Bill Laswell is a bassist,
producer and, having worked with countless
important musicians from
dozens of countries, is one of the vortex points
around which the musical
universe revolves. Mean spoke with Laswell about
his controversial work
with Fela.
When did you first get
into Fela's music?
Bill Laswell: When
I started listening to Cream and stuff, I started to
read interviews with people
like Ginger [Baker] about where they were
getting their stuff from.
Just like Clapton was getting ideas from blues
guys, I realized that rhythm
musicians were getting a lot of information
from Africa. I immediately
started looking for the records, especially
Afrobeat. Just that syncopation,
the up feel. You get ideas about putting
rhythms together. Those
early bands Fela had were really tight. Just like
when this African guy told
me James Brown had just 'messed him up,' Fela
had bands that were almost
like that. I don't think as aggressively tight,
but it had a feel, an Afrobeat,
African feel, with a modern sound.
How did you end up producing Army Arrangement?
At that time in Paris in
84 or 85, Celluloid was the label that all African
or West African, everybody
was going to them for some reason. And they got
a hold of Fela's contract
and his catalog and they just started calling the
shots. Fela was on his way
to New York to come and we were going to mix the
record when he came. On
the way to New York, getting on the plane in
Nigeria, he had something
like ten grand in cash in US dollars, I think. He
was immediately put in jail,
the tapes arrived, and the Celluloid people
were like, 'Well great,
go ahead and mix it. Let's capitalize on the fact
that he's in jail, we'll
get more press.' But the tapes I received weren't
really musical or necessarily
well-recorded. So we felt that if we just
mixed it, it wouldn't bring
anything new to what Fela's legend was. So we
added Sly Dunbar, Bernie
Worrell and Aiyb Dieng from Senegal.
Did you ever meet Fela?
[When he got out of jail,]
Fela did a press tour in the States. He was at
the Gramercy Hotel in New
York. I went there and he was sitting around his
room wearing a shirt and
some underwear and sitting in a lotus position on
the couch, a bunch of people
coming in and out, and we spoke for a few
minutes. He was kind of
amazed that I would come because he had said that
he didn't like what I had
done. There was an African magazine where I was
quoted as saying, "It's
much better to mix an artist's work if they're in
prison." Some really stupid
shit. And that freaked him out. And he was
saying that there was a
sound that wasn't African that I put on the album.
[But] it was a Senegalese
drummer, so of course it's African.
It's very interesting because everybody thought I wouldn't go meet
him, so I just went in anyway.
By that time he had started to deteriorate,
he wasn't as strong. You
could feel he wasn't the person he was. He just
wasn't the presence that
he was before. And it showed in the music too,
because in the '70s Fela
had a really strong band and then he just got kind
of more lighter and lighter.
And then a lot of weird shit came into that
scene. That was a heavy
scene. They were around some heavy people. Cuz he
was the BIGGEST thing happening
in Nigeria, and there's some heavy stuff in
Nigeria-not all positive.