After almost 40 years as front man of the band T.S.O.L., Jack Grisham retains his punk spirit; "The Encounter" is Simon McBurney's tour de force about an explorer of the Amazon jungle; 'Finding Oscar' looks at fallout from Guatemala's civil war.
TSOL frontman Jack Grisham: Once a punk, always a punk
The punk band True Sounds of Liberty, better known as TSOL, has been around for nearly 40 years.
They’ve broken up and reformed a few times, but always with frontman Jack Grisham at the helm. TSOL’s first incarnation was as Vicious Circle, a short-lived, but memorable punk band that often left the stage — and members of the audience — covered in blood.
It’s been a long time since Grisham’s crazy days as a youthful punk rocker, but he says those rebellious impulses will never go away.
When he stopped by The Frame, Grisham told us how he was surprised when Goldenvoice founder Paul Tollett asked his band to play Coachella this year.
Interview highlights:
On his friendship with Goldenvoice's Paul Tollett and getting to play Coachella:
He invited me and my family out to Desert Trip and we had a nice time together. Then I kind of teased him. I said, "Hey, don't you think it's time for us to play Coachella?" He wrote back and said, "That's funny. I was going to send you an offer." So it's really nice. We actually played the first show that Goldenvoice ever did in Santa Barbara, back in 1982 or '81. It's funny because Paul came up to my wife and he said, "I still remember his mother's phone number" — because they had to call my mother's house to get a hold of me.
On punk rock and violence:
You get a lot of anger from these kids. I'm not a psychologist ... although, I am a hypnotherapist. There was just a lot going on. There were a lot of attacks from outside. The guys that liked punk rock at the time, they looked weird. I had friends going, What are you into? What is this punk rock? They don't understand and people would be getting attacked just for looking strange. So a lot of the guys I hung out with were big guys. We fought back. So that's where a lot of the violence came to. It was directed outside of our group, not necessarily inside.
On his 2003 run for California governor:
I ran to talk about health care, which at the time wasn't a big issue. Now it is. But at the time, it was really about health care. I got injured and I wasn't making enough money where I could afford anything. But I was basically making too much money to get help. I was told, If you leave your wife and kid — if you were divorced — we could help you. I just thought it was so ridiculous. So when they asked me to run, I said, I'm not going to talk about punk rock. I'm not going to be some crazy candidate with a mohawk, but I'd be glad to go on and talk about health care. So that's what I did. I think it was [someone from] either CNN or FOX who said, Mr. Grisham, you're the only one of these candidates that even sounds like he knows what he's talking about. I got offered a couple jobs out of it.
On the kinds of messages he'd like to be spreading:
Let's be realistic: anarchy is not going to work. We struggle enough with social democracy around here, let alone anarchists. We can't take care of ourselves. So there's a need for government and it's like, How do we work this out? How do we care about our people? This is a real question I want to ask: Who's got the vision to see beyond where we are right now? Where's the world going, where's our species going? What's the real wealth in this world? It's us! So why aren't we mining the real wealth in this world? Why don't we back education? I'm for free tuition, but I think they should also have to serve maybe a year in social services for the government. Nothing is completely free. I have people say, How can you be a liberal and a conservative at the same time? And you can. I believe you can.
On how the band has evolved:
I think what's remained true is the attitude. That's the only thing that can constantly remain true. When I grew up, punk rock was supposedly about being inventive and being inclusive. This was a thing where sexes were equal, there was no gay, there was no straight — at least this is the message I got: Always challenge. Think about what's been offered to you. Think about what's been said to you. Challenge yourself. Push yourself. Try new things. Be open-minded. Question everything. That for me has remained the same. Maybe other people got a different message. The music's changed a ton of times since then.
On the changing styles of T.S.O.L.'s music:
Production has gotten more grand. Maybe it's gotten a little slicker. When I first started playing music, I had no idea what was going on. The first band I was in — we only used two strings on the guitar because we didn't know how to use the other four. It was just, La la la / neighbors suck! That's how it started. If anything, you're going to learn. Maybe you listen to The Beatles. Maybe you start moving into a little jazz or Neil Young. Like, How does somebody put a line together? How do they put a phrase together? What is it to write a great pop song? What is that? You really just start studying and experimenting.
On touring and recording:
It puts Fruit Loops on the kids' table. A lot of times, I tell people I tour because I need to pay the bills. That's the bottom line. That's the truth of it. I don't want to be a rock star. Helmut Newton said, I love having f*** you money! If I had f*** you money and somebody said, I want you to tour this summer, I'd say, f*** you! They'd never see me again. Most of the stuff I do is because I have to pay the bills. So now, you're coming to the point where you want to create the coolest record possible and you don't want to cater to anyone — and I refuse to cater and I'm not going to do something just because they think that's how the sound is. Then you've got to get out and tour and back that up. Hopefully you don't have to think about paying the bills when you're writing the music. The minute after that, I'm done. The minute it's recorded and laid down ... I'm on to the next project.
Maintaining a punk sensibility as he gets older:
I wish I couldn't maintain it, to be honest with you. I've told people before, my biggest regret was that I didn't stay in school, go to a great college, be in a fraternity and be in sports. I never could. I wanted to with all my heart. I've been trying to go straight since third grade. There's just something in me that's not right.
Here's a story for you: I was with my daughter one time and at the time — she's 29 now — she was going through this punk rock, anarchy business about the government. She was at all these protests and whatever. So I'm speeding and I have my kids in the car and I get red lighted about a mile from my house by the police. I just decide, I'm going home. I'm not going to pull over. So this shows the difference between youth and now, as an adult, after getting into it with them in front of the house — luckily they didn't take me down for [resisting] and writing me up for everything. After I calmed down I realized I owed them an apology. A couple of weeks later, I saw the police officer sitting a mile from my house. I was with my ex-wife and said, "Hey, I've got to go in." I started walking toward him and he got up and covered his pistol. He sees me and goes, "Hang on right there!" I walked up to him and said, "Hey, it's not like that. I just wanted to apologize. You're out here just doing your job. I had no right to treat you the way that I treated you and I hope that you can forgive what I did."
I started to walk away and he goes, "Hang on a minute, man." He's actually misty-eyed and he said to me, "That's the first time in 20 years that anyone has ever apologized to me." So it's still in my heart to act like this, but then I know how to turn around and amend it.
'Finding Oscar' documentary explores US role in Guatemala's civil war
In the small Guatemalan village of Dos Erres in 1982, 250 people were killed by government soldiers.
The documentary, "Finding Oscar," traces the story of one of the few survivors who didn't even know his own history until recently. It also explores the U.S. government's role in the Guatemalan civil war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996.
Nearly 30 years after the massacre, a team sets out to uncover the truth of what happened at Dos Erres and to find a missing boy named Oscar:
from
on Vimeo.
"Finding Oscar," which opens in L.A. on April 21, was co-written, directed and produced by Ryan Suffern. The Frame's John Horn spoke with Suffern last September at the Telluride Film Festival.
To hear the full interview, click the blue player above.
How the one-man play 'The Encounter' uses sound to tell its story
Not far from Lima, in the snow-capped Andes Mountains of southern Peru, is a small body of water called Laguna McIntyre. It got its name in 1971, when a National Geographic photographer named Loren McIntyre discovered this true source of the Amazon River.
Now, a play called "The Encounter" — which runs through Apr. 16 at The Wallis in Beverly Hills — tells the story of McIntyre and a trip he took just a few years prior to his discovery. He got dangerously lost in the depths of the rain forest, but was found and saved by a mystical tribe.
The show is equally part-theater, part-radio program, part-mind trip. But as a whole, it adds up to Simon McBurney’s one-man tour de force that he devised with his London theatre company, Complicité. The story is straight-forward — Western man gets lost in an unknown land in a journey gone awry. But it’s how McBurney pulls it off that’s far more complicated and beautiful.
"I tend to make things that ask questions, rather than create answers to things," McBurney says. "So this piece is about somebody getting lost. But, parallel to lots of people, I feel lost in the world. So the sense of being lost is, of course, a metaphor."
When you see and hear McBurney, you know who he is — a prolific actor of stage and screen. Among several blockbuster film appearances, "Harry Potter" fans will instantly recognize his deep, rich voice as that of the loyal but grumpy house-elf, Kreacher.
And that voice will stay in your head for at least two hours, and probably well beyond. After all, that’s how the show is designed — he’s trying to burrow into your conscious mind by entering through your ears.
https://a.scpr.org/i/b79dafa38bef5bd89f476738da3fb472/155870-six.jpg
(Every seat at "The Encounter" comes with a pair of headphones. Marcos Najera/KPCC)
When you enter the theater at The Wallis, you find a set of black Sennheiser earphones on your chair. And from there, McBurney chronicles the 1969 journey of photojournalist Loren McIntyre, and his unexpected "encounter" with a rain forest tribe called the Mayoruna. He got lost while trying to find the source of the Amazon River. Instead, he wound up trying to learn about the mysterious tribe through his camera lens.
"He’s taking something from these people. He’s taking photographs," McBurney says. "It is an act of colonial appropriation, and some people react to the show as, ‘Oh, this is just another white man going into the jungle' — which it is, but the whole audience is made to go on that journey, because the whole audience is in headphones."
As the show starts, McBurney's voice playfully crossfades as he teases: "If I were to breathe in your ear like this … your brain would tell you I was really breathing in your ear." And then your ear actually feels hot. In this fast, simple demonstration, the audience "learns" how the story will be sent from the stage and received out in the house.
The play is based on a 1991 book about McIntyre called "Amazon Beaming," by author Petru Popescu, a resident of Beverly Hills.
"He was a fantastic man to know," Popescu muses.
He spent countless hours interviewing McIntyre about his time in the jungle. They spoke endlessly, for a year — on the phone, through letters, and occasionally at the photographer’s Virginia home.
"Everything was connected to his trips. Everything evoked what he lived," Popescu recalls. "His living space duplicated the jungle, in a sense. There was a master bedroom in the house in Arlington, but McIntyre slept in a hammock. And he had as pets two Capucine monkeys, and they were obviously like two children who needed care! The animals reacted when he appeared, exactly like two infants."
Perhaps in that same spirit of communicating in ways beyond the English language, McIntyre believed his time with the Mayoruna people taught him to speak telepathically with the tribal leader, through a shared consciousness — that’s the "beaming" referenced in Popescu’s book title. McIntyre died in 2003, but Popescu says he still holds on to one takeaway in particular:
"The thing that we talked about, even though it doesn’t appear in the book per se, was courage. I was absolutely fascinated with the fact that he was hanging up his hammock in the tree and would wake up eye-to-eye with a python snake or something like that. I mean, he survived a million plane crashes. He had a very clear sense that you had to have courage to do what you have decided to do."
To re-enact McIntyre’s encounter with the Mayoruna people on-stage, McBurney works as both actor and Foley artist. His only visible castmates are microphones, water bottles and ribbons of old VHS tape. But up in the booth, sound engineer Amir Sherhan creates live soundscapes along with his partner, Laura Hammod. Amir says they are almost like DJs.
https://a.scpr.org/i/1a3e4a26e8b9f69c0d4f5265a5f5ad86/155858-six.jpg
(Amir Sherhan creates and mixes live soundscapes during a performance of "The Encounter." Marcos Najera/KPCC)
"It’s all kind of down to timing," explains Sherhan, "because sometimes you have to overdub a sentence and layer onto each other. You are mixing as you’re recording. So there is a certain musical element to it."
The stage looks like a recording studio, in a way. That’s a nod to McBurney’s time doing research about sound for the show by locking himself in a room that blocks out every bit of sound from the outside world.
"That’s an anechoic chamber — a room without echoes used to measure sound," McBurney says. "And on all six sides of this cube is what you see on the back wall of this theater. As soon as they lock you inside — behind this incredible door that they close behind you so no sound can get in, and turn off the lights, and I’m sitting there in darkness — very quickly what you hear is your own breath, you hear your own heartbeat. And then you start to hear the movement of fluids in your head. The most fascinating thing I heard was when I left the chamber and heard everything outside. It’s like a tsunami of sound I never realized was there. And this of course is at the heart of the show. Because the brain selects what it wants to hear, then the stories it forms, and then you make sense of the world. If that story produced is only one vision of the world, then it’s a little problematic."
And right when you discover your headphones are overflowing with McBurney’s rich layers of story and sounds from the Amazon, all of a sudden, out pops the audio of one of the play’s most delightful creatures.
"Well, he brought it home [and] I was like, Why is this head in our house?," says McBurney’s sweet seven-year-old daughter, Noma.
She is describing "Fritz"— a binaural microphone that sits on-stage during the show and resembles a human head. It is lovingly named after the German audio company founder, Fritz Sennheiser. "Fritz" basically has two "ears" — rather, two microphones that can capture sound with the same true range as a left and right ear. For Noma, it was funny to barge in on her father rehearsing parts of the show in the middle of the night with Fritz. But soon, Noma started asking more and more questions about Loren McIntyre. Now, she’s part of the show.
McBurney says: "The point is that Noma is able to ask questions that, coming from other people, might be a little self-conscious. Like, What is he looking for? Why is he there? Why is this man in the jungle? What’s he doing there? — when, in a sense, he really shouldn’t be there."
"My favorite part of the play was at the end," says McBurney’s poised and charming daughter. "Because it all really ended well and I really understood as it all came it to my head."
If the ideas from the stage pop into the heads of audience members as easily as they do for his daughter, McBurney says that’s the whole idea:
"I’m telling a story about a man to whom this happened. It’s entirely up to you what you make of it. And what happens in the theater is this odd event which, in the end, is beyond words. You might hear some lovely words from Shakespeare — but Shakespeare himself was aware of the added power of the audience imagination when he says at the beginning of Henry IV: 'I want you to imagine this wooden [stage] as the fields of France.' He’s asking for the audience to make a leap of imagination which is beyond words. It’s appealing to something within us."