"I was really into them for a long time in the 70s and it coincided with early drug influences and when I jumped from the kind of psychedelia that the Beatles put forth to kind of what was happening in our own backyard on the West Coast with the Airplane and the Dead and Quicksilver.. The Beatles stopped so I never got the chance to see them, but the Dead came around a lot and so you got to see those bands. The Grateful Dead delved really deep into acoustic music, that was really important, and later their famous electric records, but Anthem of the Sun was in their early period. One of the things I keep talking about with my new record Electric Trim is that it was really created in the studio and I keep mentioning Dark Side of The Moon or Pet Sounds or Revolver or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band when I should be referencing Anthem of the Sun Anthem of the Sun was the kind of record that they were trying to construct in a studio. It’s a studio experience of a live concert experience, so they were mixing all this stuff they recorded in all the studio with all these different live takes, slowing things down and speeding things up and thinking of all these trippy aspects of the way the sound exists in stereo space. A couple of those guys, especially Phil Lesh trained alongside Steve Reich at school and studied Luciano Berio and all this 20th century modernist stuff, so he was aware of where music was going on that level and they were just at a cross roads where they weren’t sure they wanted to be a straight ahead rock band. They had moments of being a rock dance band and then they had other aspirations. I love listening to Anthem of the Sun because it may not be perfect, or achieved what they really wanted, but it’s one of those records that set its sights really high and whether or not it got all the way there it achieved something really unique. There’s not many records that sound like that, not just the fact they were splicing together live tapes from 30 different gigs, it was kind of a ridiculous stoned or drugged task from the beginning but they threw their back against the wheel, and tried to do it. If you ever listen to that record with headphones it’s so rich. I was really into them for a long time but once New York City punk and all that stuff happened I kind of dropped it like a hot potato and went onto other stuff and it was only in the last 7 or 8 years that I’ve come back to my appreciation of it through a number of different avenues. I was involved a couple of years ago with this record that this group The National put together called Day of the Dead where they covered 60 songs or something and they asked me to cover ‘Mountains of the Moon’. There were a couple of good Dead songs I was listening to at the time because they related to a song I was doing for my record with The Dust – Last Night on Earth and when I went to record with them they played me a lot of the songs they were working on and whether you like 30 minute noodling electric guitar solos or not you can put that aside and say the thing that impressed me about what they were doing was how great their song writing was. Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter especially, wrote a lot of amazing songs together and that’s what really struck me – that’s why I liked these guys way back when because they had really great songs. Their songs are like the 60s era American songbook. And it was also in this period where I was thinking that I wanted a lyrical collaborator and so the idea of Hunter’s role with Garcia in that band especially or like when Dylan turned to either Robert Hunter or Jacques Levy for inspiration when he was working on Desire Dylan doesn’t need a lyrical collaborator - why’s he working with outside lyricists? And yet at some point he thought “I need someone else to shift the viewpoint”. So that’s what inspired me to ask Jonathan Lethem to work on Electric Trim. We’d known each other for a long time and I just felt like this was a good time to get someone else’s input, put another voice in the mix. Every single aspect of the record, words, lyrics, tunes didn’t have to spring from me. Music can be very collaborative and I’ve kind of come up in a very collaborative situation with Sonic Youth for so many years – every song was listed as all four of us writing it, ‘cos that’s ultimately what happened. In Sonic Youth, it was only a very rare occasion where one of us came in and said, “Hey I’ve got a new song this is how it goes…”

"Blind Joe Death was kind of John Fahey’s alter ego. He wanted to put out records under a different name and pretend he was an old obscure bluesman. He was obsessed with collecting these old obscure records that informed his American primitive style and he went on these quests down South to look for old 78 records with a couple of friends of his. Eventually they found this artist Skip James and rejuvenated his career. James wasn’t in music at all any more and he was someone they revered. Fahey was steeped in this whole mythology of his early period of these recording heroes that weren’t on television, weren’t on the magazines and you only saw them if you happened to be in Mississippi where they lived or the rare places they travelled to and I think he really longed to be one of those guys. So when Fahey started being serious about making his records his idea was “I’m going to make this record, I’m going to call it Blind Joe Death” and this was a totally obscure idea, “I’m going to slip it into bins at record shops and at thrift stores and people will find it and ten or fifteen years from now they’ll say I wonder what happened to Blind Joe Death?” It’s an obscure task from the very beginning, it’s not like he’s shooting for fame and fortune and Top Of The Pops, it’s almost the opposite of that. He’s shooting for obscurity, for this blissful obscurity that he was relating to. Self-mythologizing but in a way that’s so deep down. It’s not self-mythologizing like whoever does that these days, like Nick Cave or whoever, like somebody who is doing it on a big scale where a lot of people are reading about it, this is like Fahey’s self-mythologizing himself out of existence almost, hoping that 20 years later 5 people will have this record in their collection, ‘cos that’s the kind of guy he was, a guy that would make a record only 5 other people would have. The original Blind Joe Death was released on only 100 copies and Fahey was developing this style that wasn’t beholden to the pop music of the day or anything like that. He was obviously listening to a lot of different stuff but he was formulating this thing that was really his own basically. It proved really influential to a certain class of people, certainly everybody that was involved in either folk music, or later on folk turning into pop music, or a lot of the people from Sonic Youth’s generation that kind of went back to it. Fahey was really an antecedent in a way because he was playing in open tunings and playing a lot of stuff that didn’t fit any easy categorisation. Then later on he was doing tape manipulated pieces and adding sounds he recorded from tapes into his acoustic finger-picking stuff and obviously much later he was playing this really weirdo electro distorted music and ploughing his own row in a sense. I came across him really early for a strange reason and it was for another record that I was going to put on the list, which was a record by Leo Kottke that Fahey put out. Leo Kottke is a much more popular person in the same vein as John Fahey and his early records were on Fahey’s label and he rose to quite a bit more popularity. He’s mostly an instrumental guitar player. He’s a lightning fast, super technical finger-picker with a lot of open tunings and his first record was called Six And Twelve String Guitar – it’s all instrumentals and it was one of the very first records on Fahey’s Takoma label. Somehow I came into that record very early, it’s got a weird black and white woodcut on the cover with an armadillo or something and it’s an amazing record. And after that record I started getting interested in this label Takoma and Fahey’s records were the next ones I found on it and then I realised that it was basically Fahey’s. Then later, especially when Jim O’Rourke was in Sonic Youth, because he was so tied in with Fahey, we got even more into Fahey at that point. Fahey was also making these primitive artworks. We used a piece of his on the front cover of Sonic Youth’s The Eternal and I collected a bunch of stuff. A couple of years before he died I managed to do a short tour with him, just a duo tour where we were both playing solo sets and we travelled around in a car for a week or so and he was making all these drawings on the road and I managed to get a couple off him. I’ve got a lot of his work at this point. He just was a very singular character and I think that’s what makes his music so beautiful that he just had his own agenda. He wasn’t kow-towing to the mores of the day or what people expected of their recording artist. He played the game for a little while and then said “oh fuck it”, got fat and weird and just kept doing his thing."