Silence Is Not Golden
The Man Behind Mission To Mars Wants To Record Your Band
by A. Raitano
There are some things you should know about Philip Golden. He has a degree in philosophy, has a family and cut his musical teeth in college as a punk-influenced outsider in the spandex-clad Welcome to the Jungle scene of L.A. While the radio pumped out hair band after hair band, he and his friends were listening to the Clash and the Minutemen, frequenting clubs off the strip to hear music that appealed to their Husker Du sensibilities.
He moved to San Francisco and played guitar for the well-received power punk-pop band, Buddhakowski. They recorded an eight song demo that was produced by engineering whiz Adam Steinberg (Patti Griffith, Dixie Chicks), who would fly in from his hometown of Boston to oversee the mixing process. The long distance relationship eventually took its toll and the members of Buddhakowski went their separate ways leaving only a well-polished album as a gift to the Bay Area.
Enter Mission to Mars (M2M), Philip's solo project. Initially intended to be a "less-aggressive" folk/rock album, via acoustic guitar and drum loops, ROCKANDROLLSPIDERMANBASKETBALL ended up being Golden's Monster, combining loops, keys, drums, bass (upright and electric ), and the ever-increasingly ubiquitous cello played by BK alumni Mica Pollock. It got airplay on the radio and MTV.
Philip moved to Portland in 2002 to promote his new project, got his old Sex Pistol cover band buddy Scott Kloos to play the bass and Carl Curry to play drums. The result was a heavier, less supple, M2M which culminated in a five song demo recorded in the basement of his Alberta street house. The demo was sent to his friend Rick Stone in L.A. for mixing and mastering and came back a polished piece of work ranging from punk to ballad, from political to philosophical. Philip tells me the band was being shopped. The labels wanted him.
Almost immediately after the release of the demo, however, Kloos left the band to pursue other dreams. M2M floated around for a while looking for a bass player, Philip and his wife had a kid and had trouble selling their house to find a new space to start their family. This is where a good VH1 behind-the-music story drops into depression and nights of painful regret. Sorry. This isn't on of those stories.
Still without a bass player, Golden found a house in the Hollywood district. It is a cute, fairy-tale style house with a brick entrance and a fenced-in back yard that he tells me used to have a Koi pond. He shows me his room that will be made available to bands to hang out in when they are taking a break from recording. Then he shows me his studio. Well, first off let me tell you it looks like a studio. Isolation chambers, drum room, headphone monitoring system, Control area. He tells me the house belonged to an acoustics physics professor at Reed College who built it a few years ago to record some his own stuff. White walls, not a single right angle, everything is acoustically sound. He's recorded four songs in the three months he's been there and they sound fucking great.
His system is digital: PIII 800mhz with logic, a Delta 1010 8 in/8 out card, a sixteen channel Allen-Heath board that he calls "quiet and clean". For microphones he has two AKG 414 condensers, one "lesser" AKG, a "nice" kick drum mic, and an array of 58's and 57's and a mic-pre. On his list next is a tube-pre, something to warm up the vocals.
He was taking the Recording Studio Class at PCC but stopped going because he found working in his own studio to be more rewarding. Still, he tells me that it's "a great class."
"If you have no background at all, or even if you have lots. The first semester is nothing but theory and physics. It was fantastic." He tells me that the second semester he learned more specific things. "Reverb", he says, "Most people set a preset and play around. I learned what does all that shit mean, what does predelay mean, and then you can go in and really make your reverb program a million times better because you know what you're doing. [You learn about] compression. EQing to some extent, although that's a little bit more obvious, although you learn a lot about what you don't want and why EQing sucks, why it causes other problems. You learn a ton about noise gating."
I ask him about a foot rocker pedal that is sitting on a shelf and he played me a sample of something he recorded with it. It sounds like a pissed off tiger being lit on fire by Jimi Hendrix. It sounds mean and gnarly like gnashing teeth. It fills the whole room. It, for lack of a better term, rocks.
"I'd like to get a whole collection of old, fucked up crap. Old tube things, off brands. Just stuff to get different kinds of sounds."
There are some things you should know about Philip Golden. He stands about 5'8" and has short curly brown hair. He likes the Clash, is serious about his craft and he is funny as hell.
We talked about the do it yourself method in music, something I find a lot of in this town. He is well versed in DIY but he's not kidding himself. He brings up Radiohead and Beck being "real bands doing cool shit" that couldn't be made at smaller studios. I asked him about smaller labels being the comet to the major label dinosaur.
 PG: Major labels are just the blind leading the stupid. They blame every possible situation for their own economic downfall except their own inability to identify good music and try to sell it. They say (mocking voice) it's the internet, and people are downloading shit. You don't think it's because your record costs eighteen fucking dollars? Fuck You. I'm gonna spend Eighteen dollars on Britney Spears? I buy every CD used because of that or on sale. Eighteen Dollars my ass. So I guess they are relegated to selling to the lowest common denominator. You know, like Britney Spears or anything on the Grammy's.
MLP: It's not even Britney Spears, it's all the Rock/Rap bands.
They're the worst thing in the world. All KUFO's stuff, where it's just one big pile of unlistenable shit after another. I have some respect for Eminem but don't really like it. That's just my taste. But that's what major labels do. They're like McDonalds now. You're not going to look for them to find the Beatles, circa the new band that's great.
Eminem has the whole Death Row connection. I'm not sure how major label those guys actually are.
Well, they're subsidiaries of a major label. It's all blurry. To me major label means: do you have bigger distribution? Do you have deep pockets? Jay-Z, I don't give a fuck what any magazine says, that is bullshit. It's absolute garbage for the masses. I don't care how many magazines tell me a Big Mac tastes good 'cause it don't. That's what major labels are for.
Independent labels don't even try to sell records to the masses because who gives a fuck what they want to hear: shit. Let them fill their mouths with Big Macs and their ears with Jay-Z and the independent labels will spend less money on [making] a record.
Philip is full of useful information. For those who don't know, payola is what you call it when a record company pays a dj to play whatever the label is selling. It's illegal now, but all that's really changed is that they have added a middleman--a radio "promotion" company--that the record company pays first. Then the promotion company pays the radio stations. It's still the same rules they just renamed the game. Two companies own 50% of the radio stations. The list of musical injustice is long and windy.
He tells me about a friend's label that sells classical and jazz and a "Grand Slam" for them is selling 30,000 copies of a disk. His take is they keep the cost down and you don't have to make a video that comes out of your budget that nobody will ever see which is often a contract breaker for major labels. Selling 30,000 copies is possible with a touring band. "You can make a half a million dollars", he says. "Fourteen dollars a disk? Do the math." Well, it's not quite half a million, even before expenses, but I get the picture.
We look to the independents, Philip believes, because we all know bands on the radio are crap.
If we all know its crap than why do we keep listening to it?
"Kids", he says, motioning to his infant daughter. "Kids."
"When I was fourteen," Golden continues, "my friends and I were listening to Clash and Elvis Costello, all the other kids in my class were listening to fucking Bon Jovi and White Snake. That was every bit as bad as this stuff.>br>
"Not so much in Portland, but in Bellingham, there's no exposure to pop culture and that's what kids want. I can remember my mom coming home, I was thirteen, fourteen, whatever I was. When I bought the first Clash album on vinyl because the guy at the record store told me to buy it. I remember playing and not even believing how cool it was and my mom came in and yelled at me, told me she didn't like it, to turn it off and I said 'OK, this is the greatest thing in the world'."
"That's what kids want. Music is like this. It's a visceral thing. They're not going to find it in paintings or books or T.V. Music always offers that rebellious thing. But now it's corporate pre-fab rebellion. Every song on KUFO is some dude boy is he pissed, he's screamin'. It's a joke."
There a few things you should know about Philip Golden. He is animated, friendly and opinionated. He has a calm fire about him that is almost endearing and gives you sense of no shitness. He doesn't like George Bush. He is an educated man with a quick mind and has no problem giving you a piece of it.
Let me ask you about the political ramifications of music and art on the social conscience of people. Because you are putting your views out there.
Yeah, I write political songs.
Yes, like Botany Lesson.
Botany Lesson is very political.
What is the role of the artist to the social conscience.
(amused) I don't know. I know that the bands... let's just stick with... I don't think I can speak to what Picasso did with Guernica, right? I can speak more to music. I think the bands that have really tried to wear their political aspirations on their sleeve, I think that they succeeded in that, I, as a fifteen year old kid who was listening to the Dead Kennedys and all those kinds of bands and getting ideas and made you want to do something. And I think in that sense you have this real power if people are listening to you. But your not gonna change the world. I think that's what the Clash was talking about being the hardest things that they could get out there and sing those songs and think it's the biggest thing in the world but Thatcher and Reagan are still running things. There's nothing you can do.
So, what are you doing really? I think you are making yourself feel good first. It's your expression, you have the microphone, a big loud guitar behind you and you can say what you want, and everyone else in the bar may not agree with you but tough shit, I got the microphone. There's an appeal to that.
We played a show at the Satyricon and [M2M drummer] Carl's parents, are real nice people but they're right wing people. And Bush was in town and I had a suit on, and I had a shirt on that said "FUCK BUSH" on it, and Carl said they didn't know how to take it but you know what? I've chosen this lifestyle and it's hard as hell and I get to get something for it, right? The bar's not going to pay me more than ten bucks so I get to say what I think, you know? This is a very old discussion. Plato discussed this, the role of the artist and philosopher in society.
As a musician or an artist you have the medium, you have an automatic soapbox. Do you think if people didn't use the soapbox it wouldn't make any difference?
I think you can definitely point to historical periods were there was real change. Clearly the late sixties. That was the sound track of the Vietnam [protests]. I mean, I wasn't there but certainly if you were in London in '76, '77, and all these bands, the Sex Pistols and all that, definitely had a huge influence. Kids were pissed, they didn't know why, someone gets up there who's smarter than most of them and says, what they... and they go, 'right! That's what I mean!'
I know it influenced me. Listening to the minutemen records from the eighties, during the Reagan years, and I was a kid and I was pissed. Listening to these guys that are older than me and they were discussing issues and I would go and look it up, what they were talking about, so it's cool.
I try to write songs... Botany Lesson is an exception. It's such a straight forward, blam, blam punk rock song. I try to not get up on the soapbox too much because it makes you sound like a jackass.
Botany Lesson was a response to the US response to September 11th.
I went to go see Mike Watt, he came to Dante's on September 15th or something like that and he ended a song by saying 'Fuck Revenge!'. He kept saying 'Peace to  Afghanistan. Love to Afghanistan'. And people were saying 'Death to the Taliban' and he was saying 'Love to the Taliban' and I started thinking about it and I said 'that's right'. I can't just sit here and be silent about the whole thing. Everyone's driving around with their flags on their cars, it's an empty gesture, on the back of their SUV's, guzzling gas, it was ridiculous. So that is what [Botany Lesson] was written about.
Hide behind the flag again/Little man with your great big guns in hand.
I was pissed and I'm more pissed now.
I would like to write a song about how we've had this coup de tat. We've got this unelected president. We all know he wasn't elected president. And they've got a right-wing Christian psycho agenda, businessman agenda, which they are now bashing over, as if it were us, as if the Americans are going to war. I'm not going to war, Motherfucker. I think we all feel that way. But we can't do anything about it.
It seems like every week, there is a protest, a big, massive protest worldwide.
And yet the polls say that over half now of Americans support the use of force to take Hussein out of power. Whenever war actually happens, the polls [tend to do that]. It's from people giving in at some point. The whole world is against us now, half our country is against it. I want to have something to say about it. I know how I feel. How do I say something about it without doing the Botany Lesson trick, which I don't like to do. I mean, I'm disgusted with everything right now, in terms of politics. So hopefully I can get some of that off my chest.
There are a few more things you should know about Philip Golden. He is damn interesting to talk to, he knows his shit, and he wants me to tell you he wants to record your band. He's says he's not ready to make you an album but he will make you a fucking great demo at a decent price.
Towards the end of our conversation I asked him how he felt about the attitude of people that suggest musicians and artists should not give their opinion about political and social issues. He says, while it's not a responsibility but "basically, they are acting as individuals. Any individual has the right to do these things and they happen to have a bigger soapbox." He thinks, however, it's unfortunate that some people say stupid things. Being an actor doesn't make you smart, Golden says. He finds Barbara Streisand annoying, even though he agrees with her politics. He watches the Simpsons.
Mission to Mars has found a bass player and have begun gigging again. Aaron Smerle, a "theory head" Philip calls him, a BIT grad, now plays with M2M. He is "less aggressive", "more pop-minded" than Kloss. A few record deals have come his way but nothing yet has struck him as the right deal. He tells me he figures he has one last chance at Rock Star, after that, if the studio doesn't work out, he's not sure what he'll do. Then in all earnest, Philip Golden looks me in the eyes and says, "I don't know, maybe I'll try banking."
philipgolden@attbi.com
mp3.com/missiontomars |
