The Chuck Johnson Interview
Are you originally from North Carolina? What was your childhood like growing up? When did you first begin to fall in love with music? Was this something that was relevant growing up in your household?
I was born and grew up in Raleigh, NC. Both of my parents grew up poor, but managed to provide a fairly comfortable life for us during my childhood. We had an old hifi console in the living room - with the receiver, turntable and speakers all built into a large piece of furniture. I remember spending a lot of time with it, playing the handful of records my parents had and my own little collection of KISS and disco singles. I also really loved recording radio sounds from that hifi on a portable cassette recorder. When I was about 7 years old I went to a piano dealer’s exhibition at the NC State Fair and was so enamored with the dealer’s demonstration that I convinced my mom to buy one and find a piano teacher for me. We had limited means, so it was a big sacrifice and a very big deal!
What would you and your friends do for fun growing up? Who were some of your earliest influences in your more formative years? When and where did you see your very first concert? When did you realize you wanted to spend your time pursuing music?
With an instrument in the house, I really never stopped playing music, although I didn’t stick with the piano lessons for more than a few years. I was also a pretty serious swimmer from around age 8 until I went to college, and in hindsight I think piano lessons after school and a two hour swim team practice was maybe a lot to ask! Playing music was a private thing for me, something I did alone on the piano but not with friends or other kids. My friends and I were more interested in typical kid stuff like running around in the woods, playing video games, etc. One close friend of mine lived with his single mom and she was an avid sailor. So we would spend a lot of time on her boat at the coast.
Did you participate in any groups, or projects prior to setting out as a solo artist? When and where did you make your live performance debut and what was that experience like for you?
I didn’t actually start playing guitar until I was in college, and started my first band (Spatula) a couple years after that. This was in Chapel Hill, NC, which was a very fertile music scene in the early 90s. Most of our friends were in bands, and my bandmate Matt Gocke was already in an established band called 81 Mulberry. Our first show was at an open mic night at the local arts center. We played two songs, I think. I immediately knew it was something I wanted to keep doing, and it helped that so many friends and musicians who I admired were supportive. I played in a few other bands and projects in Chapel Hill, but the one that connects most directly to my solo guitar music is Idyll Swords - an acoustic trio with Dave Brylawski from Polvo and Grant Tennille from Black Taj who also played on some Trans Am records. We released two full lengths and an EP between 1999 and 2002.
You released your solo debut, “A Struggle Not A Thought” back in 2011. Tell me about writing and recording that album and what the overall vision and approach was. What was most important to you when expressing this material?
From 2007-2009 I was in graduate school for electronic music at Mills College. In the years leading up to that my interests had turned away from playing guitar in rock bands and more towards improvisation using electronics and raw sounds. I had also been interested in minimalism and just intonation tuning systems, so the program at Mills was an opportunity to dive deeper into all these interests. I had started playing fingerstyle guitar in the mid 90s, and when I finished at Mills I felt drawn back to the immediacy of the acoustic guitar. And I approached some of the tunes I had been playing for years with fresh ears. Resonance, harmonics, and the way sound behaves in spaces were important parts of my electronic music pursuits, and I was suddenly aware that fingerpicking an acoustic guitar in opening tunings tapped into these same interests. Jack Rose tragically passed away the same year I finished at Mills, and I think that also inspired me to try to get that music out into the world. So I started playing guitar shows around the Bay Area, and doing recording sessions. I had a track on a Tompkins Square compilation called Beyond Berkeley Guitar, and because of that the Strange Attractors label was aware of me and were on board with the demos of A Struggle Not A Thought.
2013 saw your follow up on Three Lobed entitled, “Crows In Basilica”. Can you tell me about this album? From 2015-2020 you released a huge body of work featuring titles such as “Velvet Arc”, “Balsams”, “Ayami”, and “Blood Moon Boulder”. What were some of those experiences like for you working on these projects? Do you have a favorite from that period?
I had known Cory from Three Lobed since he released the Idyll Swords EP in 2002, and we had stayed in touch over the years. I think he was pretty surprised by A Struggle Not A Thought because the last he had heard from me I was deep into experimental electronics! But he really seemed to like it and invited me to play at the Three Lobed day party at the first Hopscotch Festival, and when I walked off the stage he asked me to make a record for him! The making of those records were wildly different experiences. Velvet Arc is a band/ensemble record, Balsams and Blood Moon Boulder are entirely solo endeavors that I recorded myself, and Ayami was a long form piece performed live on Negativland’s radio show, hosted and recorded 1by Wobbly, at KPFA’s studio in Berkeley. Of all of them, Balsams marks the biggest transition in my work, and it somehow reached a much wider audience than I had before. I still receive messages and comments from people who are experiencing it for the first time, so for me the response to Balsams has really been overwhelming. There was an intention behind that album: to make music that could provide respite or refuge. And I guess that intention comes through.
Jumping ahead to your anticipated 2023 release, “Burden Of Proof” on All Saints Records, what was the overall vision and approach to this material and how did you watch to go about this album that may differ from anything else you may have done in the past? Would you mind giving some background to tracks such as “The Note”, “Two Worlds”, “Burden Of Proof” and “Letters From The Attic”? As summer draws to an end, what is your fall/winter looking like?
Music from Burden of Proof consists of music I composed for the HBO series of the same name, and although I’ve been composing for film and TV since the early 2000s, it’s my first commercially released album of soundtrack music. In the end, I felt that the music stands on its own. And that might be due to the fact that I worked on the series since 2019 and it went through many revisions and iterations. That’s much longer than a typical scoring project. So there was a lot of opportunity to refine both the film and the music, which I think is evident in the series. The titles connect the music to pivotal events, or scenes in the series. It’s a documentary about a teenage girl who went missing from an affluent Virginia suburb in 1987, and her brother’s journey to find the truth about that happened to her. “The Note” refers to the only piece of evidence that was left behind when Jennifer Pandos disappeared. “Burden of Proof” is the theme and opening cue to the first episode. “Letters from the Attic” refers to new evidence that is uncovered as a result of the film being made. But I don’t want to give anything away about the film, and I highly recommend everyone watch it! The fall is busy with mastering and mixing projects, which is my main gig these days. But I’m playing a show September 2 in Oakland and September 9 in LA.
Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers? No, I think we’ve covered a lot of ground haha! Thanks so much for having me! But I do have a question for you: Why “Primitive Man?”
Primitive Man Soundz: I chose the name from a song called “Primitive Man” by an underground British group called Jerusalem that I was really into at the time when first starting the publication and podcast. They were connected to Deep Purple in a curious way, released one album and kinda faded into history like most of those groups at the time. The song is just killer and one that stuck out when I was really digging that type of music. Having been doing this now for the last couple of years its just stuck at this point!
