how that came about.

Mike: That became a reality in 1999, so it was shortly after my deal with Immune came to an end. It was sort of the brain child of me and my friend, Scott Chatfield, whom I’ve know for about 21 years and who has acted as my manager for almost ten years now.

In the late '90s, when this was happening, it started to feel like the whole major label paradigm was beginning to crumble. It wasn’t as clear then as it is now how much the rules have changed. In the early '90s and anytime before, the goal was "we gotta get signed, gotta find a major label, bend over and, y’know, ruin our life [laughs]. There was a time when that felt like the best thing you could possibly do. When Scott and I were talking we felt, OK, we now have the world open to us in terms of where I can go with my music, so let’s do it ourselves. Let’s start a label.

Exowax was a name that I had from when I was eleven years old; I asked a Ouija board what label will I record for when I grow up, and it replied “Exowax.” I know the whole Ouija thing freaks some people out, but I don’t get twisted about stuff like that. The universe is interesting; it feeds you information in different, various ways. It’s not scary, it just is what it is.

Mark: Your website details your exploits with Frank Zappa quite nicely. Now that there’s been some time between then and now, how do you look back on your time with Frank?

Mike: When you asked me that question, I broke into a huge smile. I guess that’s how I look back on it – extreme gratitude and great joy that that actually happened 'cause I love Frank and always will. When I was a teenager growing up and going through adolescence and what not in the '70s, Frank was a lifeline for me to a certain reality - that it was possible to be completely non-conformist and creative, unique, and uncompromising and just do whatever you want to do musically and that doing that could have an effect that was really wide-ranging and could touch people’s lives and go way beyond just the music itself and have a real positive impact on people. That was super-inspiring to me, and it gave me the strength that I needed to try to attempt to do the same thing. Then, I had the opportunity to actually play with Frank - when he extended that hand of acceptance – and be a part of his world, and help make that music happen that I love so much. At the time that it happened, there was nothing in life that I could have wanted more.

Following that, it was somewhat disconcerting to understand that I had achieved my life’s goal at age 25, and the rest of my life would be, “How do I follow that one up?” After a certain point, I realized that the only thing I could do was establish my own career, and just do my best to honor him in the work that I do; not to mirror him or to be another version of him, but just to pay respect to his work ethic and his mindset of “I do the music that I want to do and I trust that other people will appreciate it and enjoy it and be glad that it exists.”

It’s about being productive and building a body of adventurous work that people will be able to dig into and look for the interconnections between things. At this point, I have something like 16 albums that I’ve done, and there are people who will really examine the music and see where things connect up and get a tremendous amount of nourishment from it, and that’s exactly what I did with Franks music and any number of other people’s music when I was forming my ideas about life and music and things. I know how crucial and important that is, and I’m really grateful for the guy somewhere in the world sitting with a pair of headphones on who really digs into the stuff that I do, and still consumes music as a music lover and pays attention to an extended work and follows its contours from start to finish as opposed to just downloading a track here or there.

I still love albums, and in fact, right now I’m in the middle of an album called Scanbot which is going to be two hours long, minimum and is specifically designed for the type of music lover who makes the time in their life to sit down with a piece of music and album package that supports that music, and concentrates on the thing from start to finish. That, to me, is still a great joy in life.

Mark: What do you think of the Zappa Plays Zappa tour?

Mike: The one show that I saw, which was in Anaheim [California], was absolutely killing. They sounded fantastic. The guy who has been my regular drummer for the past few years, Joe Travers, is the drummer in that band, and I always love an opportunity to hear Joe play. He’s just driving that machine incredibly well. It sounds beautiful. Dweezil has done unbelievable things with his guitar technique. He’s devoted a good amount of time in his life to revising his technique to execute these lines that are just outrageous. The attention paid to the original textures of the recorded versions is outstanding. Last year, they were doing primarily mid-'70s material like the Roxy And Elsewhere era, and the timbres were shockingly close – they paid much more attention to replicating that stuff than Frank ever did. He was not at all interested in replicating an album arrangement; he was always looking to find new things in the material and expand it further from what he originally created and, of course, that was obviously his life and he considered it his duty to do it that way.

Dweezil’s thing, I think, comes from great love, where he has such respect and honor for those original recorded versions but, at the same time, it doesn’t come off as a museum display case – it still has a lot of life and a lot of vitality to it. The sound is so close to the original it’s just like a huge, nostalgic orgasm for the audience. It’s great fun, and the playing is of a high quality, and everyone in the band is super-nice people – I’m really happy that they’re out there doing that.

Mark: I saw them in Connecticut back in October of 2006 – it was a fantastic show. It was cool to see Terry Bozzio, too – he’s amazing.

Mike: I’ll tell you what; even after being in Steve Vai’s band for six years, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen Steve play better onstage than I saw him playing with that Zappa show. He was so calm and so focused, and I think because it wasn’t his gig and he didn’t have to feel that he was taking the responsibility for how entertaining the show was, he could just stand there and focus entirely on the music. When Steve Vai stands still and plays the guitar, there’s almost nothing better. He is unbelievably good. And from what I understand, his current band – which includes my current bass player [Bryan Beller] – is a whole new step for Steve’s live music, and I’m really looking forward to seeing that and seeing Steve on his current tour [Sound Theories]. There’s something that happens when he doesn’t worry about the showmanship and just concentrates on the playing that is just – shocking [laughs].

Mark: You’ve played with a lot of other musicians as a sideman in addition to Frank Zappa – Mullmuzzler, Dweezil Zappa, Andy West with Rama, Steve Vai. Tell me about those experiences.

Mike: You meet people in all types of contexts. I met Andy West at a NAMM show; he just walked up – this was after hat. was released in the early '90s. I was always a rabid Dregs fan – Andy just walked up and introduced himself and said that he had heard my solo album and hoped that we would have an opportunity to play together sometime. He and I have a mutual friend – Henry Kaiser. Andy and I and Henry and Prairie Prince made an album called The Mistakes, which has been out of print forever, that Exowax will be bringing back into print soon.

One of the beautiful things about this business is that I’ve managed to connect with these guys who I pretty much idolized when I was growing up. Making music with Andy was a real pleasure.

For Mullmuzzler, I believe James LaBrie had a connection with Mike Mangini, who was the drummer in the Vai band. It was through Mangini that James got my information and got ahold of me and said that he wanted me to take part in this recording project. It was a very interesting project, because none of the musicians ever saw one another. It was recorded in different studios on different coasts and that was my first experience with that type of album production. It was educational, but I still prefer when musicians stand in the room together.

Mark: I have Dweezil’s Confessions album.

Mike: That was huge; that first Dweezil band was really powerful. It was an amazing band live, especially. We used to do a medley of songs from the '70s; like 200 songs. It would go on for a about a half-an-hour; sometimes you’d only do about a second and a half of a song. We’d just pivot from that song into another song just on the basis of one note in a guitar riff or one word in the lyric. There were all these crazy changes in time and key and tempo non-stop for a half-hour; it was a totally exhausting experience for the audience and really, really fun to just whip out on people and watch them just…melt. For every gig that band did, we probably rehearsed for about three weeks. We rehearsed far more than we performed; used to just rehearse non-stop. That was what that band did; day in and day out for years at a time. [Laughs]

Mark: I know the name of this magazine is Modern Guitars, but tell me about your work with Steve Vai on Piano Reductions, Volume I. I got this when it came out and was absolutely amazed with it.

Mike: I am so happy about that record. The album was Steve’s concept; he assigned the songs; he told me which eleven he wanted me to arrange. It was recorded back in 1998 and 1999, but wasn’t released until 2004. He just said here are the songs; arrange them how you see fit. Depending on how each song struck me, I would either do a very faithful transcription of the original and on others I would be inspired to do almost a complete re-imagining. For example, a song like “Ballerina 12/24” – at the time, what I wanted to do was to play on the piano exactly what he had accomplished with the guitar and effects because I thought that it would just sound beautiful to play that, those shimmering Eventide effects on a piano keyboard. In the case of “Salamanders In The Sun,” which has been my favorite song of Steve’s for a long, long time – I just loved the melody so much, I saw the opportunity for a lot of harmonic adventurings. Like you do with any arrangement, you just start at the beginning and work slowly through it and see where the music takes you. In the case of that song, I just decided to come up with a really radical harmonic approach to the melody.

I have never done anything in my life musically that was more challenging than that record. There’s no other format that I work in that is more naked and unprotected than solo piano. You’ve got full control of the orchestration; both hands need to be in tip-top condition – interdependence and independence is paramount. It’s just all out there – one bad note can kill the vibe.

Before going into the recording studio, I would play for Steve my concept for the arrangement and he’d go, “Yup, go for it.” Then I would record five or six versions of the song and Steve would edit together his favorite portions. In the process of doing the takes, I would frequently make mistakes, and because it was such a challenging and emotionally wrenching process doing those arrangements and playing them properly, I would spend a lot of time just screaming at the piano if I made a mistake. Steve would go through the tapes, and every time he heard one of these obscenity-laden tirades, he would put that off in a different file. Apparently somewhere he’s got this medley of every heinous thing that I said during the session. I still haven’t heard it but his initial reaction was to include this as a hidden track at the end of the album [laughs]. It definitely would have changed the vibe of the record.

Mark: What do you think of the current state of the music industry, and the transition from CDs to digital media and the growing pains inherent in such a change?

Mike: I’m firmly in favor of anything that puts more control in the artist’s hands and allows them a more unfettered access to their potential following. Give the artist less boss-man that he has to suck up to in order to get his job done. It’s been unbelievable how abused artists have been traditionally, and it’s the kind of abuse they willingly put up with just to get out there and play music for people. There’s been a lot of misguided thinking making artists believe that they have to play by these rules in order to establish a foothold in the industry. Little by little, the lies are being seen for what they are and people are taking more control into their own hands. I’m very grateful for that.

Mark: I’d like to ask you just one more question – just for fun. If you could put together a dream band with anyone – alive or dead – who would you choose?

Mike: Wayne Shorter. Herbie Hancock. Basically, just reforming the '60s Miles Davis band. Ron Carter and Tony Williams, too. My single favorite music in the world is the box set of the Miles Davis Quintet playing at the Plugged Nickel on December 22 and 23, 1965 [The Complete Live At The Plugged Nickel 1965 1995, Sony]. That is epochal music; it’s absolutely trend-setting, amazing music and I would be grateful for the opportunity to see what could happen in that context. Oh – and Miles can play, too [laughs]. When I think about it and allow my mind to dream about the guys that I really wish that I could play with, it always goes to that world. I would just be happy to play with John Coltrane for five minutes, too. That would be incredible.

Related Links
Review: Mike Keneally's hat. and Boil That Dust Speck
Mike Keneally's Website - a "must visit" for any Keneally fan
Dweezil Zappa Interview

---