The Sir Richard Bishop Interview
Tell me about growing up in Saginaw, MI. What was your childhood like growing up with your brother Alan? When did you first begin to fall in love with music, more specifically the guitar, piano and the other various instruments you play? Was music something that was relevant around your household growing up?
I'd say we had a typical Michigan childhood for the most part. We spent a lot of time in the great outside. We had guns, bows and arrows and knives, we hunted and fished, and we had a snowmobile. It's fucking Michigan! We also had a habit of getting into trouble every now and then, creating havoc, destroying things for no reason, etc. And we smoked a ton of shitty pot. I only had a few run-ins with the law. I can count 'em on one hand. Saginaw had its moments. There was a pretty bustling downtown from the 1960s into the early 70s. It also had one of the highest murder rates per capita in the United States for a few years. My father went into business in the heart of downtown, first running a shop called Bishop's House of Foam Rubber! To this day I think of how, with a bit of perseverance and discipline, I could have become a Foam Rubber Tycoon! But sadly, that never materialized. He then bought an Army & Navy store from my Grandfather and continued running that even after Alan and I finally left for Arizona. But before then whenever we weren't in school, we were working for my dad from a very young age at the store. There was an education to be had by spending a lot of time downtown where all the "action" was. Next door to my dad's store was a black-owned head shop called The Yellow Lion. This was where we were first exposed to drug culture, pimps and hookers, eccentric street freaks, over the top afros, velvet paintings, black-lite posters, and early 70s soul music. My dad was all about business. He wanted us to run the store after he retired but our interest in music seemed to move us away from that idea. My mom was a teacher at one of the big inner-city high schools. She taught English Literature and her specialty was Shakespeare. So we always had an educator close at hand and that helped us in many ways. And she was very supportive when it came to us playing music.
My dad, not so much. He would often say "you boys are living like gypsies," like that was a bad thing. As far as music growing up, when we were 6 years old our parents got us a cheap portable record player and a stack of records, having no idea what we would like. The records were: The Beatles Second Album, The Beetle Beat by The Buggs, Jimmy Soul and the Belmonts, Tom Jones' It's Not Unusual, and that Batman record by Dan and Dale, which, as we found out many years later, featured Sun Ra and Arkestra members Pat Patrick and John Gilmore on several tracks. And we each had our own transistor radios so we listened to AM radio all the time. A few years later we were exposed to my grandfather's small cassette tape collection. Being Lebanese, his cassettes were all recordings of Farid Al-Atrache, Oum Khaltoum, Fairouz, Asmahan, and others. My grandfather played the oud, violin, and double reed horns, but these were all destroyed when his basement flooded so we didn't get to hear him play in person, though there were some older lathe recordings he made that we eventually heard. My mom could play the piano so there was a piano in the house and my first musical experience was probably banging on the piano in ways that shouldn't have been allowed. But nobody ever said anything. Eventually I must have shown some interest in the guitar because my parents bought me a cheap one and encouraged me to take guitar lessons. The lessons only lasted a few weeks. A few years later I got a better guitar and started teaching myself how to play it. Alan started playing guitar shortly thereafter.
Who were some of your earliest influences in your more formative years? When and where did you see your first concert and when did you realize you wanted to spend your life pursuing music? What led to the decision for you and Alan to relocate to Phoenix, AZ in ‘79 and why Arizona specifically?
My first main influence was The Beatles, but in the early 70s I was listening to heavier rock: Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, Yes, The Who, Alice Cooper, and others. So my earliest guitar influences were from these bands. I'll even throw in Ted Nugent just to piss people off. Eventually I started listening to Django Reinhardt, Les Paul, Wes Montgomery and Barney Kessel, and by then I was already listening to Middle Eastern music. Though I was serious about playing the guitar as a teenager, the decision to become a lifelong musician probably didn't materialize until Sun City Girls started. Go figure. The first concert Alan and I saw was Seals & Crofts at the Saginaw Civic Center in 1972. A few of the other early concerts were The Guess Who, Chicago, The Sweet, and Frank Zappa (Bongo Fury tour with Captain Beefheart, though I had no idea who Captain Beefheart was at that point). Surprisingly, a lot of major bands came through Saginaw and I saw most of them, though I did have to go to Detroit to see Led Zeppelin. In 1977 my parents came home one day with 4 tickets to see Elvis Presley at the Civic Center. They asked us if we wanted to go, but Alan and I both immediately said no (probably in unison) - because of the music we were listening to at the time, we just weren't interested at all. He died one month later. I now regret that decision. It would be nice to be able to say "Yeah, I saw Elvis." The reason that we moved to Arizona was because my grandparents (who also lived in Saginaw) had purchased a winter home in Sun City (just outside of Phoenix). Alan and I did a cross-country summer road trip when we were 17 and ended up staying at their practically empty house and exploring Phoenix and the rest of Arizona. We each made separate trips with friends the following year. Arizona was a totally different world compared to Michigan and we just liked it because of that. Alan and I moved there in 1979, leaving our parents in Michigan, though they ended up in Sun City a couple of years later.
Before we jump into SCG, I’m curious to know about the incredibly short lived group Paris 1942. How did you guys initially meet Moe and Jesse Srogoncik? The band recorded an album and an amazing EP. What led to you guys getting together for this project and how did Moe come into the picture?
We met Jesse through the underground scene in Phoenix. He was playing in a band called Destruction (with my brother Alan) around the time Paris 1942 started. Jesse is also on a few early SCG recordings. If I remember correctly, Jesse worked at a record store and somebody had told him that Moe Tucker was living in the Phoenix area. I think Jesse found her phone number in the phone book and just called her up out of the blue and asked if she wanted to play music, and she said yes. Jesse asked Alan to join and he was on board immediately and the other guitarist was Benny Baressi. So along with Moe, that was the original band. Practices took place at Moe's house. At first I would tag along just to hang out and listen and soon enough I was sitting in. Shortly thereafter I replaced Benny as second guitarist. All of the practices were recorded by Moe's husband at the time, on 4-track reel to reel. I think we practiced about once a week. All of the original songs (there were a lot of them) were written by Jesse and Alan, plus we did a number of cover songs: Bo Diddley (with Moe on vocals and guitar), several Velvet Underground songs, and more. The LP and 7 inch were not released until the mid 1990s and, as odd as they are, they didn't really capture what the band was capable of doing. And neither of the releases were mastered very well so the audio quality isn't that good in my opinion. I think there were a total of five live Paris 1942 shows and I played three of them. The last show we did was in Los Angeles at the Troubadour. The same night Nico was playing down the street at The Whiskey. The local music media picked up on this and sort of advertised the evening as a Moe vs. Nico type of thing.
At the end of the night we headed back to the Tropicana Motel where we were staying and Nico came over, hung out with us for a while and then disappeared into the back room to talk with Moe. According to Moe, the two hadn't seen, or spoken to each other since the Velvet days. The next day the newspapers had reviews of both shows and all I remember reading was something like "Paris 1942 had audience members racing toward the door during the first song." I don't really remember that happening, but I hope it was true. There was another show in Phoenix scheduled for the following month with The Meat Puppets but on the day of the show, either Jesse or Alan got a call from Moe saying that she is leaving town with the kids right away because of, well let's just say, "marital problems" which resulted in a divorce. Instead of cancelling the show, we went ahead and did the show with the three of us plus Charlie Gocher and Eddy Detroit, and we performed under the name of the Alien Freedom Quintet. A recording of the show can be heard on one of the early SCG cassettes called "Superpower." I never saw Moe after that and we've only exchanged a couple of e-mail messages over the last forty years. It's too bad. It was a pretty interesting band that I really enjoyed playing in. I honestly had no interest in the fact that Moe played in The Velvet Underground - I knew very little about the Velvets at that time. I was just a 21 year old kid. She was a great drummer - never missed a beat. But I really liked the material that Jesse and Alan were writing and I wish it would have lasted longer - but that might have prevented Sun City Girls from starting when it did so things just happen like they're supposed to. There was one major disappointment after the band broke up - all of the original 4-track reel to reel tapes recorded by Moe's husband, were eventually taped over, destroyed, or "lost". Thankfully, a few crusty old cassette tapes survived.
You guys roughly had two years before SCG formed, what was the first order once you landed in AZ? How did you initially meet the late Charlie Gocher and what were your first impressions of him? What was the overall chemistry like between you guys when you first started out and when did the band play its very first gig?
As soon as we got to Arizona we got involved with the open mic scene. We played mostly cover songs at first. This is where we met Linda Cushma, who was an early member of Sun City Girls. We met a drummer named Kevin Hughes and started a band called "Fuck You". That didn't last long. We then hooked up with a drummer named Joe Musico (yes, his real name) and we became "The Next". By this time Alan had started writing songs, sort of an endless stream of them. So we were now doing all original material. From time to time Alan, myself and Linda Cushma would do a show at an open mic or an art gallery and we had a different name for the band each time we did that. The three of us did a show at a nightclub in Phoenix called Friar Tuck's. It was all improvised and I have no recollection of what it sounded like. There was a guy watching the show and afterwards he asked us what the name of our band was. We had been "practicing" at the house in Sun City so for that night we decided to call ourselves Sun City Girls. Well, the guy evidently liked what we did and later wrote an article about the Phoenix music scene where he mentioned Sun City Girls. That was our first "press."
That guy was Jesse Srogoncik. But we were still "The Next" when playing with Joe on the drums. Linda then officially joined the band and we changed the name to Sun City Girls. We also had a saxophone player named Jeff Jones in the band for a short while. Alan had started hosting an open mic in the back bar of a pizza joint. I think I had seen Charlie hanging around on a few occasions, but the first time I saw Charlie perform was at one of these open mic nights - he was standing on a wicker chair with a drumstick in his hand, waving it like a magic wand. He had a boom box playing some bebop piece and he was scat singing over it at the top of his voice, without a microphone - he didn't need one. He had placed a large flashlight underneath the wicker chair and the light created weird shadows on the back wall. It was surreal. I had no idea he played drums at that point. Afterwards we started talking and we all just hit it off. Later we would perform at the open mic with Charlie on drums and whoever else wanted to sit in. We called ourselves The Freeform Orchestra. Shortly after Linda joined Sun City Girls, our drummer Joe quit. He didn't like the idea of having a girl in the band. Then Charlie became the official SCG drummer. Linda eventually left the band to pursue her own music. Our first show as a trio with Charlie was in December of 1982 at the Calderon Ballroom in Phoenix, opening up for Black Flag.
What was the concept, or idea of the band if you could call it that? What was most important to you guys when setting out to create, express and explore? The band released its monstrous, self-titled debut on Placebo in ‘84. Tell me about writing and recording this record? When and where did recording begin and what was the overall vision for the album?
We didn't have any concept going in. I think that was the most important thing. There was an overall sense of freedom whenever we played together. At first everything was improvised with no boundaries whatsoever and that allowed us to try different things and to go in whatever direction we wanted. This approach seemed to work the best for us (and it still works for me when I perform solo). We quickly developed a kind of telepathy between us, having a good idea of how each of us would react to whatever the others were playing. It was certainly different from what I was used to. Alan was starting to write more unusual songs and Charlie was always coming up with ideas for us to explore. Some of the improvisational ideas we were working on began taking shape and turned into slightly more coherent pieces which had a definite structure, but still contained a lot of room for improvisation. Many of these pieces ended up on the first album. I don't remember much about the recording sessions. I haven't listened to the original reel-to-reel tapes since probably right after we recorded them so I have no idea if there were different takes for each song, or if it was all done on the fly, or even if there were songs that we recorded and didn't use. I don't recall doing any overdubs either but we may have. Memory is the first thing to go and I will blame drugs for that. As far as a vision for the album, I'm not sure there was one. We just wanted to make a record. I don't think we even put our names on the album.
The best way to embrace the SCG catalog, if one can, is for me to present my top five and sort of break them down from there in as much detail as you’d like: “330, 003 CFBTRV” :: “High Asia/Lo-Pacific” :: “Funeral Mariachi” :: “Midnight Cowboys From Ipanema” and “Grotto Of Miracles”.
Crossdressers is certainly one of my favorites. There's so much going on with this one. I think it was the first record we did that featured the Javanese gamelan set that Alan secured at an auction. Also, I don't think it had any of the spoken word weirdness which was featured more prominently on Dante's Disneyland Inferno, which was released around the same time. Crossdressers basically reflected much of what we were performing live at the time. Plenty of ethno elements here. It was great to have Eyvind Kang playing with us on that 30-plus minute live track which was his baby, so to speak (Ghost Ghat Tresspass/Sussmeier). High Asia / Lo-Pacific was a double CD. On High Asia (disc one) we stuck to mainly acoustic instruments that we acquired during our travels, avoiding the usual electric guitar/bass/drum setup. Most, if not all, of the songs were improvised and there is a pretty heavy ethnic vibe to the whole disc. Lo-Pacific (disc two) was all field recordings and short wave radio recordings mostly from Indonesia and Burma. The three of us had traveled to Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and India in 1989, along with our late friend Manford Cain and all of us except Charlie were recording as we went. And Alan went to Burma a bit later and got more recordings there. A lot of time was spent editing it all together and I think it was released as one long track. It's not the easiest thing to listen to, but it captured a moment in time that we all kind of treasured. Manford passed away shortly beforehand and we acquired his recordings from the trip and included some of them. We dedicated Lo-Pacific to him since he was there for all of it.
Funeral Mariachi is another favorite of mine. All but one of the songs are composed, with only the final track being fully improvised. I'm not sure if that was planned or not but that's how it turned out. The opening track (Ben's Radio) is a little out there, but the remaining songs are all pretty focussed and seem to flow together well. It's probably the most accessible and user friendly SCG album, replacing Torch of the Mystics in that department, in my opinion. And it was the last "official" SCG album. We started working on it in 2006 and Charlie passed away in early 2007. Alan and I had to finish it without Charlie's further involvement. We had Eyvind Kang and Jessika Kenney help out with arrangements and backing vocals. Their involvement made a huge difference. The title track (Funeral Mariachi), which most people relate to Charlie's passing, was actually recorded long before Charlie was sick. Dave Carter plays the trumpet on that one. Midnight Cowboys from Ipanema. I guess I'm a little surprised you mentioned this one, though it does have its certain charm, in a ridiculous type of way. It was released by Gregg Turkington via his Amarillo Records label originally on cassette in 1986 and then reissued on LP in the 1990s. I don't remember how this even came about. I think Gregg had written something about SCG in his zine Breakfast Without Meat, and he probably just asked us if we had anything to release and so, that was what we gave him.
I doubt he had heard any of the "material" before hand. There are a lot of cover songs on this and they were most likely all played off the cuff, with no care in the world. There are a few "serious" pieces like Sev Acher and Gum Arabic, but the rest are just little snippets of made up songs, many recorded on a cassette deck with low batteries - some were recorded in Morocco in 1983. There are also a few bits with us quoting some of our dad's drunken rantings (I've Done it All, I'm Gonna Die Tomorrow). The song Go Wild is actually a recording of SCG at our first show with Charlie, opening up for Black Flag in 1982. It features a bunch of skinheads who came up on stage and started playing horns and screaming into the mic. Good times. Grotto of Miracles was our second LP and came out in 1986. It's sort of a natural progression from our debut album - a little more musically focussed, but also with a fair amount of vocal oddities that certainly helped pave the way for the next album which was Horse Cock Phepner. When it was released we were playing every one of these songs during our live shows. That's what you're supposed to do, right? Also, it's probably the only SCG record in which I wrote three songs (In a Lesbian Meadow, Swing of Kings, and Damcar), sort of my George Harrision/Revolver moment.
I’d like to highlight that you have seen the world 10 times over in your life. What is most important about seeing other parts of the world and immersing yourself? What have you learned the most about life, people, culture and yourself through your incredibly extensive travel?
Travel is a personal thing and people will approach it and react to it in their own way. I find it useful to go to places that immediately put me out of any comfort zone. Most of my travels have been related to pursuing and learning about music and/or magical practices in other cultures. Those are my main interests, but a lot more comes with that by default. Being among a different culture is just a great way to experience how others live and how different, and in some cases, how similar it is to what one is used to in a Western country. It depends on where one goes. Most of my more interesting trips have been to places in Asia and North Africa. I've learned a lot about many things, but I've probably learned more about myself than anything else, especially from how I react to and interpret certain situations that present themselves. In places like India, you never know what you are going to see, or what is going to happen around the next corner. So it is helpful to not have any expectations because they will be challenged on a regular basis. Travel is the best form of education in my opinion. To anybody that doesn't have a passport, fix that right away! I have a feeling that traveling in other parts of the world will become more difficult, and certainly more expensive, as time passes.
Your solo career dates back to ‘98 with the debut release of “Salvador Kali”. What was most important to you when kind of stepping out of the SCG gravitational pull for a moment to focus on your sincere passion for the instrumental acoustic guitar? Similar layout as my top five SRB records. “WMGVB”, “If You Don’t Like It... Don’t!” “Fingering The Devil” “Intermezzo” and most recently “Oneiric Formulary”.
When I started playing solo on a regular basis it was basically because there was material I wanted to play that, for whatever reason, didn't quite fit into what SCG was doing at that particular time. Nothing more than that, really. And, I'm not even sure I had any real intentions to start releasing solo records either. When I was approached by Dean Blackwood from Revenant Records to release my first record (Salvador Kali), he told me it was because John Fahey requested it (Revenant was Fahey's label). I was really surprised by that, but pleasantly so. And the one time I met Fahey after that, he actually told me that I played like the devil! That's pretty hard to beat so maybe that kicked me a little to continue with making albums and more importantly, to start touring regularly as a solo act. When it comes down to it, I really don't like making records because it only captures a small moment in time and is usually done under heavy time restraints and can be a bit sterile and an overall mess if you're not prepared. But it's a necessary evil. I think playing live is much more true to form because that is where things can happen unexpectedly - anything is possible, it could go great, or it could go terribly wrong. It always depends on certain factors that are constantly changing depending on the location, the energy in the room, the audience's attention span, etc. I'm okay with that because it is much more real that way. It's live!
While My Guitar Violently Bleeds was recorded very fast. All first takes and all completely improvised. When I got to the studio, there was a band there who had just finished a session and were about to leave. About a half hour after they were gone I noticed that they had left behind a pile of cocaine on a table in the corner of the room (who does that)? Well, what does one do in that situation? I'm sure I did the right thing because I hate to see anything go to waste. So that may be why the record was recorded so quickly. It's three tracks only, though they are lengthy, with the last piece clocking in at around 25 minutes. It is certainly one of my favorites. I'll admit that I couldn't remember what was on If You Don't Like it...Don't! I had to look it up. Cory Rayborn from Three Lobed Records approached me and my brother Alan and asked us to do a split LP. We had known Cory for a while. He released a SCG CD with live recordings from Japan, as well as a SCG/Steve Gunn split LP, not to mention another compilation album that each of us made a track for. So it seemed only natural to continue the tradition. The four pieces I had on there each used a different guitar tuning and again, were all improvisations. I just listened to it and it's decent enough, but I like the album mainly because of my brother's songs. Fingering the Devil was recorded on a day off in London during a European tour in 2005. Somebody from Southern Records contacted me to see if I would have time to do it and I agreed. I arrived on a very rainy afternoon and basically just recorded a version of the live set that I had been doing.
Only two of the songs were composed, the rest were all improvisations. Again, each one was done in one take and I was out of there within an hour and a half. It was a pretty good capture of my acoustic set at that time. I liked how it turned out. I still play a couple of those pieces live on occasion. Intermezzo started off as a CD-R I threw together and was hawking at live shows. Just a collection of pieces I had been working on, but wasn't performing any of them live. A year later Stephen O'Malley contacted me saying he wanted to release it on vinyl through his Ideologic Organ label. This was another surprise. I agreed right away. He later told me it was one of the best selling albums on that label. Oneiric Formulary was the last record I put out. It was released by Drag City in April of 2020. It's a combination of newer material and a few older pieces. A few of the tracks have no guitar at all. There were only a couple of pieces that I could perform live since there were overdubs on most of the songs. I had a full US tour and a European tour scheduled to promote the album, but of course both had to be cancelled because of the lockdowns. When those were cancelled, I completely lost interest in the record and during the lockdowns, while most of my guitarist friends were woodshedding, I rarely picked up a guitar for two years.
What have you been up to most recently? Any new projects, gigs/tours in the works? What are you most proud of and what makes you feel fulfilled when reflecting on your 40 plus year career so far? Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?
After not playing guitar for nearly two years, even though I think it was good for me, I finally came to my senses last year and started messing around again. I haven't "written" much, but have been playing every day like I used to, and messing around with sounds - trying to come up with new ideas for live shows. So I will be doing a US and a European tour which starts in August (2023). That will keep me busy for a while. The music for these tours may be a bit more experimental than in the past, but I will still be playing a few older pieces here and there and maybe some SCG material. I'm still undecided on that. I’m not sure what I'm most proud of over the years. It's probably easier to say that I have no regrets. I'm just glad I can still do what I'm doing after all these years. I've said way too much already!
