ADRIAN BELEW: SETTING FREE THE BEARS

CREEM SHOWCASE

Moira McCormick

Adrian Belew has distinct ideas about this business of being an artist, and there’s nothing grandiose about them. On the contrary, this supremely normal guy doesn’t see why the creative process can’t be just as much a part of the daily routine as brushing your teeth. He’s got some pretty formidable role models, too, in that respect. “Picasso, Miro, would just get up every day,” Belew describes, “have their coffee, go to work on their art, stop and have dinner with their wife, and then go back to work. I’ve always admired that, and just decided that that’s what I want—to find what the art is in what I do, and do it every day, right here at home.”

Belew’s actually phoning from a spot a couple hundred miles from his southern Illinois home, on this unnaturally chilly May day. He’s holed up in Royal Recorders in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, working with his new band, the Bears, on a demo for CBS Records. The cheerily iconoclastic Belew, whose wildly inventive guitar work has added strange and wondrous dimensions to the music of Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson, King Crimson, David Bowie, and Frank Zappa, has found with the Bears his most fulfilling ensemble setup ever. Even if CBS doesn’t bite (and they’d be nuts not to), it makes no difference, according to Adrian: “I have a very strong feeling that the Bears are gonna be around for a long time.”

Read on and you’ll hear more about this most uncommon pop quartet, but first a word about Adrian’s latest album, his third project for Island Records (due out in August). Entitled Desire Caught By The Tail, it’s a serious instrumental work on quite a different tangent from the artful whimsy of its predecessors, The Lone Rhino and Twang Bar King. “I play everything on it, and it sounds like an orchestra.” he says, “and though for the most part there’s nothing on it that sounds like a guitar, it’s almost exclusively guitars and percussion. Those are the two things I think I do best musically; I’ve been playing drums for 25 years, but I just don’t do it in front of people that often.” Desire’s cover is a painting done by his artist wife Margaret (her first after a 15-year hiatus) and the album itself is in fact inspired by the lives of those unassuming painter geniuses Adrian spoke of earlier.

Belew’s fascination with the guitar began in the late ’60s, with the work of Clapton, Beck, and Hendrix. Up till then, he’d used guitar solely for songwriting, as it’s difficult to compose tunes on a drum kit. Adrian’s percussive background set the stage for his angular, exploratory guitar style. “When I approach guitar, there’s a lot of rhythm in what I’m doing,” he explains. “When I solo, my choice of notes is usually not as important as my choice of rhythms.

“Soloing is not that important to me, actually,” Belew adds. “I find myself a lot more interested in textures, in being able to create a million different things with a guitar. The thing that got me most interested in guitar was making it sound like something else.”

Belew works his six-string alchemy with the help of a Roland GR700 guitar synthesizer, which turns his Fender guitars into Turkish snake charmers, roaring freight trains, screaming women and zillions of other sonic characters. Adrian programs all his sounds onto the GR700’s cartridges, which are themselves triggered when the guitar is played. At last count, Belew had “written” over 200 sounds.'

“The other side of what I do with guitar,” he says, “is all the unorthodox methods of creating a sound, in which anything goes. For instance, turning a tape around backwards to get a backwards sound.”

For Desire Caught By The Tail, Belew did “a lot of strange percussive things. I had a dobro (metal-bodied guitar), and I played soft mallets on its body, and then ran it at different tape speeds. It sounds like very big metal drums only it’s actually guitar.

“Another interesting thing I did—I don’t know if anyone else has discovered this but you can get the GR700 to more or less play itself, if you plug it in improperly.

“There’s this one plug in the back that if you leave it open, it starts playing itself. The title I gave it is ‘Berserk Orchestra,’ because it sounds like the whole orchestra running rampant. On the album, we took that sound and ran it through a unit I have, and we had that whole berserk sound coming backwards—it really sounds spooky. We use it for a song called ‘Guernica’ (after the Picasso painting), and it’s a song about war and chaos, so it’s very fitting.”

Belew’s days as a hired hand are over, at least for quite awhile (even though those doing the hiring were on the order of the Davids Byrne and Bowie). He’ll only take on an outside project when it’s collaborative in nature—such as his work with Laurie Anderson, in whose concert film Home Of The Brave Belew appears. “She asks me to do what I like to do, and she’s usually very happy with the results,” he smiles. Anderson, in fact, went and rewrote “Sharkey’s Day” from her Mister Heartbreak album after hearing Adrian’s radical interpretation.

Yet there probably won’t be much time for Anderson or anybody else as far as Belew’s concerned, between his solo work and the Bears. The Bears are, in a word, fascinating; they manage to make basic two-guitar pop sound like previously uncharted territory. Maybe it’s their Eastern influences, maybe it’s their almost scary energy but these guys are wild. There’s nary a hint of retro-Beatles or neoByrds elements in the Bears’ music, either—it hits a responsive chord without being reminiscent of any other artist in particular. Once they’ve been around a little longer, the rockcrits’ “sounds like” litanies will no doubt come flying, but until then, be advised the Bears are like nothing else you’ve ever heard.

Belew put the Bears together a year ago with two guys from his hometown of Cincinnati, guitarist/vocalist Rob Fetters and bassist Bob Nyswonger, and Toledo native Chris Arduser on drums. Adrian had been buddies with them for 10 years, when they were in a regional group called the Raisins. “I used to sit in with them, I’d produced their first record,” he says. “It was such a likely combination, it was bound to happen.”

Belew already had an idea of what he wanted a group to sound like, and when the four sat down to talk about it, they operated from a distinct approach: “Two-guitarand twosinger-based, with interesting but danceable rhythms, a little bit of Eastern overtones that come from the guitars and drums,” as Adrian describes. “It’s a lot of fun to say,

‘These are the limits of our music,’ and it’s a challenge to make four instruments and two voices so appealing.”

All four members collaborate on songwriting, even lyrics, which Belew deems “unusual, in the sense that it really is equal...And we don’t even touch all our pedals and technology until we’ve written the songs acoustically first.”

ADRIAN BELEW: SETTING FREE THE BEARS

Bears songs range from a tongue-in-cheek gripefest about their lack of status symbols (the manic raveup “None Of The Above”) to a more sober treatment of “family men who assemble the machinery of war” (the nevertheless ridiculously hooky “Robobo’s Beef”) to a pastoral mood piece that rocks (“Raining”). Most of the Bears’ material showcases the agile interplay of Belew’s and Fetters’s remarkably complementary voices, which wrap around each other like strands of DNA.

“I think the Bears have a rough road,” muses Adrian, “because we are trying to do something unique. But at the same time there’s a thread of something you recognize all through our music.

“A lot of the music I’m doing right now,” he adds, “is actually things I’ve wanted to do since I was 14 or 15. I like to see it as a world view of music, because I don’t think it has any national boundaries. It doesn’t bother me in the least that I would use something Middle Eastern—I’m not involved in the politics. But I’ve had this approach in my mind for so long, it’s become second nature. I constantly think music.

“I think the reason this band is the way it is,” stresses Belew, “is that we’ve had this chemistry for the last 10 years. We’re real close friends—these guys were there the night I had my first child nine years ago, so it’s a real family feeling. That’s what I’ve always been looking for in a band. Here I am, sitting in a beautiful studio with a group of people I love—what could be better than that?” 0