Reggie Watts (pictured), the one-man band from "Comedy Bang Bang," has moved on to become a bonafide bandleader on CBS' "The Late Late Show"; L.A. Times art critic Christopher Knight discusses the work of the late Chris Burden, who has two singular installations at the L.A. County Museum of Art.
'Late Late Show' bandleader Reggie Watts brings improv, chaos to 'crisp' late show model
Reggie Watts is a musician with a strong connection to the comedy world, creating a name for himself with his vocal looping. He served on IFC TV show "Comedy Bang Bang's" as the show's sidekick and one-man band, and now he's the leader of an actual band on James Corden's "Late Late Show." He also appears in "Pitch Perfect 2."
Watts attended Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle and was inspired by one of his teachers who would use effects pedals to build up music into a big soundscape.
"I'd been doing mouth-percussion melody stuff all my life, and then when I went to Seattle I ran into some musicians that were using a Boomerang pedal. One of the first kind of pretty successful, fairly powerful looping devices," Watts says.
Reggie Watts performing "I Just Want To"
Watts was in several different bands before becoming known as a solo act. One of them, Micron 7, had a great deal of potential and Watts says they could have been something big, but the personal dynamics didn't work.
"I had the classic — I'm glad I experienced it, but at the time it was pretty stressful — a classic band fight, like in the rehearsal room. Like, the singer jumping over the drum kit to start attacking the drummer, and the drummer egging her on, and then them getting into a fight, and then me like holding back her, and the drummer, and she's telling me to let go or she's going to hit me, and everyone's yelling and stuff."
That was the end of Micron 7.
Watts eventually developed a relationship with comedian Scott Aukerman, which sparked several of his later projects.
"I met Scott in the early days when I was coming over to L.A. and was doing stuff at UCB," Watts says. "I would stay and watch his programming, and I always thought he was really brilliant, and then he asked me to do the show, and then he asked me to do a theme for the podcast."
They kept in touch through the show changing names to "Comedy Bang Bang," and later Watts was approached by IFC for some other ideas. Nothing happened, but when they were looking at turning Aukerman's show into a TV show, they thought Watts would be a natural addition.
He was already planning to leave the show when he was approached to be the band leader for James Corden's "Late Late Show." Watts had been written out and planned to pursue his own projects when he heard that Corden wanted to meet with him.
"I didn't even know who James Corden was. I sat down with him in a hotel and he told me about the show. And I was like, I don't know," Watts says. "I thought of it as bad timing. I was like, I'm ready to go full Han Solo here and what is this? Why? Why now?"
Watts consulted with friends, other comedians (including Sarah Silverman) and other members of his team.
"My agents were like, 'This'll be a really good opportunity!' Everybody was like, 'It's gonna be a great opportunity!'"
The deciding vote: Watts's mom.
"My mother said, as she always does — 'Well, you don't know unless you try.' So I was like, OK, fine. I thought, well, [Los Angeles] is a little closer to Montana where my mom lives [than New York City]. So, maybe that could be cool? Maybe I could get in shape? Maybe I could... I don't know. I felt like maybe I could increase the health lifestyle and buy an ecological car."
As part of pursuing his L.A. dreams, Watts told "The Late Late Show" what he wanted in order to be a part of it.
"I just said, you know, I'm an improviser, I love improvising, I don't like preparing, I don't like knowing about stuff too much in advance. I want to pick my band, I want to be able to have that band improvise on the show live — or at least learn things just before the show happens."
Beyond the music, Watts had a wardrobe demand: that he could wear whatever he wants.
"I look at all the [late night] bands, and they're just all very crisp. And I don't like that — it's gross to me."
Watts was told that he was welcome to contribute ideas, and that while the show would have the "scaffolding" of a traditional show, they wanted to do something different.
"They were using all the right language," Watts says. What they told him that closed the deal: "'You can roll in at 2 o'clock, and you can leave by 6 p.m.' And I'm like, 'Absolutely.' That was actually part of the reason why I left 'Comedy Bang Bang,' was the hours. It was like 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., and it was just crazy."
Sure, he was hired for his musical skills, but Watts says he thinks the show also wanted him to bring some chaos. While the show is starting out in a more traditional way, Watts says that, over time, "we're going to see if they start messing with that structure."
One of Watts's signature bits on the new show is asking guests a random question.
Reggie Watts question for Tom Hanks
The questions are completely improvised, Watts says.
"It freaks me out too when I'm about to ask the question, because sometimes I'm comfortable and I know who I want to ask, and other times he's saying 'Reggie, do you have a question?' And I'm like, 'I have no question.' And I'm pointing at the drummer for the drum roll, the drum roll happens, and then it stops, and I'm like, 'Do you like apples?'"
Reggie Watts question for Arnold Schwarzenegger
There were some concerns with CBS about music licensing, but Watts says that's cool because he wanted to play original music.
"I told them, I don't want to play covers. It's way easier to come up with music than to learn a cover. So that's great, and we just kind of stockpile stuff. And we just name them in the moment."
Watts had the chance to build a dream band for the show.
Reggie Watts introducing the Late Late Show band
His first pick was keyboard player Steve Scalfati, who was an expert improviser and could produce anything.
"Anything that you would want, he can reverse engineer it and make it sound exactly [the same]. So I knew that he was a natural first choice that would get rid of some of the burden for pre-production stuff."
Next came guitarist Tim Young.
"Tim Young is one of the most brilliant musicians I've ever met. He's an incredible guitar player, genius, photographic memory, and a great natural kind of... he's like the AD. He kind of can band lead the band when I'm facing forward, he can organize stuff."
Next came drummer Guillermo Brown, who Watts says he connected with over them both being only children. The last member, bass player Hagar Ben-Ari, was a recommendation from Jack White's bass player. Ben-Ari has a "razor-fast ear," Watts says.
"Really, it was about overqualified musicians with incredible ears and creativity. So I wanted, like if the show needed a certain level of music, I wanted to exceed that by 200 percent so that it would reduce the workload for anything that was asked of us," Watts says.
Watts says that his favorite part of moving to L.A. has been driving, along with easy access to healthy food options. But he does miss New York.
"What I miss about New York is the density of things happening, and there's so much that can happen in one day in New York, whereas on the West Coast, generally you've got to choose like two or three things. That's kind of your max."
Watts's girlfriend still lives in New York — he says she can fit a lot more in.
"She'll do like seven things in one day. It's just impossible to do that here in L.A., unless everything happens to be in your neighborhood."
You can see how well Watts is acclimating to his new life weeknights at 12:35 a.m. on CBS.
Chris Burden: Remembering the LA artist who made those street lamps outside LACMA and much more
If you’ve visited the Los Angeles County Museum of Art anytime in the past seven years, you’ve surely noticed “Urban Light," the installation of 202 street lamps along Wilshire Boulevard that now marks the museum’s entry plaza.
That work was created by L.A. artist Chris Burden. He started his career in the early 1970s making edgy, controversial performance art, but he gradually transitioned to sculptural works that took conceptual ideas and turned them into popular public art attractions.
Burden died this weekend at the age of 69 from complications of melanoma. His career was followed closely by L.A. Times art critic Christopher Knight, who joined us on the Frame to talk about Burden's roots in dangerous body work, his controversial "Other Vietnam Memorial" and the reasons why Burden's work never resonated on the East Coast like it did out west.
Interview Highlights:
Let's talk about Chris Burden's place in both the national, international and local arts scene. Where would you put him?
Paul Schimmel, who was the chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art for a long time and knew the artist well, said something I thought was really apt: "Chris may well have been the last authentic, avant-garde artist." The whole idea of an avant-garde has pretty much disappeared since it's been completely absorbed into mainstream culture, and in some respects that's the case with Burden's work.
"Urban Light" has become a sort of icon of the city, but even those people who adore that public sculpture have a great deal of difficulty wrapping their heads around Burden's performance work from the '70s, which remains outside the realm of "acceptability" given the kinds of often-dangerous performances he executed. People scratch their heads and wonder, Why on earth would someone do that?
Let's talk a little bit about his body works, many of which had a kind of sadomasochistic bent. Chris Burden had himself shot, he nailed himself to a Volkswagen, he set himself on fire and he was nearly electrocuted. What was the importance of those kinds of works, using his body as part of the canvas on which he was constructing his art?
For "Shoot," which was the first notorious body performance that he did in 1971, he had a friend of his with a rifle stand about 15 feet away from him and shoot him in the arm. Obviously people asked why he was doing such a crazy thing, and Chris said he did it because he wanted to know what it was like.
If you think about that for a minute, he did it in the context of a society that was being ripped apart by its participation in Vietnam, but the experience of carnage and death and destruction was something that we watched on television — it was divorced from us. And Chris wanted to move it out of the realm of mediated experience back into the body. Oddly enough, a lot of Chris's performance work has as its subject the mediation of experience in the modern world.
I think there's a conceptual component from the start of Chris's work, and it's one reason that he's such a significant figure: he was able to take it from performance work and infuse it into objects. He went from doing performances to making what's commonly called "performance sculpture," and the objects that he made are things to be manipulated, used or operated by the artist, his surrogates or the audience.
One reason "Urban Light" is so popular is that you can go there any time of day and kids are climbing on it, having their pictures taken, wedding photographs are shot there — it becomes embedded in the viewers' body and the viewers' experience.
Were you able to spend any time with Chris Burden in his studio or when he was working?
I first met him in the late 1980s, oddly enough not in Los Angeles but in Vienna, Austria, where he was participating in an exhibition. I was asked if I would film an interview with him, which I was happy to do, but I was also slightly terrified because of the reputation from all of those early performances.
Including one in which he holds a knife to somebody interviewing him for TV.
[laughs] Exactly. "TV Hijack," that piece is called. And when I sat down with him, I found a man who was — I mean he's a relatively short, stocky, compact, almost like a bulldog. But he was focused, he was thoughtful, and he was smart as a whip. I was a bit hungover from having been at a party the night before, and he kept me on track in the interview. I thought, This is a guy who knows exactly what he's doing and what he's about.
Did the rest of the nation understand his work? His first major show in New York didn't happen until 2013 at the New Museum, and MoMA and the Guggenheim never featured him prominently. Was there an East Coast bias against his work?
I don't know whether "bias" is the word, but there was certainly an East Coast misunderstanding of Chris's work, and I think there are pretty much two reasons for that. The bulk of his performances were done in Southern California and a few other places around the country, but the kind of sculptures that he subsequently made were cumbersome, expensive to move, and difficult, and New York's museums couldn't deal with them, so he was pretty much a cipher in New York.
I first recognized that in 1991, when he was commissioned to do a piece for a show at the Museum of Modern Art, a piece called "The Other Vietnam Memorial." It was an absolutely brilliant and terrifying sculpture that commemorates not the American war dead, but the Vietnamese war dead.
And critics in New York eviscerated it — they absolutely hated it, they completely misunderstood it, they had no idea what it was about, they didn't understand Chris's history, the reviews were withering, and I was stunned, because the piece is absolutely brilliant.
This is a counterpoint to Maya Lin's "Vietnam Veterans Memorial," where Chris Burden created these plates which had 3 million names that he had representing the Vietnamese dead from the war.
Exactly. It's a giant machine — it's this huge copper-plated rolodex of names, many of them computer generated because we don't know the actual names of all the people who died in Southeast Asia during the war. In some respects it's the opposite of Maya Lin's great Vietnam Memorial, which is all about providing a catharsis, as Chris's work did anything but create a catharsis. It was received with a good deal of hostility.
Go inside Chris Burden's kinetic sculpture 'Metropolis II'
Chris Burden's sculpture at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, "Metropolis II," is one giant sensory overload — bright cars whiz past on an oversized Hot Wheels track in a never-ending loop, powered by conveyor belts that create a constant hum of electricity. The whole thing's so loud and kinetic you can actually feel its energy in the room. And if all that comes from standing outside the sculpture, imagine what it's like standing inside the bustling "city."
Alison Walker was one of Burden's studio assistants who helped assemble "Metropolis II." She says it took a team of eight people "five and a half years...full-time" to build the sculpture, which she characterizes as "a machine." Some of the ingredients of that machine: 96 unique cars, three conveyor systems, and two ramps that are approximately 12 feet high.
But that machine also needs a human element at its center, and now that element is Walker. To work safely inside the controlled chaos of "Metropolis II," she needs safety glasses — "there are a lot of sharp, pointy metal objects inside there" — and earplugs. While she can cut down on some of the noise from the sculpture, she can't drown it all out: "Sound is a way to indicate if there's a problem. If a train is derailed, it will make noise, and I need to be able to hear that."
Walker also has a specific outfit for her job inside the city: "I wear a one-piece jumpsuit so I don't have any fringes that can get snagged, and I don't have to worry about exposing my back when I bend over to pick up a car. I wear the same thing to work everytime I'm going to operate the sculpture for the public."
Operating the sculpture doesn't simply require the proper wardrobe and accessories; it requires a lot of standing, too. Walker says: "A lot of people ask, 'How come there isn't a chair inside there? Why can't you sit down?'" She confesses she had something to do about that decision: "There was a debate in the studio when we were building the sculpture, and I was in the camp that voted against a chair. And now I'm the person running the sculpture 12 hours a weekend. But I still agree — no chair."
Walker argues: "I need to be up and moving and be able to worm in somewhere to fix a problem. But at the end of the day, after having ran it for four hours, it's a big relief when it goes quiet."
However, some people never quite want the show to end, and sometimes, Walker says: "The patrons boo when I turn it off, and I think, If they only knew what it was like to stand inside here, they would be cheering." But then she laughs as she counters: "A lot of times patrons clap, so that's nice. I feel important."