erin_broadley

While so many music icons seem to fade away without dignity or creative energy to speak of, David J has plenty of both, and he doesn't look to fade away any time soon. David is best known as the bassist for the influential British bands Bauhaus and Love and Rockets. But with Bauhaus coming to a well-publicized end (their final album, Going Away White, came out this month), David is setting off in a new direction. He'll keep putting on tremendous shows with Love and Rockets, but he's also finally presenting a completely different sort of project that's been in the works for four years. Silver for Gold (The Odyssey of Edie Sedgwick) is David J's big debut as a playwright. David talked to SuicideGirls just before opening night at L.A's Met Theatre about the end of Bauhaus, the state of the music industry, and the years he spent with Edie as his muse. Jay Hathaway: You've been doing music for a long time, but this is the first theatrical production that you've done, right? David J: Yeah, absolutely. I wrote a short play that was put on by another theatre company, but this is the first one that I've put on myself. I'm directing it, I've got a finger in all the pies. It's like spinning a lot of plates. JH: Yeah, you have to keep everything going. Because you wrote it, you're doing the music for it live, right? DJ: And I designed the lights as well, and costumes and everything. Well, that's not entirely accurate about the costumes. We have a designer, Joey Tierney, who took my sketch ideas and she's done a really nice job of realizing the costumes, which is obviously an important part of it. JH: Where were you when you decided to do a show about Edie Sedgwick? Can you tell me what that moment was like? DJ: It was quite interesting, because it was something that was suggested to me. I was staying at a friend's house -- Shepard Fairey, the artist -- and he had a copy of this screenplay lying on the table, called Girl on Fire, by Leonard Schrader and David Weisman. David Weisman being the guy who made Ciao! Manhattan. I read it through, just for something to do, and it inspired a song titled Girl on Fire. So Shepherd came in, and I said "What's the story behind this screenplay?" and he said, "Well, David Weisman was going to make this film and he wanted me to do the artwork. I don't think he's going to do it now, but you should talk to him, he's sort of interesting." So Shepard gave me his number and I called him up. I thought it would be interesting to chat with him about all things Edie. I told him I'd written a song, and he said, "Oh, I want to hear that." So I came round and played it for him, and he liked it a lot. He said, "You know, this screenplay was originally going to be a stage production, a sort of cabaret evening based on Edie's life. I'm never going to do that. You should do it." At first I thought, "I don't know if there's enough depth to this subject to warrant extending it beyond one song." But I was proved wrong, because the more research I did into Edie, the more complex and fascinating she became. I just got a bug. David sowed the seed, and I just kept on and became practically obsessed with it for four years. I just carried on writing and writing, and here we are today. I'm still writing it! I changed one word this morning. JH: [Laughs] Oh wow, at the very last minute! DJ: Yeah. And there's 10 new songs, there's two instrumental pieces. There are three voices. There's what's basically a monologue, which is Edie's personal voice, which is delivered by the actress Monique Jenkinson. And then there's another voice, Norich, the wounded healer. He operates as a kind of Greek chorus, and he tells Edie's story in mythic terms. And the other voice is the music. Each is a component that informs the story and helps to move it all along. The mythic element's really key to this, because it occurred to me that Edie was, in fact, living out a myth, which is the myth of Persephone. And it's about her journey into the underworld, where she consorts with Hades, who is Andy Warhol. And then I was working other mythic elements into it, like Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards the gates of the underworld, and I thought, "Who are those three heads?" I realized the three heads were three acolytes of Andy's, those being Chuck Wien, Paul Morrissey and Ondine. And then I have Bob Dylan appearing as Orpheus. It all ties into the mythology. And it's a hero's journey, because it starts out in Santa Barbara, she goes out into the world, lives her life, and then returns. It's a classic hero myth. JH: Since you're basing it on this Greek style of theatre, and the Greeks are known for writing heroes with tragic flaws, did you find a tragic flaw here? DJ: Well ... [laughs]. JH: Yeah, it's Edie Sedgwick. DJ: Yeah, of course. Of course. It's very tragic. That's central to it. JH: What was the most surprising thing you learned about Edie when you were doing your research for the play? DJ: When I went to the Andy Warhol museum in Pittsburgh, and they set aside a room for me, I went through some of Andy's time capsules -- these cardboard boxes that he would fill with detritus and stuff that was lying around, every month he'd fill a box and label it. I went through all of 1965, and there's some of Edie's personal effects in there. It's kind of ... shivery ... to be holding those things. But the thing that really informed me was they've got hours and hours of audiotape. Just her, in the factory, talking to people there, talking with Andy, Chuck Wein, her driving her car, going out to clubs, going to restaurants. That gave me such insight. What was really surprising was that she came across as this old dowager duchess. She sounded like she was in her 70s and lived a very long life. She was very intelligent, very fun, witty, compassionate. Just a lot of depth to her character. An old soul, and that was really surprising and delightful. I had to go back and practically rewrite the whole thing. JH: Spending four years with all of this stuff, did you feel like you knew her by the end of the project? DJ: I felt like I was in communion with her. It was really quite weird. I felt like, when I would write, I would conjure her up. It would be an act of magic and she would appear. The more I wrote, if I'd start to write some good stuff, she'd glow, like Tinkerbelle in the corner of my room. It's a very, very strong presence. JH: Did you find you had a lot in common? DJ: With her? She was very Taurean. Very loyal and strong in her opinions. There were things I was listening to on the tapes where all the queens in the factory were bitching like hell and she just cut through it all and said, "Come on, knock it off. That's very unfair." I really admired that. She didn't go along with the bitching. She was loyal to this friend that they were having a go at. It's a Taurean trait, you know, that loyalty. Also, she was stubborn, very stubborn. JH: Did you decide to go with the monologue format to highlight how strong a character Edie is, or just as a continuation of the minimalism that we've seen in a lot of your work? DJ: Well, I am a minimalist. That's an intrinsic quality in what I do, I think. It comes naturally that way. I like stripping things down, getting it honed to the bone. The idea to do it with just two players came from the writing. I mean, I didn't know where I was going to go with this thing. There were more characters in it when I started writing it. I even had Andy Warhol appearing in it. I had two brothers appearing as ghosts, I even had the father in there. As part of this process of honing it, I stripped away those characters, and they appear through Edie's monologue. She evokes the other characters through her words. JH: That makes a lot of sense. You get to see them through her eyes. DJ: I wanted that sort of objective perspective, and then you've got the subjective perspective that comes through the songs about the other characters. And through the narrator character, he describes them in terms of myth. JH: Have you seen any of the recent movies where Edie's appeared as a character? I just saw I'm Not There a little while ago. DJ: I thought that was a very charming manifestation of this woodland sprite. I thought Cate Blanchett was great as Dylan. That whole section was really terrific. And I saw Factory Girl. [Laughs] It was awful. I thought Sienna Miller deserved a better vehicle. She gave it something, but it's just an awful script. Very trite treatment. JH: It seems like Edie's been getting a lot of attention lately. Theres a whole generation of people going to the movies, who might not have known who she was, and that's what they're seeing. DJ: I see girls on the street, especially here in a big city like L.A., who are really copying a lot from her look. Every day I see it, it's very interesting. Girls in their early 20s. The SuicideGirls generation. She's very individual. She didn't have a stylist, she wasn't put together by someone else. She put herself together. I think that really resonates with the whole SuicideGirls ethos and attitude, you know. JH: Absolutely. DJ: Don't go along with the bullshit. Just be your own person. Be yourself and celebrate your sexuality in a real way. That's why I really wanted to talk to you and have something on the site. There was a resonance for me with the SuicideGirls thing, and her. JH: Yeah, I think there's a lot of crossover in the audience. What's your plan for the show? Are you going to take it out of L.A.? DJ: Yeah, I definitely want to take it to New York and Off-Broadway. Eventually I'd love to put it on Broadway, so I can get the right producers behind it and get some money behind it. Hopefully this run will serve as a showcase, so I can get some investors on board and give it some wings. And then one day I'd like to make it into a little movie. It's very visual, so it would work. JH: Are you going to be touring or working on any albums in the meantime? Obviously Bauhaus has come to an end, you're putting out your last album. I heard you're going to be doing more with Love and Rockets. DJ: We're playing Coachella next month, and we're getting quite a few offers coming in to do more gigs. So we're quite up for that. We don't want to tour like we used to do, but the idea of doing festivals and playing big gigs and making them something special is appealing. We're into doing it again. It seems right. JH: Absolutely. Do you mind talking about Bauhaus a little bit? DJ: No. JH: So, looking back, what do you think of the state of the industry from the beginning of your career to now? Has it changed a lot, or is it just more of the same? DJ: It's changed incredibly. Huge change, yeah. In all sorts of ways. It's all very interesting. The whole structure is crumbling. I say good. I say dance in the flames of their corporate demise. This is the first album we're putting out ourselves, without a label. We never made any money from Bauhaus or from Love and Rockets because we were signed to a really crippling contract. It never changed. We own two songs, basically, we gave all our publishing away. So this is our first opportunity to be our own label and just be truly independent. It's like a complete cycle, because the only time we had that before was when we did our first single, Bela Lugosi's Dead, on Small Wonder records. The guy there, Steve, was great with us. We had a 50/50 split, and then he let us have the whole thing for a very reasonable buyout. And those are the only two songs that we own, Bela Lugosi's Dead and the b-side, Boys. JH: It's really a great time to do that, it's really working for a lot of bands. Nine Inch Nails just sold out their new box sets in two days or something, it's incredible. DJ: Yeah, yeah. The downside of that is you can't control downloads and just piracy, you know? Our album was out on the Internet two months practically before it was released, and we don't get a penny from that. And we put our own money into this, to make this record. So we're losing at the moment, hopefully it'll switch around. People hopefully will be loyal and buy the record to support us, and just to have it as some nice artwork there. JH: Warren Ellis was writing the other day about how he's going to start buying CDs again because his daughter is getting old enough to want to look through his music collection, and CDs are so much better for that. DJ: You know, I've never heard anybody say that before, and that's really significant. It's true, because my boy's doing that. He's just turned 20, and he's going through my CD collection, getting turned on to things. If I didn't have them there, he wouldn't find that. So it's true, yeah. He's also going through my books and my clothes. Things are disappearing rapidly, and he's the same size as me. I haven't really changed my size since I was his age. I mean, I see him and he's dressed in my clothes, he's got my books in his arm, he's got my CDs playing on his headphones. JH: Lucky kid! DJ: He's got a band, too. He's playing bass. This is a funny story. They're called the Correct Sadists, which he thought up. Quite proud of him, thinking of that. But it's funny, because years ago a friend of mine gave me this book called The Correct Sadist, by Terrance Sellers, who's a dominatrix. It's all about doing her job. I had moved and I had to just get rid of a load of books, I had hundreds of books. So I went down to this second-hand store and I just got rid of them all. A couple years later a friend of his goes into the shop and buys that book, The Correct Sadist. My son is round his house and he sees it on his shelf and he's intrigued by the name, so he's adopted the name for his band. And that was the book that I traded in. JH: It's a hell of a band name, too. DJ: It's a good name, yeah! [Laughs] I like it. I'm going to be producing a little EP for them soon. JH: If you were going to start a new band next week, what would you call it? DJ: [Laughs] Um, what a question. Uh, [pauses] Ad Hoc. JH: Ad Hoc. That's a really good answer, actually. An appropriate answer. JH: So you were talking earlier about people pirating your album. That's surprising, since Bauhaus is known for having some pretty obsessive fans. You seem to have inspired so much loyalty as a band over your career. DJ: It's really gratifying, yeah. It was great when we were on tour, seeing real young kids in the audience. Early 20s, really into it. Yeah. JH: Do you think there's a gap to fill in the music scene now that Bauhaus is done? Is there a void that some other band will have to step in and fill? DJ: Well, there's a lot of good, interesting stuff out there. I don't think of it that way, no. JH: What music is out there that you're excited about right now? DJ: There's this band, Young Galaxy. I heard this track, Sun's Coming Up, Plane's Going Down, that I really love. They've actually kind of copped a Bauhaus title. It's a twist on the Bauhaus song title, which is the title of their album. It's called Swing Your Heartache, and we have a track called Swing The Heartache. I wrote to them actually, just to say how much I liked their record, and they said it was a tribute to Bauhaus. Not that they're anything like that, they're more like Love and Rockets, actually. More like Spiritualized. They impress me. Dresden Dolls are great, they're friends. The Horrors, I really like. I like LCD Soundsystem, and all those offshoots coming from James Murphy. I think he's a really interesting guy. There's a few. JH: Do you get out to a lot of shows? DJ: Yeah, yeah, not as much as I used to. It has to be something really strong to pull me out there. I'm always working, don't have that much time. I saw The Legendary Shack Shakers recently, I was very impressed by that. I'd actually had a long time since I'd been at a gig where there was a real sense of danger in the place, and I like that. JH: You've been in L.A. for a while now. How are you finding the theatre scene there? DJ: Well, I really lucked out by coming across this theatre space, the Met, because it's great. It's been here since the 70s, and the people who run it are real theatre people. Although they're like rock-n-roll theatre people, they've just got a great attitude. The guy I'm working with, Lloyd Reese, is just fantastic. He's helping me with lights and stage-managing, We've developed this bond between everybody, all the tech and the actors and the musicians. It's a real gang kind of bond thing. It's great. I don't really know anybody in theatre, I'm making it all up as I go along. It's all new to me. I've got big ears on, listening. I'm open to everybody's opinion, 'cause I'm just learning. But it feels like this is a direction to go in, theatre. I'm very into doing this, not just music. I feel like this is a real calling for me. JH: I thought it might be too soon to judge, since you haven't actually opened the first show yet. Are you already looking at more script ideas? DJ: I've got one idea on the back burner, and another idea on the back burner behind that one. [Laughs] I'd like to write black comedy. I just had that notion this morning. JH: You know, I don't think anybody's really going to be surprised to read that. DJ: No. And there's some comedic moments in this play as well, which are black comedy. [Laughs] It comes natural. JH: With all the things you've accomplished, how do you hope to be known when people look back at your career? What do you hope people are saying about you? DJ: Hopefully as audacious. An audacious bastard. JH: I think your chances are good! DJ: Oh, thanks. JH: You know, not to be a gossip or anything, but can you tell me how Bauhaus broke up? DJ: Yeah. You have a test tube, and you pour in one chemical, and you pour in another chemical, and something happens. It starts to bubble. Pour in another chemical, and it starts to bubble a bit more. You pour in a fourth chemical, and it bubbles really violently, and then explodes. That's my answer.

Silver and Gold: The Odyssey of Edie Sedgwick, written and directed by David J of Bauhaus and Love and Rockets runs Thursday March 6th to Sunday March, 16th at the LA Met (Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays & Sundays at 8pm.)

For more information and tickets go to www.themettheatre.com.