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| Intervista di qualche tempo fa, ripresa dal comatorium, originariamente su noreasterzine.com, scorrendo trovate un pezzo in grassetto riguardante la sua prima esperienza coi TMV CITAZIONE Interview by Larry Dolan
Photos by Silke Fleming
I have always felt that the best that music and art have to offer resides in obscurity and receives very little attention. When I saw Laddio Bolocko open for Trans Am in September of 2000, this notion was confirmed. What I experienced moved me in a way that few bands have. Laddio Bolocko was an instrumental rock band unparalleled and indescribable. The energy that they produced during their live set could power a small city off the grid, but their manner was humble and inviting.
Every individual in the crowd with an ear willing to listen was welcomed into their world; a world of sound which they had constructed, a world unlike any other. Luckily I had the foresight to purchase the CD they were selling at the show, because in the months that followed I was able to find very little information about the band, and it was nearly impossible to purchase a release. They had no website, there was no current contact information on their CD, and there had been very little written about them. After a few inquiries, I was able to contact Blake Fleming, the drummer of Laddio Bolocko. Our conversation traversed the history of Laddio Bolocko as well as Blake's musical background and his current work, but at the core of the interview were the issues that every artist faces. As a musician myself, I could relate to many of Blake's insights and I feel that what he has to share is invaluable to those of you out there who are striving for that perfect note, that unique sound, and that perfect mix that will be your own piece de resistance.
noreasterzine.com: How did you start Playing the drums?
Blake: I was about 8 or 9 years old. I had seen this girl who was my neighbor play or something and it freaked me out and I knew I wanted to play the drums. Basically I just did the thing that a lot of kids did my mom would buy these big old gallon ice cream tubs and I would beat on those and pots and pans. You know a lot of people's typical stories. When I was 9 I got my first snare drum. After that I did a lot of things. I was in a colonial pipe and drumming corps until I was 13. It was very regimented, rudimentary snare drumming. We had a drum instructor who was a guy from West point who taught us the military style of drumming. It was very disciplined, stick heights were very important and the openness and cleanliness of everything. We would do competitions and we would travel all summer. We would travel all over the US and Canada doing reenactments, festivals for colonial periods, or whatever. I started getting drunk a little too much (laughs) and my parents found out and they yanked me out of it because I was just a fucking kid.
About two years later I started playing in a Scottish bagpipe band. And that was a very different style of drumming. Scottish snare drumming is very jazzy in a way and it's got a real swing to it. From there I started doing cover bands, and all through school I was a total band fag (laughs). I was in all the bands... I was in the jazz band, I was in the symphonic band, I was in the orchestra, the concert band all that sort of shit. By the time I was... well I wasn't driving yet so I must of been fifteen when I met Darin [Dazzling Killmen]. I was playing in a community college jazz band at the time and he had just enrolled to go to school there. We played a few weeks together there in the jazz band and then during one of the rehearsals - during one of the breaks he and I just started jamming together on the stage and we started doing our own stuff. It was pretty instantaneous the way it happened.
Our intuitiveness was very symbiotic so we were like, 'whoa we gotta keep doing this'. So we played pretty much every weekend after that. He had keys to one of the music buildings and we would just go there and jam all night. Literally we would have these six hour improv sessions and we would just zone out. At the time, he was going to have a baby and he had quit drugs and alcohol and I hadn't even gotten involved in that stuff so it was kind of perfect we just played music together and we did that for months and months and months. It correlated with him teaching Nick (Sakes) how to play the guitar. Nick came to the college one night and they showed me one or two of the songs they'd been working on and it was just one of those classic moments from the very first note it was like, 'Holy Fuck!' you know what I mean... like, 'this is fucking great'.
I was still 15 or maybe I was 16 and they were showing me this music that I had never heard of. I had grown up with the Ramones. That was my first intro into the punk scene... and the Clash and the Jam, because I had an older brother. who was into all of of that stuff. But I had not gotten into the early 80's stuff yet... Black Flag and the Minute Men and Misfits and all of these sort of bands. They turned me onto a whole new world and we just started playing together. That's how Dazzling Killmen came together. We made a single in the summer of '89 or '90. Started doing shows on the weekend. We got the money for our first record from a small label, now defunct, called Intellectual Convulsion. I think they put out the first Eye Hate God records. It started going from there.
noreasterzine.com: I've read that the Dazzling Killmen break-up ended badly. Did it end on a sour note?
Blake: Well, I guess most bands don't end on a good note, but there was... We started to have our fare share of inter-fucking-personal turmoil. At one point Darin and I got into a fist fight on stage during a sound check. And we still had at least another two weeks of the tour to go, but it actually ended up being Nick who quit the band and it was a shame because it was like two weeks before we were scheduled to go to Japan to tour with Zeni Geva. We had our tickets, we had the tour, it was actually going to be a money making tour and things just got so bad. Nick just said, 'I can't. stand it, I can't stand it anymore.' And I think a lot of it at the time started to be between he and Darin. They were the oldest guys. Nick was 10 years older than I was and Darin was 6 or 7 years older than I was, so I was the kid in a lot of ways.
I got my fair share of shit just for being a kid but I took it because I knew I was young. But I knew that as far as when we were on stage or when we were on records I was pulling %100 just like those guys. I think the fact that those guys were closer in age the friction just became a lot greater after awhile and the whole thing just exploded. Nick called and left a message on Darin's answering machine of all things, Darin called me and said that's it. That started a two year period where I didn't play with anyone I just practiced.
noreasterzine.com: Now did you end up doing that tour with Zeni Geva?
Blake: Not then, I was in Zeni Geva for a time. It was around '96 whenever they did the Freedom Bondage album. Their drummer Aito had quit and they already knew me. We [Dazzling Killmen] had toured together in the past and they were huge fans of Dazzling Killmen. I guess they knew right away that I would be able to fill in the spot, so they called me and asked if I would fill in for a two month tour with them. I said of course and it was perfect because at the time I was getting ready to move to New York. So it gave me the extra amount of cash that I needed to get there.
noreasterzine.com: Is this what brought you to new York, or was it something else?
Blake: Basically, it's sort of weird, when I was young knowing that I was always going to be a musician and a drummer, I always knew I was going to live here. It's always been a dream or a vision of mine since probably 11 or 12 years old. I had it in my head too, especially, from the Ramones. They really blew me away and I knew they were from New York. I just had this whole... I just knew I had to be in New York because I knew that this was where there was so much great music coming from. So just before the Zeni Geva tour I was getting ready to move, and at the time I was making my living from music, I was giving drum lessons. So it was great, I had no real ties to anything. I could go on tour, they paid me pretty well, I got a nice trip around the US and we had a fucking blast. We made a few recordings at some radio stations and it was cool because at this, time Zeni Geva became the hardcore band that they always wanted to be because I didn't have such a metal tinge to my style. I never played double bass drum. The interpretation that I had of the songs was a bit different than the previous drummer and they were really really happy with it because they always wanted to get away from that sort of metal sound. But I guess they couldn't find the right combination.
noreasterzine.com: They needed to get rid of that double bass kick?
Blake: Yeah [laughs], totally. They wanted me to move to Tokyo after that and be in the band full time, but I was moving to New York and I really didn't think I wanted to move to there. I would love to visit and tour but New York is crowded enough and Tokyo is even more ridiculous. You know, I'm from Illinois and I got to have a little space. So that's how that ended but it was great while it lasted and we all had a really great time. The shows were well attended. It was a cool period of my life.
noreasterzine.com: How did that lead into Laddio Bolocko... or how did Laddio Bolocko get started?
Blake: Actually Laddio Bolocko had already started. We were a three piece with Ben and Drew, but we had only played one show in St. Louis before the Zeni Geva tour. We had just started getting our sound together based on what we had been listening to and of course at that time Dazzling Killmen was still a big influence because Ben and Drew were really into that band and it was a band that I was in. So it played a big role in the beginning, but after we moved to New York, somehow, we really came upon our own sound. This was right before the whole big Kraut Rock explosion, we had gotten a hold of that stuff just before the trend really hit. We were really influenced by Can and Faust. Can for their repetitive locomotive rhythms. That was something we really took into Laddio Bolocko because we realized how far ahead of its time that it was. When drum&bass and techno was just starting to get bigger, we heard it being done electronically, there was no rock... or there was no real sex in that anymore, it had started to become very sterile and very clinical and we thought there were aspects to that music that we liked. We never listened to it a lot, but we knew about it because it was all around us.
We thought if we could take influences from that but add the fucking rock back into it, then we might have something. Also, we ended up making it a little more violent. On the albums it's hard to tell because the environment is a slightly more controlled version of what we did, but live it was more of a... some sort of... paganistic festival or ritual.
noreasterzine.com: When I saw you guys it was very impressive.
Blake: Thank you... I'm very proud of that band. It's weird to this day I still get quite a few e-mails from people. This guy out in Seattle is looking to reissue the entire Laddio Bolocko catalog right now. And he knows that we're defunct. But I still get e-mails from people all over the world seeing if I have any CD's for sale or if there is anyway that they can get the stuff. Yeah... It's a really great feeling actually.
noreasterzine.com: The sound of Laddio Bolocko was really unique. You touched on the influences, but did you have a specific approach to writing or was it more intuitive?
Blake: It was very intuitive. A lot of it came just out of jamming. Purely improvised jamming. We were starting to realize, listening back to the improvisations, that they were a lot more fun and a lot more interesting to listen to when we found an idea, hung onto it and played it out. There's all kinds of schools of improvisation of course but when you are doing it in a rock oriented way, if your just leaping around from motif to motif it becomes pretty boring pretty quickly. Especially in the rhythm section, we were a very rhythmically oriented band, we found that once we got onto something we should stick to it and after awhile you had the original motif in your head so there was always room to play over it -- to play outside of it but always being able to come back to it. We composed our songs -- 'a' section/'b' section -- and so forth, but how we got to a and b and c was always different. What made it cohesive was we always knew where we were going. Everybody had the freedom to get there in their own way. But the main thing was that we got out on that limb together and we always landed together. In the most ideal situations of course, things didn't always happen that way.
But towards the end of the band, within the last year, we were very much under control of what we were doing. We had developed our own compositional/improvisational language together. I think that was one of the real special things about the band, it came from very organic origins because it was really just spawned from playing... from listening to each other and having that intuitiveness.
noreasterzine.com: Did you feel that it translated to the recorded environment?
Blake: Um... That's the biggest shame. The last record that we started making was going to be the one where we really focused on translating our sound to the album, because we always looked at the studio and the live setting as two very different things. We wanted to blow people away at our shows, and we wanted them to expect that on the CD. But when they went home and put it on, we would give them something completely different and hopefully that would blow them away even more, and they wouldn't even believe that it was the same band. There both equally great but they're both completely different worlds, but it's the same group. A lot of people want their live show to be a version of the CD. We didn't even play a lot of the stuff on the records live. We would play different aspects of some of the songs, or different interpretations. It was intended to confuse people in the best kind of way.
noreasterzine.com: When you recorded Strange Warmings was that in Brooklyn? B: Yeah. L: So, you were living and recording in the same space?
Blake: Exactly, that's when the band really got under way. We had just gotten a practice space down in Dumbo. This really great basement space, actually. We had a sink and a toilet in the room which was quite luxurious for us at the time. We all just moved in. It was $450 a month for the whole space, divided by four people. We were like, 'Kick Ass! We can come to New York City and we don't even have to work hard. We can play music all the time.' And that's what we did. That whole summer of '97 I believe it was. We just played everyday hours and hours a day and we made the Strange Warmings record.
We got our hands on a small amount of pretty crude recording equipment and did our best. Part of the reason that record is so blown and distorted is because that was the only way that we could get our shit to sound good [ laughs ]. We just said, 'fuck it let's just blow it all' because when we tried to make a normal sounding recording it just came out limp, because we didn't have enough money to get good enough mic's to really catch the true air of the room. So we shoved everything and put it to the red, and I'm glad we did. It was intentional in the end but it came about by necessity. I think it was a pretty awesome characteristic of that record. All of our records we recorded ourselves. I mean we monitored through a fucking home stereo. We mixed on stereo speakers. The most expensive mic we had was a $100 Shure Condenser mic. We were just learning about the recording process then.
noreasterzine.com: You got some good results.
Blake: That was the beauty of having the equipment there. We could spend the hours to tweak it, tweak it, and tweak it until we got the results that we wanted. And that was the first time I was ever able to do that. With Dazzling Killmen, we did all of our stuff with Steve Albini and some of the stuff he did I liked and some of the stuff I didn't like. We figured we could drop a few thousand dollars on a studio or whatever, or we could spend the same amount or less and just continue to record records, and put that money toward equipment instead of studio time.
noreasterzine.com: In a very Can-esque way.
Blake: Exactly, Exactly.
noreasterzine.com: Did you play in New York a lot when you lived there?
Blake: No not really. That was one of the down falls. Right up until the end we were virtually unknown in our home town. It wasn't until about the last six or eight months of the band that we really started to play quite a bit [in NYC] and draw good crowds.
noreasterzine.com: I lived down there in '98-'99 and I never saw you guys.
Blake: During that period -- in the fall of '97 -- we moved up to the Catskill Mountains, just to get out of the city. We found this old Ski Lodge -- literally it was a fucking mansion -- for $200 more than we were paying in the city. It had a gigantic ball room attached to it with hardwood floors, a gigantic stone fireplace, these crazy wagon-wheel chandeliers. We had six bedrooms on the second floor, and two gigantic living rooms and a huge kitchen; two decks. I mean it was monstrous and we were out in the middle of nowhere. It was completely beautiful and serene and that was where we recorded the second album As In Real Time. That album really reflected our move because you really hear the change in our mood and the ambience of the record.
Strange Warmings sounds like what we were experiencing. Dealing with rats and mice, and the noise of the city and the garbage dumb right across the street. That was Dumbo. And then all of a sudden we were out in the land of Van Gogh and it was completely different. All these colors, in the middle of nowhere and more space than we ever had. Bigger than anything we ever envisioned, and it was just ours. It really changed the direction of our music. It was very powerful. It was a very mystical area, really enchanting.
noreasterzine.com: What was the name of the town?
Blake: It's called Elka Park. It's primarily made up of two religious communes/ cults. There were about 200 residents and about 150 of them belonged to these groups. It's really tucked away up in the mountains and there's a few scattered houses. Our closest neighbor was a football field away through some woods. We had crazy pagan rituals out there, running around our yard at night starting fires naked, beating on drums. Literally just 'cause we could. It definently had elements of Lord of the Flies or The Shining. There were the beautiful aspects and the sort of darker aspects.
noreasterzine.com: How did you survive financially?
Blake: Oh yeah, we got fucked man. That's one of the things that killed that band too, was that sometimes we definitely had a lack of foresight. We were just so involved in the moment that it was just like, 'fuck this man... we fucking hate New York. Let's go.' And literally two weeks later we had found that house and we were gone. We did it that quickly, it was that extreme. We were at a time too where we all weren't really tied to anything. We were experimenting in a lot of different ways. Musically, personally, and just with our lifestyle. We just knew that it would be a trip to go to such an extreme: from living in a one room basement in Dumbo to a dilapidated ski lodge in the Northern Catskills.
noreasterzine.com: How much touring did you do in the US?
Blake: We did one full tour of the US that I booked and that was a two month tour. That was the first thing that we did.
noreasterzine.com: How did that go?
Blake: It went really well actually. We actually made money, which was Un-Be-Leiv-Able. It was basically booked on the fact that I had been in Dazzling Killmen and Zeni Geva and we used that to get the shows. And then once people had seen the band we were definently invited back to most places. We were still scrambling for places to play, still eating like fucking Papa John's Pizza, and shit. There were quite a few nights that we slept in the van.
noreasterzine.com: Laddio Bolocko did a lot of touring in Europe. What was the reason for that? Was there a reason that you chose to focus your efforts abroad?
Blake: Well, we got a call while we were on our first American tour, from our booking agent in Europe. We had sent him a CD and he really liked it. He called to originally have us play at a festival in France but the festival fell through so he decided to book a tour for us. So that really changed all of our lives in a lot of ways. We went to Europe for two months and the first tour we went to thirteen countries. We made money, a lot of people came to the shows, and we got fed really well. We had places to stay and there was always an abundance of good food, wine, and hash or whatever we wanted. They were so much more fucking humane than in the US. People really had respect for you, you weren't just another dude in a band. You weren't just some fucking leper. It also really helped that we were from New York. Because still... in Europe there is still something about that New York mystique that was definently in our favor. All of a sudden we were being treated like rock stars and we thought, 'wow we can do this now. maybe we can actually start to make a living doing this.'
After that we started focusing more and more on playing in Europe. In Europe you don't deal with the shit that you do in the US, it's so much more organized. A lot of the clubs over there already had lodging taken care of. Many of the places have kitchens in them. So a lot of meals were really good homemade meals; roasted chicken, mashed potatoes. Of course there was always a great selection of breads and cheese. It was a lot more civil. It really felt like the people over there listened to what we did. Our music translated on a deeper level than it did in the US. We had good shows in the US but it was always more about, 'Alright, Alright, Alright.' and the fucking lights come on and it's, 'Everybody out! Get the Fuck out!' And after your done playing and you hear, 'Alright People Get the Fuck Out!' You haven't even had a drink of beer, you can't even converse with someone who saw your show. It wasn't like that at all in Europe. We went for another tour, and we went for two months on that one. It was incredible. That's my favorite place to play. All over Europe.
noreasterzine.com: I don't know why but for some reason your music seems to me to have an un-American feel.
Blake: Yeah, I don't know why that is, but the first tour we did a lot of people didn't know we were an American band and assumed that we were definently NOT an American Band. I still don't really understand why that is. Maybe because it wasn't traditional Rock and Roll.
noreasterzine.com: It felt Eastern European to me, almost Transylvanian.
Blake: Well, we went as far east as Zagreb, Croatia. And we played in Slovenia and those were two of our most favorite places to play when we went to Europe; always. The people there were amazing. The people there were so appreciative of the band, and we always appreciated them.
noreasterzine.com: How did the Trans Am tour come about and how did it go?
Blake: Originally we had hooked up with them because they heard one of our CD's in a club they were playing. They really liked it, they asked who it was, and we had our phone number on the back of the CD. This was when we were living on the mountain and they called us and said they had heard our CD. They really liked it and wanted to know, vaguely, if we would be interested in touring with them in the future. We said, 'yes, of course.' We had heard of them so we knew that they were in a band that would have a decent draw but none of us were listening to them, we didn't really know much about the band. We figured they seemed pretty cool, and we thought that they would definently draw more people than we do in the US. So we thought, 'yeah let's do it,' and we were really excited. But it didn't happen until about a year later. We did a short one week tour though with them and Pan Sonic and that went well and was a lot of fun. We liked the guys a lot so we went on the Fall of 2000 tour.
noreasterzine.com: I'm really at a loss why you didn't have label support, did you not want that?
Blake: Hmm... [long pause] We were pretty bad at that. We were pretty bad socially and we were pretty bad business men. We weren't good schmoozers in any sort of way. That was one of our downfalls. We were really not that organized when it came to maintaining the business aspects of our band. I don't know if we ever sent stuff out to labels. I don't think we ever did, that I recall. We were naive in some ways and it became more and more difficult for us to concentrate on the music and try to figure out how we would pay for the next event or whatever.
noreasterzine.com: Did this cause the break up? Did the tour with Trans Am have anything to do with it?
Blake: The tour definently did not. Things had already started to fall apart before that. Shit had been building up for about a year. We just started becoming more and more dysfunctional... [long silence] Finally... I couldn't take it anymore. I called everybody up the day after this rehearsal. We had gotten together, we working on the recordings for what was going to be our new record. I told each person in the band... I quit. I told them why, and I told them what I thought of them and what I thought of the situation. I was very honest and very direct. I said, 'I just can't do it anymore.' It had ceased to be fun, and it had ceased to be productive. It was like pulling teeth even to get everyone together for rehearsal. It was ridiculous. And I was really getting sick over it... I mean physically and mentally. I was getting really sick. It had been my life for so long and I had put so much into it - we all had. But it was just totally dying. And it was a shame. Because I knew... I mean in my heart - I believed in it. I knew it was what I really wanted to be doing, but it got so bad. The dysfunctional aspects out weighed the magic of the music and that's when it's time to go. That happened in January of last year.
noreasterzine.com: So what happened after the break up?
Blake: During the Trans Am tour we had done two shows in Los Angeles. We met these two guys. They were in a band called At The Drive In. They got really big about a year or two ago and had a record out on Grand Royal. blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Omar and Cedric the lead guitarist and singer of the band, saw Laddio Bolocko both nights and they put us up in this house. We sort of hit it off with them and we thought they were really cool guys. We had never heard them at the time, but we were blown away by all the stories they told us. We came home to New York after that tour and then we started seeing them everywhere. We were like, 'whoa we just met these guys.' In march I got a call from Omar and he said that he and Cedric were quitting At the Drive In, and they wanted to start a new band with me and asked if I would be into it. I said, 'Of course, what the fuck. You guys sold a million records. Of course I'll give it a shot.' They had an integrity that I looked up to even though they were in this whole major label world. I thought that we would get along really well musically. So last year for five months I was living in Los Angeles. I'd started this brand new band with those guys. We got it off the ground, recorded a single, it was going to be on the Grand Royal imprint with Virgin putting it out. I thought, 'Wow! my dreams have come true. All of a sudden I don't have to work anymore. I can make money playing drums. I got cymbals coming to me. They want to make a drum set for me. ' And it all fell apart five or six and half months later.
noreasterzine.com: How did that fall apart, personality conflicts?
Blake: Yeah, well, we were all living together also, whenever I was out there. It was your sort of typical thing that happens whenever you move in with people. At first your like, 'these people are great,' but then you start to learn more things about them that you kinda wish you didn't know because it ruins the initial good picture that you had of them. We just ran into roommate syndrome where we just got on each others nerves... in a nutshell. So I couldn't take it anymore and I walked away from it. And that was a big thing because that was the first time that I had ever really made a solid living just from playing the drums. I mean, it is a big dream for a lot of musicians. And it just wasn't happening for me after awhile, because all of that did not matter... because I wasn't happy out there. I came back to New York and in the mean time I had been doing a lot of engineering and recording. I had worked at a recording studio before I went out there so when I came back I started doing that again. Now I have my new band which I'm devoted to full time of course and on the down time of that, I record, engineer and produce for other people. I'm starting to earn more of my money doing that. All that started back in Laddio Bolocko, but it's translating what we did engineering on a home stereo to a real studio with two inch tape and all that.
noreasterzine.com: Now you and Marcus DeGrazia [sax player, soundscapes for Laddio Bolocko] have begun anew?
Blake: Exactly.
noreasterzine.com: Do you have a name?
Blake: Yeah, we're called the Rock Gate Estate. Actually my wife and I started writing music together. Just because we spend so much time together we started writing together. It just came about naturally. We started really getting into the stuff we were writing, and we had a couple of solid ideas. At the same time, Marcus and I were smoothing things over after everything that had happened with Laddio Bolocko. We were hanging out with Marcus one night and we showed him what we were doing and he was really into it. It just started out that way. Silke and I had pretty solid concepts of what we wanted to do and the kind of music we wanted to make. The sort of visual aspects we wanted with our band. It's just the three of us right now and eventually we want to add two more people to fill out the band. But right now we don't need that because we can do the recordings ourselves. All the basic instrumentation we need we have in-house right now. And Marcus lives right above us in our apartment building. Our studio is in the basement. We have this whole sort of headquarters now and it is really convenient. There's vocals in this music which is something I hadn't done for a really long time. It's got more poppy elements than anything I have done before.
I started to realize, 'why is it that I just want to sit around and listen to T-Rex all day' but I never make music that I really enjoy listening to. I just wanted to start doing music that I would want to listen to a lot. I'm very proud of what I've done in the past, but it's not the kind of music that I listen to and it makes me feel that kind of way... that kind of sun shining in your face feel good sort of way. And I decided that I wanted to make music like that. There will always be darker aspects to it, because that's just part of what i really do - the music that I create. So I am writing everything with Marcus and Silke and I'm playing bass. I will play drums in the band, but for the sake of writing the melodic and harmonic ideas I am playing the bass. Which is really great because I always wanted to put my style of drumming on to a bass, so on record I can be my own rhythm section. I was actually downstairs recording the drums for the first song for our record when you called.
noreasterzine.com: So you plan on doing your own record? Are you going to release it and tour?
Blake: Basically, we are going to record this record, find another guitar player to do more lead stuff and find a bass player eventually. We are going to put this out ourselves but we are definently going to shop it around. We have a lot more business sense going into this. I mean, because, right now I bar tend a couple nights a week at the Lotus Club to supplement recording and playing. It's not bad but I don't want to be a bartender. The place is great though, because it's a haven for musicians and artists of all sorts. It's a great place to meet people. I've worked for those guys off and on since I've been in New York. They've always let me come and go. I was gone for a year to the Catskills and when I came back they gave me my old job. They've become friends of mine over time. Everyone who works there is involved in some sort of creative discipline. So people come and go a whole lot and those are the kind of people the owners want there. They are very understanding of unusual schedules.
noreasterzine.com: It's hard to find that.
Blake: And that's why I stuck with it. I hate looking for a job.
noreasterzine.com: Yeah I'm looking for one right now.
Blake: Oh, no! [laughs] Man it stinks. Especially in this City because when I first moved here I thought I was going to have a heart attack looking for a job 'cause money was going out the window. So once I found good people, I really hung on to them. It's been really good and I feel fortunate about my situation in the city. Finally, after years of living in fucked up situations, in one room with just electricity and rats, I'm above ground and pretty stabilized. I've got a bathtub and shit. I can eat decently. It's luxurious.
** editor's note: Both Laddio Bollocko albums, plus some previously unreleased recordings were reissued by
No Quater Records this fall. Blake Fleming is currently in a new band called ELECTRIC TURN TO ME. |
