The Tom Carter Interview
Tom Carter is a Texas based legend who has been creating music with his radically philosophical poetry for over 3 decades. Having participated in groups such as Badgerlore, The Mike Gunn, Mudsuckers, the great Charalambides and many many more. His work stretches the imagination with chaotic textures, serene scenes of psychedelia, patterned tones and sprawling distances into the human subconscious. In this incredibly in depth interview, we talk about Carter’s youth, how he got into music, his earliest influences such as Queen, Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, forming the great Charalambides, his solo career that took off in ‘03 and much much more!
Tell me about growing up in Salisbury, MD. What was your childhood like? What led to you relocating to Houston, TX when you did? When did you first begin to fall in love with music and what was it that initially fascinated you about it, more specifically the guitar and bass? Was music something that was relevant around your household growing up?
I don't remember much about growing up in Salisbury. Mainly a bunch of family stuff, going to the beach, and doing the kinds of things kids do in small towns - playing in the woods all day, hanging out with friends from school, speculating on what pornography might look like if we should ever actually see some. I left Salisbury when I was probably 8 years old, in 1975? The main thing I remember about leaving is the tank farm at the edge of town exploding, and the enormous shockwave knocking me out of bed. We got on State Highway 50 and drove to Greenville Ohio, where my dad had a new job, which began a 9-year stretch of living in various places in Ohio. Eventually I ended up in Toledo, which is where I finished high school. Why I fell into music has always been a mystery to me. I grew up listening to Barry Manilow and show tunes, which is all my parents listened to on our 8-track player, when they listened to music at all. (Mysteriously, we also had an 8-track copy of Eat a Peach). Music wasn't totally alien -- we sang at church and had a piano in the house, which my mom played when no one else was around, though the family all sang Christmas music together once a year. And for some reason, all three kids were expected to be in the marching band.
I played alto sax from maybe 4th grade until high school when I decided to take computer classes (a novelty at the time) instead... Which I think was the right move, but I still wonder sometimes what would've happened if I'd stuck with the horn. As far as records -- which fundamentally shaped how I hear and make music -- my older sister had a few, so I got to listen to all her cast-offs. At first that was Beatles and Stones 45s, then a small stack of LPS that included a couple Elton John records, a couple Billy Joel records, and somehow, a copy of Led Zeppelin 2. I quickly became obsessed with that one, staring at the gatefold image of the zeppelin with its spotlights shooting down towards the ground. I imagined it raining death on screaming bystanders while Moby Dick blasted at top volume from speakers mounted on its gondola. I also listened to a lot of radio, although I didn't hear a ton of what was then called AOR ("album-oriented rock") until my preteen years. Anyway, by the time I was 13, I had moved to Steubenville (where I smashed my first guitar while imitating Pete Townsend), and back to Greenville again. I joined the Columbia Record Club, cruised mall and K-Mart cutout bins, and began piling up records (and later tapes) on my own. At that time it was mostly Rush, Queen, The Doors, Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd and of course Led Zeppelin.
I started digging deeper and tapping into Talking Heads, Prince, and later King Crimson (Discipline in particular). Via the Rolling Stone classifieds (and inspired by multiple cover-to-cover reads of the Trouser Press Record Guide, second edition), I began doing mail order from Ralph Records. My friend Pat discovered the Toxic Shock catalog through the same ads (and became the person to play me a hardcore record -- Everything Went Black, the commercials side). By 1982, music had become a social thing, and although nobody played an instrument yet, it felt like a band was waiting to happen. But back to 1980, when I was 13, my dad died and my mom remarried quickly. I left Greenville a couple years later in my sophomore year and moved to Toledo, where my stepfather lived, and amazingly, my parents bought me another guitar when I was 14, or 15, which I ignored for a year or two before finally picking it up and teaching myself chords from the Mel Bay book (and bass lines from Unknown Pleasures). Once I got to Toledo, I had access to better record stores and started scooping up punk and whatever looked weird. I tortured new friends with Pere Ubu, No New York, The Fall, fhe Velvets, Iggy and the Stooges. These friends, who I met shortly after moving to Toledo, were all music/ computer nerds. We hung out and watched Monty Python, Night Flight and Pink Floyd "Live at Pompeii," drinking Coke from 2-liter bottles (we were straight edge, I suppose, but not for long). We started to play music together right away, and in 1984 I bought my first real guitar (a Yamaha acoustic). We attempted to figure out songs from Beatles, Rush and ELP records -- but mostly we played long drawn out blues jams with three (or fewer) chords. My attempts to sound out stranger stuff were typically rebuffed, but there were still plenty of weird feedback experiments performed in the basement, even if none of the good stuff (if there was any) survived on tape.
My tastes and playing both became more expansive as high school wound down and college approached. I read a lot, because that's how you found out about new music. Forced Exposure was a big deal, and there was an article in (I think) Guitar World that interviewed Live Skull, Rat at Rat R, Sonic Youth, Arto Lindsay, Elliott Sharp and a few others. That really blew my mind. As my awareness of punk (and its derivatives) picked up steam, it became OK to play simply and fiercely. Punk set me up for Sonic Youth, who blew all my perceptions wide open -- the first time I experienced pulling sound from a guitar as a pliant physical process that could be molded apart from the rules of "music." Once I graduated, I wanted to get as far away as I could, although I didn't verbalize it like that. I ended up at the University of Houston, who offered me a full scholarship for four years with in-state rates (which at the time were ridiculously cheap). It took me a semester-and-a-half to figure out that I didn't want to study engineering, which I was terrible at. I spent the rest of my college years finishing my English degree, reading Philip K Dick/ William S Burroughs/ Charles Bukowski in the UH Library, smoking weed, dropping acid, playing in short-lived bands, and making druggy solo recordings on a boom box or borrowed Fostex 4-track. Anyway, to close off this question, as far as what fascinated me about the guitar, I'm not really sure. I think it was the romance of it, and the fact that all the band I liked were guitar bands. There was something about the sound of densely layered power chords, screaming thirds and fifths, shrieking feedback. I had a weird love of performing, which enabled me to act out in a way that was otherwise difficult to obtain as a shy, introverted kid who moved every few years. Almost from the start, I would attempt to play things on guitar that were way beyond my abilities just to show off, and I admit that I still do that.
(Btw, you asked about bass, but I have never really been a bass player, and only pick it up when someone asks -- though I did decide the first time I played with Jandek that I only wanted to be a bassist as far as Corwood was concerned. The last thing Jandek needs is another guitar player).
When and where did you see your first concert and what kind of impact did that leave on you? What were some of your earliest music projects/groups that you’ve participated in? When and where did you initially make your live performance debut and what was that experience like for you?
My parents dragged me to the Grand Ole Opry in 1978 while on vacation in Nashville, but I'm not sure that counts (I was in agony at the time, but I would certainly enjoy it now, and I've tried numerous times to track down an artist roster from that era to figure out who I saw). The first concert I paid for with my own money was Judas Priest and Iron Maiden (on their first US tour with their original singer), summer of 1980, while on vacation back in Salisbury. The spectacle and the community (and the sheer volume) made more of an impression than the music, and it was the first time I'd seen people smoking weed (my aunt had been deputized by our absent parents to keep people from passing joints to us). I've already talked about my earliest playing experiences above. My Toledo friends and I called our band the Cellar Dwellers, and my first real gig was with them at a house party on New Year's Eve, 1986. I'd just been dumped by my high school girlfriend and got super drunk and rolled around on top of my electric, a shitty Kalamazoo spray-painted primer black that I'd bought from a friend for 10 bucks a year earlier. Back in Houston, I was in a few bands (Schlong Weasel, Herpes Media Blitz, Danny Bonaduce Soul Explosion), and my next half-dozen gigs or so (1986-87) followed the same pattern (and indeed, almost everyone else in these bands rolled around in the same drunken fashion). I joined a thrash/ stoner metal band at the same time called Da Plug Uglies, who sounded like a shambolic cross between St. Virus and Corrosion of Conformity, and that was where I "learned" to play guitar and write riffs.
I kept playing in both Schlong Weasel and Da Plug Uglies for a while, until the general insanity surrounding Da Plug Uglies (which would require its own interview to describe) finally drove me crazy and I quit. (I spent the next few years dodging their singer, a gun-toting bruiser/English teacher who I feared would attempt to kill me). Schlong Weasel survived, however, and gradually, the more "serious" musicians in that group separated out into various configurations (spawning several different concurrent lineups, all named Schlong Weasel, all playing separate gigs around town). The configuration I stuck with more or less transformed into the Mike Gunn (1989-1993), the first "real" band where I had my own skin in the game, and the first one to release a record (though Da Plug Uglies managed to get a track on a comp LP called "Houston Loud" a few months before). I loved being in the Mike Gunn at first, forging the kind of simultaneity and non-verbal language that would coalesce jams into real music, riffs into songs, etc. We put out 3 LPs and recorded another one or two (or three) that were never released. This was during peak grunge/Amphetamine Reptile era, and as time wore on (and I was getting more into the Incredible String Band and the Dead C than Helmet and Soundgarden) I felt the band was losing its psychedelic shagginess in favor of a wound-up, power chord jumble of right-angled time signatures -- in short, I was getting bored, and wanted to veer into formlessness, and no one else did. Christina and I had been recording as Charalambides for a year when one day Scott and John (bassist and guitarist/vocalist for TMG, respectively) came to visit me at my bookstore gig to tell me they wanted me out of the band (fortunately, I'd independently decided to quit anyway, fueled by the Charalambides Siltbreeze deal, so it was mutually agreeable).
How did you initially meet Christina if you don’t mind me asking and what initially led to the decision to form the wonderful Charalambides in the early ‘90s? What was the music and artistic chemistry like between the two of you and what was it exactly that solidified that foundation to then start making music together?
Christina and I worked together at Sound Exchange from 1989-1993 and became friends that way, although I think I first met her when she was living with my friend P.G. (who's now a free jazz promoter in Austin) a year, or so before that. My old college roommate Kyle Silfer turned up in Houston in late '91 (he'd moved back to New York, and then returned to Houston for a month to escape a bad breakup). Soon we all started playing music together, Kyle fretting guitar chords overhanded with only his thumb. After he left Christina and I kept going. Once Christina and I started playing together, the musical chemistry was immediate and natural (more on that below).
You guys self released your first albums, “Our Bed Is Green” and “Historic 6th Ward”. What was the vision and approach that you guys wanted to take with your music as the 90s continued to roll and morph into its many different shapes and sounds? What were those early gigs like for you guys?
Though we had various recording strategies, the most fundamental was Christina recording drony, single-chord guitar parts and singing on a boombox. I'd move the tape to the 4-track and layer overdubs. We had no goal or plans and it was liberating, especially after the increasingly uptight and disciplined compositions of the Mike Gunn. With Christina, her vocal melodies rolled out effortlessly and sounded immediately great. It was glorious to build sounds on top of that bedrock, and everything flowed and felt new. Once I left the Mike Gunn, suddenly everything was wide open, and we realized we had a creative project with no rules, preconceptions, or ambitions, and it felt amazing. Our Bed Is Green is the purest example of this; Historic 6th Ward (although some of it was recorded at the same time as OBIG) actually came after Union (on Siltbreeze) and featured a handful of more complex songs, though it never felt forced to integrate those into our other work. And although we've gone through periods of free (or structured) improvisation, or more intricately mapped songs, or different lineups, our layering approach hasn't changed too much, either in the 90s, or later. Playing live was more problematic, and we wouldn't really get that down for almost a decade. We did one or two shows with Kyle where Christina was so nervous she threw up beforehand. We did one or two Houston gigs as a duo after that before Christina decided that she never wanted to play live again. In early '93 we tried again, however, and played a house gig in Flint, MI, of all places, organized by Chip Porter. That was the last time we played as a duo for 3-4 years.
Shortly after the Flint gig, Tom Lax invited us to play the '93 Siltbreeze festival at the Khyber in Philly. We didn't want to perform as a duo so we invited Jason Bill to be our third member, thinking it would fill out our sound. We picked Jason because he told us he'd been playing for 10 years but he still couldn't play "real" songs, which sounded right in line with what we were doing. We agreed to play the festival (which included Guided by Voices, Strapping Fieldhands, Bassholes, etc.) and Tom also set up a few shows for us with Harry Pussy, who we met for the first time in Atlanta. We went on to tour with them two more times. The shows were still spotty but successful enough that we kept at it until 1996, when a couple disastrous shows on the Rose Watson tour with Harry Pussy and the Shadow Ring (check out the liner notes for the last HP live LP for more on that) convinced Christina once more that she never wanted to play live ever again. We kept trying to record a second trio LP for Siltbreeze without success, and eventually Jason moved to El Paso and we became a duo again. We finally finished Houston, our last album for Siltbreeze (ironically, after moving to Austin) and were encouraged to play live again by Craig Stewart, Tony Dale, and Pete Dixon (KFJC), and in 1999, we did another very short tour as a duo. We stripped our sound down to the very basics and recast ourselves as sort of a minimal improvisational acid-folk band, and started playing with Heather Leigh soon thereafter in order to tour around the 2000 Terrastock in Seattle. (Heather was in Charalambides through Joy Shapes, until roughly 2005 when she moved to Glasgow). Christina and I kept at it until we finally became confident players and performers and haven't stopped since, even though the pace of gigs is glacial at times.
As much as I’d love to run through the group's whole entire discography, I’d like to jump nearly ten years into the future with the band’s ‘06 masterpiece “A Vintage Burden”. One of my favorite songs from you guys is “Dormant Love”. Would you mind walking me through the writing and recording process of this record and a little back story to some of the songs including, “Dormant Love” and their meaning?
The more "friendly" tone of AVB was primarily a reaction to Joy Shapes, which was defined both by the intense trio recording sessions and the personal/ emotional context in which they took place (Christina and I were going through a protracted breakup and divorce, and also severing ties with Texas). After wrapping up Joy Shapes in late '03, I hit the road solo and fell in love with a friend in San Francisco. As fate would have it, the bookstore chain I worked for had a manager job open up in Berkeley, and I got the job, which came with an all-expenses paid move from Austin to the East Bay. I moved in early 2004, eventually landing in Oakland. Sometime in late 2005, Christina came through with her then-partner Andrew MacGregor (Gown), and we recorded the basic tracks. We'd decided to revert to our original recording strategy of laying down very basic tracks and building on those. Christina already had most of the chords plotted out, so it went really fast, although it took me months after that to edit and layer everything, especially Black Bed Blues. Perhaps in honor of my new California home, I was listening to the Dead, the Byrds, Love and the Airplane nonstop and it shows in the guitar parts. It's hard for me to comment on the lyrics. Christina by this time was writing a lot of poetry and she's always focused on images rather than biography, so while the lyrics are personal, the images are based more on facets of experience rather than narrative. Sometimes they are character-based, which is how Dormant Love strikes me, but that's more of a question for her. As weird as it sounds, I pay little attention to lyrics until a record gets to the mixing stage, and don't really digest them until after a record is finished. Sometimes they take years to sink in, and often I realize I've misheard a line, thought something was personal when it wasn't. I think Christina realizes that many listeners hear lyrics as biographical, or overlay their own experiences, and she plays with ambiguity while still using very exact language, very specific images.
You’ve played in numerous bands/projects with numerous artists over the years including Grouper/MV/J Mascis/Ben Chasny/Rob Fisk and countless others. What keeps you creative and still interested in making music and art over the years? What are some of the most fascinating and engaging elements of exploring music, tone and texture the way you have over your career?
Well, I’ve stayed creative because I haven’t stopped. Even when the flow has slowed to a trickle, it’s never totally dried up, even during Covid, becoming a homeowner, getting remarried, etc. and, of course, even when I’m not creating as much, I’m still endlessly devouring music and information about new artists and musicians, because I think that’s just the way I’m wired. I am always more interested in what I don’t know then what I know. It’s funny you mention all the collaborations, because in a way, that’s what keeps me going. I started pursuing a solo career more earnestly in 2003, because it was becoming apparent that once Christina and I split up, we would be pursuing our own paths in addition to Charalambides. For me, that meant moving to California and establishing a lot of new relationships. Oakland is where I met Pete Swanson, Glenn Donaldson, Liz Harris, and especially Rob Fisk, who was the glue that held all these people together in Badgerlore. (I’d known Ben for a few years before that.) Even today, I'm sustained by other musicians. Most recently, that's been the improvising community in Houston, since touring has reduced to a trickle since Covid. I'm still waiting to see what the next phase of my solo performed and recorded work is going to sound like, but I've been thinking a lot about something John Duncan said in a recent interview about his true medium being consciousness: I.e., music and performance literally altering mental and physical states. Not sure what it means, but I hope to find out.
What works of yours are you most proud of and why? Are you currently working on anything new? Any plans for 2023? Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers?
Christina, Jason and I have talked about doing recording and possibly performances sometime this year or next, which would be the first time the Market Square Charalambides lineup has played together since 1997. I have a few solo shows lined up, and a few recordings I need to edit and finish, which will probably got on Bandcamp since the physical media landscape is all but impossible to navigate currently. But overall, it looks like a quiet year devoted to personal and household projects, and the everyday tasks of work, play, home improvements, and helping run a resale business. I would like to play again with my rock band Morning Scales the Mountain, but distance makes that difficult - 1/3 of the group splits his time between two continents, neither of which are North America. What am I most proud of? That I'm still kicking and creating. Charalambides, of course. My collaborations with Loren Connors, who I believe to be the most important solo guitarist (and artist in general) since John Fahey. And that I still don't really know what I'm doing.
