David Lynch, (Non-)Musician: The L.A. Weekly Interview

Did you get a feeling "Up in Flames" was a turning point? Because the Twin Peaks score is kind of ethereal.

Yeah, angelic, yeah. Every song wants to be a certain way. With Koko Taylor, the players on that got so into it. Angelo and I wrote it, but then we recorded it here in L.A. I think it was right down on Sunset. And Nicolas Cage had been working with a guy ... I think it was not the original guitar player for Elvis but the later guitar player for Elvis. And there was a guy who was Elvis. I mean this guy was, I don't know if you'd say an Elvis impersonator, but this guy was working with Nic, but Nic just got it, man. Those Elvis songs on Wild at Heart were really great. Nic Cage: really great.

PHOTO BY SEAN TEEGARDEN

"Happy accidents are real gifts and they can open the door to a future that didn't even exist."

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• Moby (Musician)
• Wild at Heart (Movie)
• Elvis Presley
• David Lynch
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

If you go to some karaoke places nowadays, people sing "Love Me" not like Elvis but like Nicolas Cage in Wild at Heart.

Oh, yeah? [laughs] Wow, that's really good.

It's a strange tribute.

Strange trip, yeah.

So, we recorded "Up in Flames" in the same place, I think. And the players were so good. Especially the guitar player on "Up in Flames" was just dive-bombin', you know, dropping bombs, and it was really, really, really good. And Koko Taylor [makes a sublime face]. She was like a ... you know, she's the real thing.

Did you listen to a lot of blues music growing up?

No. I came later to it. I've loved music always and my music fire was lit by Elvis Presley, really, and all that was happening back then. And I always say the same thing: That music that was born out of a combo of many things was so special and then Elvis went into the Army, so what was started ... it's strange.

I think it was like this tremendous explosion, white-hot, it was so hot when it happened. Instead of just raging forward, it burned, but it kind of went down a little bit, and it kind of got lost in people being — I don't know, I'm just making things up — being quite not so sure, and other things kinda were still there and this kind of real, real rock & roll kinda got lost a little bit. The fire went down.

The power ... I think people have got it, for sure, but there was something happening there that was real, real, real special and hard to match.

Isn't that the same argument punk rock made when it appeared in the mid- to late '70s? "Rock got too proggy, theatrical, and we're gonna bring back the fire of '56." Do you remember that happening?

Yeah, yeah. But it wasn't ... it was loud and it's like a thing. It set a time. Punk set a time. And I know they were trying to get there and there was some great stuff done, but it wasn't ... rock & roll is like ... [long pause] It's not just loud, and it's not just a beat. There's something. And to find it you would look at Gene Vincent, and Elvis Presley, and those guys, and even Roy Orbison, Everly Brothers, ["Come Softly to Me" vocal group the] Fleetwoods. ... These people, it could make you cry, and it could make you, you know, wild at the same time. There's a mixture.

I don't know what it is, but it was there and it kind of dissipated a little bit, I think.

Brian Eno is also a huge fan of the sounds of his childhood, and he's mentioned the Fleetwoods as a reference for his music. [Side note: On the mixing desk of Lynch's Asymmetrical Studio, there's a box of Eno's "Oblique Strategies" cards.] Your music projects and Eno's both sound very distant from the Fleetwoods. Do you think you want to recapture that lost childhood sound?

It might not be possible. Because I think every time — some people would say, "You listen to '50s music, you can feel the time of the '50s, you listen to 1930s music, even if you didn't live in the '30s, you can feel the time, so you just listen to it and you're back in time, makes a picture come, from that time." But the time played a huge part in making that music, you know what I mean?

As the time changes, it would produce different music, so I don't know if you can ever go back, if you can ever make something from a different time and make it real.

You can get the aura, and the chords, and the phrasing, but the hardest thing to reproduce is pure sound.

That's a big, important thing. [Film is] "sound and picture flowing together, in time." Music deals with time and timing. It's so magical, but when you get into it, every little sound and every little space between the sounds, it's critical, so critical. And if it's not there, it not only feels wrong but it ruins things. So you work and work and work to get a thing to feel correct, in sound and how it goes and in picture. It doesn't mean you're gonna hit 100 percent, but you work so hard to get it to feel correct.