We chat to the founder and frontman of the cult experimental rock band Swans, Michael Gira, about the records that shaped him

Michael Gira: I listened to The Doors’ first album when I was 13. It came at a time in America when there was a great deal of turmoil, a turmoil which I wish still existed today, in that there was mass rioting and protests in the streets. It was the first kind of eruption of a counter-culture and The Doors to me, being from California, were emblematic of this ongoing apocalypse and, sonically, they just embodied that to me perfectly.

The songs can be quite sensual and beautiful. I think that the song “Crystal Ship” is just absolutely beautiful, it’s like Frank Sinatra-beautiful. In fact, there’s a YouTube video—guess YouTube is good for something—of Jim Morrison singing it acapella. I guess they just isolated the vocals but it’s just so unbelievably sensual and tactile.

But then there’s the song “The End”, which is like 12 minutes long, and mainly it’s an experience; it’s this unfolding world that you fall into when you're listening to it. It’s not virtuosic or anything, but it just has fantastic dynamics and drama.

Jim Morrison's vocals are incredible. I guess they had a lasting impact on me in the way that I think about music being an immersive experience.

RD: What’s your next record?

MG: The next one is very much conjoined in my mind. And that is The Mothers of Invention album Freak Out!. That’s a pivotal experimental psychedelic spit-in-your-face anti-consumer society record. It’s utterly fantastic. Some of it sounds a bit dated, but it employed sounds, tape loops, great rock grooves and really acerbic words.

It has such great songs like “Hungry Freaks, Daddy”, “Who are the Brain Police?” and a really great psychedelic song, “Help, I’m a Rock”. And this was at a time when psychedelics conjoined with other rejection of consumer society and, you know, people think of hippies as these dazed, happy creatures or something, but I think that this record was more punk rock than punk rock ever was.

It has a great song about the Watts riots. Watts was a black area in Los Angeles and it erupted in riots in 1966—at the time this record came out—and burned down part of the city. There’s a song about that event called “Trouble Every Day”. It's a great pastiche of strange musical adventures and overwhelming psychedelia, and it’s truly a great record.



RD: Do you remember how you were introduced to it originally?

MG: You know, that’s centuries ago. I just hung out with the hippies and did the things that they did and the word got around. I certainly wasn't reading magazines about music or anything of that nature. It was just around—it was kind of the lingua franca, a great psychedelic record at the time.

"When I was about 16, I ended up in prison in Israel and to pass the time, I would recite The Doors album in my mind"

I listened to it on one of those little record player stereos that were like a tiny small-size suitcase, it didn't have any external speakers, and I listened to it hundreds and hundreds of times.

I had a sort of chequered youth and later on, when I was about 16, I ended up in jail and then in prison in Israel after running away. And to pass the time, I used to recite The Doors album in my mind, I didn't really actually need to play it anymore.

RD: How did you end up in prison in Israel?

MG: I was in Europe with my father and I ran away. I was in Germany with some older hippies, and I hitchhiked down Germany through Yugoslavia into Greece and then into Istanbul. We were running out of money and someone knew someone in Israel. So we went to Israel and I spent a year there as a vagabond, just a homeless kid basically. My older friends had procured some hashish and they left town and left it with me—and I idiotically went to sell it at some youth hostel and then I was arrested there for that.

RD: What a story. So naturally you still associate The Doors with that rebellious period of your life?

MG: Oh yeah. I mean, I didn’t listen to them for decades and I started exploring them again recently for some reason, and I think the Doors records, the first three albums, really hold up very well. And I can't listen to them without associating it with my childhood, so it still sounds magical to me.

You know the song “When The Music's Over”? That to me is just Wagnerian, you know, when it takes off and the synthesiser and the slide guitar enter—it’s just unbelievable.

Morrison was a great singer, even though his poetry was a bit juvenile sometimes. But he sang with such authority that it didn't matter. And I guess, speaking of sticking it to the authority and singers, I could segue into another artist who had a great impact on me, which is Nico.

After her first stilted solo album Chelsea Girls, with the album Desertshore, she became a true artist and chanteuse. Her solo albums Desertshore, The Marble Index, and to the lesser extent The End…, are just unique in modern music. I think that they’re thoroughly uncompromising and most importantly, she’s just completely engrossing and her voice is without apology. She sings in these difficult to parse words but she delivers them with such force that they just convince you immediately.

The arrangements on Desertshore as well as on The Marble Index are just phenomenally good and strange and very abstract. They’re done by John Cale who’s one of my idols in terms of music production. They’re art records, you know, I guess they’re like art classical records.



John Cale. Image via wiki commons

I guess it didn't have this European feeling to them in that they’re often dissonant and they’re very sparse, there’s a lot of spaciousness to them. But her voice is a warrior’s voice, it’s really powerful.

RD: Would you say you borrowed anything from Nico, musically speaking?

MG: Well, yeah, actually. There's a song on the new Swans album that I specifically drew from the arrangement on a song called “It Has Not Taken Long.”

If you listen to that and then you listen to the song “Sunfucker”, you’ll immediately see the relationship. It's not the same musically, but the arrangements are very similar. I just used it as a template because I was so taken by that arrangement.

RD: What’s your next one?

MG: I'll say two records that directly influenced me to move from Los Angeles to New York in 1979. And those two records were the No New York compilation record, which was put together by the so-called no-wave bands of New York at the time. On this record, there were the Contortions, Teenage Jesus and The Jerks featuring the marvellous Lydia Lunch, DNA and Mars.

And the other record, which I conjoin in my mind, the Suicide’s debut album. When I heard that record I thought, Wherever that sound’s coming from, I want to live there, and so it had a direct influence on my moving to New York City when I was first starting to make music.