From Andy Kaufman to Saul Bellow: David Williams' non-musical influences
Victoria Renard
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David Williams has had a Zelig-like presence in music, turning up in the background of some of its most epochal movements—and often just before its time. Over a career that spans more than three decades, he’s been at the leading edge of various watershed moments of punk, post-punk, noise-rock, and hip-hop, rubbed elbows with Ice-T and Dr. Dre, played “the secret white dude” behind the scenes of The Jungle Brothers’ seminal J. Beez Wit The Remedy, and more recently settled into an in-demand role as a local producer. “I just like hooks,” Williams says of his Jackson Pollock-like palette. “A hook to me can be in a fucking [Karlheinz] Stockhausen piece.” While Williams’ blend of the avant-garde and bubblegum often makes for a good sound bite (Jeff Salamon at the Austin American-Statesman once noted that he was the only person who could “credibly write tracks for Terry Riley and Teddy Riley”), it makes it awfully difficult—and pointless—to delineate the myriad musical influences comprising Shut Up, the debut release from Williams’ new project, Beautiful Supermachines (playing Beerland on Saturday, June 27). Instead, Decider asked Williams—a voracious reader, avid gearhead, and deep thinker—to trace all the various technological, literary, and philosophical strands running through his career.
Portrait of the artist as a young punk (1976-1978)
Williams grew up in the small West Texas town of Naples, where he ran with an older crowd that turned him on to both exotic acts like Roxy Music and Sadistic Mika Band and something much closer to home: Upstart punk group the Vomit Pigs, with whom Williams soon became a “junior adjunct member.”
Technology: The first stuff I recorded, I had a friend’s sound-on-sound 4-track. I sort of accidentally played Paul Leary-like naïve guitar. It was all paranoid, freaked-out, blurt kind of music—which would probably be hailed as “outsider art,” if anyone could find it. Daniel Johnston, art of the insane stuff. I had a Yamaha organ, those early electric, beautiful little slabs of plastic. I had an RMI Electra Piano—like what Sam Coomes uses in Quasi—and a Wurlitzer electric piano, which I had to tune all the time because I played so hard. I had to learn to solder for that. My parents were really supportive, and I saved some money and got the same suitcase synth that Eno used—it’s called a “Putney” in England, the EMS VCS3—through this proto-hipster dealer in Texarkana who ran the jingle studio for Sam Walton, where the Vomit Pigs EP was recorded.
Literature: My hometown was pretty small, so my library was the rotating paperback-book rack at the drugstore I had to walk past when I got off the school bus. I remember a book called I Caught Flies For Howard Hughes—this was right around the time of the Howard Hughes bio hoax. I had a bio of James Ling, the founder of Ling-Temco-Vought. And The Exorcist. For six months, I thought I was going to accidentally sell my soul to the devil.
Philosophy: I wasn’t really reading philosophy yet; that wasn’t until college. But Andy Kaufman: The Midnight Special was a huge influence. My sense of humor is entirely Andy Kaufman’s fault. Have you ever seen him doing that song, “I Trusted You”? Andy Kaufman led directly to my involvement in punk rock.
Denton post-modernism (1978-1986)
After briefly considering computer science at UT Arlington, Williams relocated to Denton to study philosophy, and—after Vomit Pigs’ Mike Vomit died “bloated, underneath a tree at a party while everyone was stepping over him, thinking he was just passed out”—he started post-punk group the Frenetics, followed shortly thereafter by Self Is On The Throne.
Technology: In the Frenetics, I played an Ace Tone organ, back when they were still cheesy—before Yo La Tengo. I hated standing behind that. In Self Is On The Throne, I picked up a G & L guitar. I hadn’t heard any of that New Zealand, Flying Nun stuff, but it was sort of like The Clean—really spare, not playing the root in the bass. A bunch of younger kids in Denton were into it—The McKay Brothers from Macha, they covered Frenetics songs.
Literature: I was reading a lot of William S. Burroughs. I would scan tabloids like the National Enquirer. I wasn’t doing cut-up yet, but instead of writing from scratch, I would use it as a repository of words. It’s like writing a song, footnoting it, then taking away the song and leaving just the footnotes. I’m not into storytellers. Like, I was never into The Clash because they’re so didactic. If you don’t get that right, you actually trivialize what you care about. I think I can do more suggestively. But because I was so young, I don’t think I pulled it off very well.
Philosophy: I was really under the sway of northern German philosophers—phenomenology, radical subjectivity. It’s a form of idealism, like a modern form of Platonic philosophy, where you bracket out all the noise around a concept or idea. You can see how that would lead to a lot of pretentious thinking. The through line of philosophy is that I read it as a cracked form of literature. They’re all failed systems, right? Freud—who cares? There’s nothing to Freud anymore, but it’s a body of work you can get a lot of fucked-up ideas from. The other great thing about philosophy was it could get you laid in the art building.
Colors and calamari with Eazy-E (1986-1988)
On a whim, Williams purchased a sampler and—after making “a couple of chopped-up, goofy collage things”—he caught the attention of fellow Dallas musician Jeff Liles, and the two co-founded hip-hop group Decadent Dub Team. Despite losing a prospective album deal with Island Records, the group spawned the single “Six Gun,” which eventually landed on the Colors soundtrack and netted Williams “one-tenth of a gold record”—even though Williams can’t stand it today. (“It’s the song that white people like on the Colors soundtrack.”)
Technology: I got the first affordable sampler, the Prophet 2000. Back then, nobody cared about clearing samples—so hey, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, whatever you wanted. “Six Gun” was written because I had this Oberheim OB-MX that would read Mirage, Prophet, and Emulator II floppies. I had a particular Emulator II disk where the drums were here and the horns were here, and that was “Six Gun.” It was completely dictated by some programmer and kind of a throwaway, but the lady at the label liked it. Then somebody played it for Dennis Hopper, and it ended up in Colors for five seconds.
That was also Dr. Dre’s first “remix.” Horrible. All he did was put UFO sounds on it. I have to tell this story real quick: At the meeting where Dre decided whether he was gonna do the remix, it was him and Eazy-E, me, and Jeff Liles at this Thai restaurant in Hollywood with paper tablecloths. Three things stick out in my mind: One, Dre was still skinny. Second, the Jheri Curl was dripping off of Eazy-E’s hair and staining the paper tablecloth. And third, we ordered fried calamari as an appetizer, and I can still hear Eazy-E’s voice going, “I ain’t gonna eat that shit! It smells like pussy!”
Lost in The Jungle Brothers (1988-1999)
Williams quit DDT and began concentrating on producing. At the urging of his manager, he put together a demo for Rakim, and he soon found himself in New York working on beats in the background of The Jungle Brothers’ cult masterpiece J. Beez Wit The Remedy, living on “Murder Avenue” with former Orange Juice drummer and Spin editor Steven Daly, and working on remixes with DJ Spooky.
Technology: I was using the Akai S-900, the Opcode StudioVision, and a Korg T1 just as a weighted keyboard. I don’t think anyone had discovered latency in MIDI, so I spent six months chopping loops. I’d have to go into the S-900 and add air in front of kick drums. I turned them onto Stockhausen and all this experimental avant-garde music, shortwave radios on different stations, John Zorn cut-up records… The thing I worked on with DJ Spooky was the remix of [Nick Cave’s] “Red Right Hand” that was in a bunch of movies. Paul got stuck on the beat, and I pulled out one I’d had since 1985. Since I’d had piano lessons, I always mapped out my drum samples on a keyboard and played them live, and I had this hip-hop beat from a thing I did in Denton, and he said, “That’s perfect!” So every time you hear “Red Right Hand” in a movie, that’s me, live in Denton in ’85. For no credit.
Literature: I was really into Martin Amis and Don DeLillo—totally ’90s “guy” literature, influenced by [Saul] Bellow and [Vladimir] Nabokov, late-20th-century capitalists with badass sentence structure. I was also reading a lot of the Physicians’ Desk Reference and the DSM-IV. I love jargon. If I could subscribe to every trade manual on the planet, I would. Plus a lot of Philip K. Dick—I was completely immersed in his late schizophrenic stuff like VALIS—and William T. Vollmann. That fit ’90s New York very well.
Finding new life in those Beautiful Supermachines (2004-present)
After relocating to Austin in the early ’00s, Williams soon found himself working at Open Labs testing digital workstations. With so much equipment once again at his disposal, Williams began writing the songs that would form Beautiful Supermachines’ debut.
Technology: I recorded that whole record using a NeKo running this program called Reaper—which was made by this guy Justin Frankel, who created Winamp when he was in high school. I’m pretty sure it’s the first rock record of its kind all done on one of those machines.
Literature: I’ve been going through another massive Nabokov phase, and rereading Underworld and White Noise. You know what’s a shame about calling your band The Airborne Toxic Event? If that band’s fans haven’t read Don DeLillo, they’re just gonna think, “Fart.” I got my name from Herzog, the Bellow novel. He has this long rant about “the beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind.”
Philosophy: I’m now back all over the Frankfurt school. [Max] Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno—yet again, “the romance of the failed system,” because they’re all failed Marxists. One of Adorno’s big things is the idea of “the culture industry.” The idea is that the content doesn’t matter anymore—the industrial complex pushes it out to people and it’s just consumed. Walter Benjamin’s The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction, that’s an offshoot of those guys. I still think you might be able to get booty off that. But what this record breaks down to is, with the age we live in, that there’s no pleasure that isn’t corrupted. Every pleasure is a “guilty pleasure,” and yet there’s no pleasure in it at the same time. We’re in this hideously post-ironic moment—I call it the “new insincerity.” [Laughs.] That’s my tagline.
