To what degree is playing a guitar solo an intuitive act and to what degree is it deliberate? Do you consciously choose the notes you play, or do you sort of blank out and let things happen?

It varies. It goes between the head and the heart, kind of jumps from one to the other. You just do it. When you think about it too much, the quality deteriorates. I just like to shut my eyes and "get gone," as they used to say. You've got to take risks -- otherwise it's boring. And sometimes the risks pay off, and sometimes not. But I'd rather take that chance than play safe. Though to a certain extent, everything one plays is based on patterns. You can play in parallel keys, whole tone scales, diminished scales -- you just connect the patterns up in a new way, an interesting way.  You chop them about. There's a certain amount of new stuff that comes out in every solo, but a lot of it is cliché.
     It's all how you vary the form. For example, a lot of British traditional music is very structured. The tunes are always played faithfully -- unlike, say, bluegrass, where a musician might only take a song's chord changes and ignore the melodic material -- and the variation from player to player is very subtle. It's all in how you go from note to note.

What led you to become a Muslim?

I think I always was. And at some point, I realized that I was and wanted to affirm that. That's all.

Is it a "musical" religion? From what little I know of it, and the writing connected with it, there seems to be a lot of earthly imagery -- wine, women, song.

You have to start with traditional Arabic poetry, the language of which is very, very rich. The best Arabic poetry is the love poetry, which deals with the love between a man and a woman. Very rapturous stuff. And the great Arab teachers, the great Sufis, used that structure to teach and describe things that can't be described. things that are beyond form are described allegorically in the imagery of the world, in the form of the love song. Unfortunately, it's atrociously translated, by Orientalists who see it as romantic poetry and render it in the style of Keats or Shakespeare. You have to decipher the translations; it's as bad as that really.

Does that use of allegory have any bearing on your own writing?

If you write any sort of poetry, you're using language, you're twisting language, you're sometimes putting together unconnected parts of language to weld new words and meanings. You're trying to express something beyond the words, something actually too big to express. To say to someone, "I love you" or "You're absolutely wonderful" doesn't sound right, you know? You have to go away and sit down and write something like, "Shall I compare thee to a...." You can do that to an extent in a song, too, but you can't get the language that you can in a poem. You can't get the music that you can in a symphony. It's a limited form, a three-minute form. And the best you can do is say something very succinctly, as quickly as possible, and within the limitation of that form try to forcefully put something across.

It seems that one can put an idea across very forcefully through rock & roll.

It seems that you can.

And rock & roll certainly has greater social impact than symphonic music.

Well, it's more accessible. It's much more of a -- I'm trying to avoid British class clichés -- it's more available, whereas symphonic music has always been elite. Poetry's really been pretty elite, as well. Rock & roll's much more for the ... common man, shall we say?

You can do anything with music, you can do anything to people with music, really anything at all. You can lift them up or bring them down. Rock music in particular can drive people crazy. It's loud -- that's the main thing about it; its volume gives it tremendous impact. In that sense it's dangerous. In that sense one occasionally has to ask oneself what one's doing in music and if what one is doing is of any use to people, if it's helping people in some way. If it's leading people to destruction, what's the point in playing it?

How do you answer when you ask yourself that question?

Well, I usually feel okay. I think most of what I do is harmless.

Harmless? Nothing more positive.

At worst, it's harmless. At best, hopefully, it's thought provoking, or moves hearts. That's what I want to do, move hearts. Like my heart moves when I play.
 
 

to Richard Thompson, Jan. 15 1982
to Q&A
Words
 

Copyright Robert Lloyd © 1982 and 2006