Spiritualized: "the Stooges fueled the whole thing.".

AFTER JUST OPENING HIS EYES on the road, Jason "Spaceman" Pierce of the band Spiritualized was woken up to answering the following questions.--Schmitty

Where were you born and raised?

"Born and raised," that's so American.

When did you start playing music?

When I was 16. Pretty much when we started Spaceman.

Do you remember what your first instrument was?

An acoustic guitar that my mom bought, and it was a real big deal for her. She bought it for me for Christmas and she showed me three weeks before, because it was a big deal for me to have something like that. So she kind of checked out if it was something I'd want before she gave it to me. I played that when I was a kid but then, like everything you do when you're a kid, I put it away. Then I rediscovered it when I left school.

What were your early influences? When you first got into music and started playing, I guess fight before Spacemen time?

The Stooges fueled the whole thing. The only things I owned were Stooges records. I met Pete at college and he pretty much had a collection of the Cramps records, and his brother had a few records. His brother had stuff like Suicide and Devo. So that was the most major influence on what we were doing. And then Maxy, who came in to play drums, his taste in music was so much broader than ours and he brought in everything from Captain Beefheart to the Staple Singers.

So how did gospel become such a big influence?

From the Staple Singers, I guess. You listen to the Stooges alongside Triumbo. the Staple Singers. I love the feeling that you get when you hear fantastics music--when you're absolutely floored by music. I've always been like that. Once you hear the Staple Singers, you want to check out the Soulsters, Mahory Jakson. You want to check out the Aretha Franklin gospel. It kind of just goes from there.

Was one of the goals in leaving Spacemen 3 and starting Spiritualized to go big-orchestra style?

No, not really. I guess it was part to make a very definite move away from Spacemen 3. Pete kind of wanted to take Spacemen 3 almost into the catering industry--this is what people want and tiffs is what we are going to do. I was more like "We have already done that, as a band and as musicians. We've already been over that ground." I thought it was dumb to go over it again. And at the time Spacemen had stopped being the live band and stopped working. We were doing "Revolution" twice nightly 'cause that's what the audience wanted. They'd shout "Revolution!" and Pete would be like, "Yeah, we know that song. Here it is." So it was kind of to put a lot of distance between myself and ground that we had been over. I wanted to cover a lot of ground, fast, 'cause I had Salt like I hadn't covered any in the last year and a half with Spacemen.

Yeah, you should always strive for something new.

It's part of what you do in music. It's part of why you go on the road, and why you tour. You're not satisfied just treading water somewhere, going backwards. You're looking tar new stuff all the time.

Why the name Amazing Grace. Where did that come from?

It is what it is. Everyone has a take on what "amazing grace" means to them. It's almost like the other half of the start of rock and roll. Aside from its obvious religious things, everybody's got a take on it from gospel. It's almost like everybody knows American music being the blues, but the other half of American music and gospel music is this kind of weird, uptight church music that came from Europe. German music like "Silent Night," English music like "Amazing Grace." It kind of factored into the country music and mixed with blues music to become American gospel music, but slightly more mundane. I heard William Parker and Matthew Shippes' version of "Amazing Grace," and I thought that maybe Spiritualized should try and perform some standards in that way. When we tried and played the song, it kind of factored into some of the songs you hear on the album. But there's more than a little bit of sarcasm in calling the album Amazing Grace. We got "This Little Light of Mine," which is saying "I ain't gonna take good care of this: this is mine and I'll treat it how I fucking want to treat it."

So it's kind of a tongue-in-cheek twist of sarcasm?

No, it's not sarcasm at the expense of the religious side of it. It's more like this is amazing grace or everyone wants a piece of amazing grace. So it's not really at the expense of the church.

It's kind of confusing with you not being religious, but you're singing gospel-influenced songs.

Kind of, but the only difference between gospel music and pop music is that you change the word Jesus to Baby and you've got either or. The passion in which they sing to Jesus is far more than people put into their every day music. That's what I get off on in gospel, this kind of excitement for it. It's almost like voodoo music, like anything they genuinely believe in. That's what I've always tried to do---it's not just going through the motions, playing the notes in the right order and then you get your song. It's about being really passionate about it and believing in what you do.

Talk about the unique way you recorded this album.

This record is more informed by flee jazz, by spontaneous music. Generally in that music you listen to other sounds in the room and then you respond to them. I kind of wanted to try and apply that to the recording of this record. Because that's something we've always done live: that's not new to us. Our live shows have always been about taking it in all directions. The only way I could think of doing that in the studio was giving the songs to the band on the day we were recording them. So what you're hearing on this record is a drummer playing to a bass line that he's never heard before in his life and responding to guitars and lyrics they've never heard. You get this kind of immediacy, this kind of spontaneous moment that is actually quite rare in rock and roll music.

Kind of jam style?

Kind of. What we've captured on record is the first time these songs were held together as songs. That comes with its own energy. It comes with a different type of excitement.

So how many takes would each song go through on average before you were happy with it?

Maybe four or five. Because the first take is genuinely way off the mark, because no one knows that the chorus is coming up or that any new parts were going to be added by me. So the first take is more like a jam rehearsal. By four or five we had something that really kind of captured something unique in these songs. And like everything in life, we did it another four or five times before we realized that we got it four or five times ago.

How did you like playing in SF?

Our sights are always set molly high in San Francisco because we've done some astonishing shows there. We did our 666 show in SF; we played at Slim's on All Souls Night, They sold 666 tickets and the promoter couldn't handle it. He was trying to sell one more ticket on the street. He thought it was a bad omen. He was absolutely freaked out by it, and the show was absolutely fucking astonishing. We have very rarely been anywhere near that level of show. So every time we come back, the bar goes up higher each time. I think the second night there at Bimbo's we gave San Francisco something they deserved. That second night was amazing.

How many guitars do you have?

I've got too many guitars.

Over 20?

Probably, yeah. I have a 1938 Gibson acoustic, like the part owned by the devil that's hard to lose. It's just the most beautiful thing. It's like the guitar on the Robert Johnson record.

Will we ever see a Spacemen 3 reunion?

No. That's a big no, I guess. What we are doing now is much more exciting than that. The reality is that this is so much more intense now. So to pull a whole load of songs from years ago, again, it would be like covering old ground, and I ain't finished. If that was as far as I could go in life and in music, then, yeah, going over some old ground that you covered when you were a kid would be a good thing to do. But I'm so not there at the moment.

Do you have any advice to someone starting to play music?

Don't go to school.