June, 1998

"Ken Nordine, yeah I know that guy, I heard his voice 1000 times Ken Nordine is the real angel sitting on the wire in the tangled matrix of cobwebs that holds the whole attic together he's the lite in the icebox, he's the blacksmith on the anvil in your ear."
- Tom Waits, 1990

 

Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Lenny Bruce, Allen Ginsberg, even Miles Davis and Esquivel - swingers, beatniks, and cult figures who were either ahead of their time or possessed a wild spirit for individuality in a suppressive society. And there's one particular hipster who actually set the stage for such surrealistic mind expansion in the early '60s. Being the first to disorder the order of his thinking so he could juggle words into verbal poetic puzzles and then twist them around some groovy, off-kilter jazz, Ken Nordine gave birth to what is known as Word Jazz.

Nordine has worked and performed with all kinds of notable musicians and fans over the years, from his earliest days with The Northern Jazz Quartet (made up of three narcotic cops led by Dick Campbell) to more recent sightings with Tom Waits and Jerry Garcia.

When he's not improvising rhymes and rambling off amusing stories over such reactionary beats, Nordine is "hip-lip"-ing clever voice-overs for radio or television commercials. His deep mysterious voice has been anchored in over 300 ads per year, including Levi Strauss, Miller Beer, Taster's Choice, Chevrolet, Murine, Motorola, Gallo Wines, and Bank of America to name just a few.

And if these two alter-egos aren't enough, then the 78-year-old genius gets down and demented when creating sonic episodes for his syndicated radio show from Chicago at WBEZ. Exploring the psychic terrain of wordplay and time integration, these experimental shows are escorted with half-hazard tape-splicing, multi-tracking, and home-made sound effects that no doubt stimulate the listener's mind as well as their moods.

Mostly an "invisible" legend for over four generations, Nordine has recorded countless Word Jazz albums that trace his early career. Some are collectibles, others (in the form of tapes) are catalogued by The Museum of Television and Radio in New York. But most are accessible as reissues on various labels, including Rhino and his own Snail Records (Box 285-8C2, Florence, WI 54121; 1-800-327-6986.)

"We want things that catch on slowly" is Snail Records' slogan, and I keep this in mind when speaking with the intellect from his Chicago home. After hearing Nordine pick up the phone and mumble "Studio" in a Lurch-like tone, I know right then my mind is in for a "wonder-wandering" ride. We begin discussing a magical exercise he's been using to help him fall asleep at night: he lies in bed rhyming...

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Explain to me more about your endless bout with insomnia. It seems as if it has actually been beneficial for you.

"I'm very pleased insomnia has turned into something useful. Strange thing, I think I've cured myself from insomnia by becoming bored with what I did to stop it. I have page after page of these [poems] which are the result of my insomniac attempts to freeze-frame time. They all begin with that first phrase ["Maybe the moment..."], all five beats to the line, and all eight lines long. Actually, I have close to four hundred of them, which I've been doing for over a year. One a night for a lot of nights, which is overkill. I've done them on a show or so, but these I've illustrated, doing some funny things on the computer. I'll put these illustrations out myself, possibly as a book if I can get someone to go for it."

Your mind seems so incessant, always thinking, even at bedtime. Does your brain ever shut itself off?

"That'd be great, wouldn't it? Of course, sleep is the antidote of all of that. If you build up enough lactic acid, it's impossible to stay awake. Think about what a wonderful narcotic sleep is, and all the things that are going on - I'm talking about dreamless sleep now, which is a big black nothing as far as I know. The fun is coming out of it, when you have a kind of lucid dreaming and I'll write about that too."

You obviously have some kind of heightened awareness in order to work with lucid dreaming.

"Especially when you have a rhythm to it. Rhythmically, it makes it much, much easier to remember because it has sort of a structure."

But I doubt most people think in these rhythms you talk about.

"The same thing is true of Omar Khayyam, for example in The Rubaiyat. The best translation, by the way, is the 5th Edition by Fitzgerald. Lines like 'I sometimes think there never blows so red a rose as where some buried Caesar bled.' Well that just roles off your tongue and makes it very easy to remember."

Some of your lyrics have such a sense of wonder about nature. In fact, I read that you feel like a frustrated scientist a lot of times.

"Well, I think mathematicians and musicians are closer to God than anybody. Some of my best friends were mathematicians. Zitter was one of them, a brilliant guy. He was a test pilot for P. Lorrilard, the cigarette company, but I think he went up in smoke. I told him to stop smoking but he wouldn't listen to me. [Sighs] He coughed off. I would have these long, long talks with Zit about his understanding of numbers, and he'd regale me with a story of a guy by the name of George Cantor, who was a brilliant Jewish physicist in Germany in the '20s. He proved something about infinities in numbers; the difference area between irrational and rational numbers. Cantor discovered that there's an infinitely greater number of infinite irrational numbers than there is an infinite number of infinite rational numbers, so of course he had to leave Germany right away! They thought this was ridiculous!"

Speaking of infinities and termination, I read a quote of yours concerning death in an interview: "If I had anything to do with creating human beings, I would have left that out." Do you mean you would have left out coming to terms with death or simply death itself?

"No, my problem with the mystery of being mortal is the same as the mystery of being immortal. When people try to define God (and God contains life and death and everything else you can think of), it's really kind of an insult to creation to try to limit the mystery of the same mode.

In fact, I was with Laurie Anderson doing this Meltdown Festival in London at The Royal Festival Hall last June and July. I did two shows with her and one of my own. She makes a phone call to God and I wrote and played the part of God. She calls up and wants to know how much I weigh and we get into a l-o-n-g discussion. We had a great time! Oh, what a wonderful high that festival was. There was a pretty interesting group of people there too. Besides Lou Reed and Laurie, Brian Eno was there, and Robert Wilson, who worked with my friend Tom Waits and the late Bill Burroughs, Spalding Gray..."

Who are the jazzy session-cats accompanying your spoken word today and explain how all of you attack impromptu.

"What happens now is my son Kris does some things with me and Howard Levy, who is a giant of a talent. When we went to London last summer, we picked up a percussionist, a drummer, and a bass player. There was no rehearsal. They wanted to know what we were gonna do. I said, 'Well, the picture that I'm doing is a verbal movie and the four of you will be listening to me and to each other and then empathically create a soundtrack/music for whatever I'm talking about. For example, if I talk about how things were maybe in the very beginning of time, or even just before time was gonna begin, you play whatever you feel would be what you think that time was like.' They listen to each other if they're good and they give each other space, which they have to do. And then of course, with that kind of freedom, some fantastic things could happen."

Have you ever tried to improvise with other genres of music besides jazz?

"No, although I must say jazz offers the freedom. You see the problem with a string quartet for example, is that it's usually so ego-oriented. The first violin is saying, 'Hey look where I am!' Then the second violin is saying, 'Well, I'm right behind you!' And then the viola is saying, 'But hey, I'm your connection with the cello!' And the cello is saying, 'Oh I get it, I get a break here in the minuet section, a chance to really let

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maybe the moment
is singing so loud
little old ladies
who make up the crowd
are cupping their ears
and hope he will quit
he won't that's for sure
cuz he's loving it

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loose!' But what we're doing with word jazz is more in the direction of tonality, playing around in the key of E or C-minor, which is a nice key. The smaller the group, the more together they can be and the freer they can be. There's a reason why artists are soloists, and musicians can play together, but if you get a group too large, then you have to have a chart for them, uniforms, schedules, a bus...

That's why when I go to the symphony, which I don't do so much anymore because it's a big hassle, the only thing that can keep me interested is to try to count how many women are in the orchestra or how many guys are wearing silk acetate socks. Or I try to imagine like the first violinist dropping dead in the middle of the thing, just wailing away! There's kind of an elitism, so I fall off the sled, I really do. They're really very conservative. They don't play things I'd like to hear. Zappa once told me, the reason why they always play the same tunes, Haydn, Mozart, and Brahms, is because they've learned these. But if they got other music, they'd have to practice, rehearse, and then they'd get paid more because of the union, which means the conductors wouldn't be paid as much."

Do you still perform in public?

"Not too often. I was supposed to go to Melbourne, Australia to do a 90-minute concert called 'The Next Wave,' but I begged off on it and instead I'm gonna do the concert 'live' with ISDN line and T1 installed, from a studio here in Chicago. With RRR radio in Melbourne, we'll do it here around 8 a.m., so it'll be broadcast at 11 p.m. down under, I guess. A good way to be there and not be there.

I got a packet from Crossing Borders, a spoken word festival held in the Netherlands, and part of it is in Belgium. They want me to do something there too, October 15, 16, and 17 of 1998."

Any public performances of yours coming up in America?

"I may do something again at The Knitting Factory. They also want me to go to McCabe's [in Santa Monica] but traveling is hard. It really is."

Besides the musicians you've mentioned accompanying your voice in the past and of those I've read, such as The Grateful Dead and the late-'60s psychedelic band H.P. Lovecraft, tell me some contemporary artists you have split your talent with in recent years.

"I've worked with Paul Wertico, the drummer for Pat Metheny, Hal Wilner, Sonny Rollins, Was (Not Was), Leonard Cohen I did a silly ghost story a long time ago with Jay Leno in Philadelphia prior to his getting the Tonight Show."

Did you really try to teach Linda Blair how to speak backwards for the movie The Exorcist?

"I actually did try to do that even though I thought it was a silly thing to do. That was one of Bill Blatty's ideas. He thought it would be pretty profound to have backwards speech. I was teaching her how to say 'tea-sloob', which when it's played frontwards is 'bullshit'. I told Bill Friedkin, 'Ya know man, ya just play this tape backwards and nobody would know!'"

During the late '50s, when horror movie hosts were becoming popular, you found your own niche on television, reading spooky stories and poems written by classic writers. Was this before you tried to ad-lib?

"Well, I memorized a lot. I was thinking back at that show I did called 'Faces In the Window' where I would read late at night. I'd read de Maupassant, 'Rats In the Wall' by H.P. Lovecraft, very dramatic, horrifying Edgar Allan Poe things, and Balzac, who was a brilliant writer. He was a guy in the Renaissance, the Evil Times. He sort of believed that behind every great fortune, there's a crime. The man was very perceptive. But at any rate, I came on doing this show and I'd read these things and think, oh god, this is tremendous! It went on for a year and a half. But I found out years later that kids just passing through puberty would crowd around in the dark and watch me do these things so they would get scared and hug each other. It was a courting overture that I was a partner to, not realizing it. What can ya do"

Do you still do your syndicated radio show for NPR?

"Yeah, now and then. I have about 300 half-hours of it so some of them are played over."

What's the difference between your one show "Word Jazz" and the other, "Now, Nordine"?

"The 'Word Jazz' shows, all the music is original. The 'Now, Nordine' is word jazz also, but the only difference is I used to play games with records and sound effects. It was partly music, a little wilder. For instance, I would play a record of someone teaching someone how to use a stethoscope. While that was on, I'd be talking about how difficult it is to really m-o-v-e around inside your heart, and what sort of stance you should take in order to really get close to someone. I did some of those shows under the influence of a six pack of beer. Some of the shows are outrageously strange!"

Let's talk about your other "occupation." How much creative freedom does a company grant you when partaking in the making of a commercial?

"It depends on the agency and the client. Sometimes it's absolute: 'Do what you want and just mention the product.'"

Your adventurous ideas for commercials are bound to have people start requesting them to be aired more frequently than when they're allowed, which of course can become a problem for the networks. Originally, didn't your series of radio ads about COLORS for the Fuller Paint Company become a bit too popular with the public?

"Yeah, that was some thirty-one years ago and now people are asking, 'Wow, when did you do this?' 'Oh, just the other day.' A book of COLORS is coming out on Harcourt/Brace in the spring of 1999. It'll be called 'Ken Nordine's COLORS,' based on the COLORS CD. The editor of Harcourt/Brace found out about me through this illustrator from Auckland, who is doing the illustrations."

What other recent promotional projects have you finished or are in the works?

"I did something for [techno label] Moonshine Records which is on the charts. They asked, 'Do you mind if we tell people how old you are?' So I wrote a whole thing about age. What I did was 'Flibberty Jib On the Bipperty Bop.' [Which also appeared in a Levi's commercial] I figured that would be something for them to hear. I also did 'Faces In the Jazzamatazz', only another version of it [Original versions of both can be found on Nordine's The Best of Word Jazz, Vol. 1, Rhino Records]. Actually a group called Moloko in England did a cassette of what they want to do with me."

What is your wife's name, and how did she get so lucky snagging you?

"Beryl Vaughan. Really, I'm the lucky one to have her. She was a very fine actress. She worked on The Lone Ranger when it started out in Hollywood. She was with Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant. She hasn't done anything as an actress since the time we got married. But she would have been fabulous if I hadn't stolen her away from the silver screen and saved her from all that silliness. She actually taught me how to read. She really knows how to inflect a line."

You've lived in the city of Chicago practically all your life, right?

"Yeah, in a big old house. There's a lot happening in my neighborhood. It has gone up and down and down and up and nobody knows I'm here with all my secret alarms that go off. We're in a fortress. But every now and then there's a guy who plays the drums when he gets off his gig, like at four-thirty in the morning. I'd be, 'Oh Christ!' So I finally heard him again and I said, 'This is it. I'm gonna call 911!' But then I felt bad, you know, a musician. I didn't want to hurt his feelings but he was a bad drummer really. Then I listened for a moment before I called and I said, 'Wait a minute. He's playing beautifully. That's the best drumming I've ever heard!' And I got hung up on listening to him 'til I realized that I was hearing the rain on the air conditioner."

I have a hunch you live a very quiet lifestyle nowadays.

"Yes, I live a rather insular life. In fact, I'm surprised when the phone rings."