Pink’s Pom Pom

“Boogie boogie down, watch that thing let’s boogie down’, you ugly, what what, you ugly, U.G.L.Y, you ain’t got no alibi,” he says, fists pumping, doing a hop-step on the spot, down the line from Los Angelese.

All I asked for was his first memories of cheerleaders. His new 4.5 star record Pom Pom has just dropped and it contains songs like Nude Beach A-Go Go, Exile on Frog Street, Dinosaur Carebears and Sexual Athletics. It bends both minds and genders and will be the whigout record of the summer.

“I love the Goldie Hawn cheerleader film Wildcats,” he says, still humming the hype anthems. “They came up with these great chants. This divorced lady with kids takes on the cheerleaders and later on in the movie the squad are singing these amazing songs,” he says, pealing into the chants again.

Pom Pom has rightly been called Pink’s Magnum Opus. Clearly, he knows something we don’t. Pom Pom maintains the hot streak for the eccentric 5 foot 4 inches 36 years young Frog Prince which started with Before Today (2010) and carried on with Mature Themes (2012). It’s an album that trips the light fantastic through surf-pop, bouncy reggae, garage scuzzball jams, John Carpenter soundtrack menace and, well, anything that takes Pink’s fancy at the time. Our own Shags Chamberlain (Lost Animal, Pikelet, Krakatau) is heavily involved too, we’ll get to that, eager reader.

Pink’s been embroiled in controversy after derisive, foot-shooting comments about working on Madonna’s album (which in turn raised the ire of Grimes who called him a “delusional misogynist”), a run-in with someone he dismissed as “a feminist” (GULP) and then a few weeks ago he tweeted about working on motor-mouth Azealia Banks album (they both include versions of Nude Beach A Go Go on their albums).

Ariel’s had everything thrown at him and it’s only made him stronger.

“I do feel detached from the trolling,” he shrugs. “I feel like I’m being made an unwitting example of. I feel like an old codger or something like that, a grumpy old man. It confirms for me some opinions that I have regarding public opinion and people’s lack of ability to think clearly. I do my fair share of putting my foot in my mouth but I’m not trying to project an image otherwise, I’m just being myself,” he says.

And as Eleanor Roosevelt once said “Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.”

“That said, people believe the media even though time and again they lie to them and skew their thinking and then turn around and eat the stuff up. It’s telling. This is a mob that doesn’t want to decide things for themselves. It’s clear to me we need to have fascist dictators in this world to tell you what to do,” he says, before distilling the ideas, “I’m untraditional in my traditionalism.”

Nobody else could’ve made Pom Pom. Fellow LA dweller Beck described Midnite Vultures as a “sexual fantasia.” The same could be said of Pink’s new LP.

“Gosh I don’t know about that. It’s got nothing to do with sexuality, contrary to certain lyrics and songtitles. It’s all sublimination,” he says, neatly sidestepping the tag.

“Sexual Athletics is about me. All I’ve wanted was a girlfriend all my life but she’s too sexual. Those are the lyrics at the very end.”

Through his 20s he was a serial monogamist. Mature Themes was his brutal break-up record. The last four years Pink’s been free and easy. You can hear it on Pom Pom, it’s basically the sound of him streaking down Hollywood Boulevard singing/zinging about what he sees as onlookers hand him energy drinks and try to touch his Johnson.

“I really can’t say anything negative about being independent. It makes so much sense. Before I had a serious relationship and girlfriends in my 20s I was consigned to the fact I may not ever have that. That’s when I developed the activity of recording to supplement that. That was a project that spanned a few years and I developed my own sense of self-worth from that,” he says before admitting “I still long for a partner, there’s no way around that.

“You get to a point in your life where you don’t need to be as validated any more. Other things validate you. You shouldn’t leave validation up to other people. I’ve been by myself for years, actively not falling into the relationship trap,” he riffs.

“It’s been a very liberating process. Not easy. I definitely had to bite the red pill (laughs) in regards to lots of things that I held true. I recommend everyone spend enough time by yourself to cultivate a sense of enjoyment from being by yourself and enjoying solitude. That’ll serve you later when things don’t go as planned,” he swamis.

With this attitude, Pink has a peer in Parker, Kevin Parker. The whole idea behind Tame Impala’s second album Lonerism is about how wonderful it is to hang out with…yourself.

“That’s interesting, I didn’t know that. I think you can be alone with everybody. I feel completely at home in my world. I see no reason to keep up appearances when trying to foster an impression. For better, for worse I am who I am. There’s no need to give anybody a false sense of hope,” he says, then counters.

“Of course I’m saying this because it’s convenient. I’m only happy when I’m making other people happy, that’s what it comes down to,” he says. It’s an Ariel Pink stream-of-consciousness triple backflip that you hear aesthetically all over Pom Pom.

He may say he’s only happy when he’s making other people happy but there won’t be pleasing some fans at Sugar Mountain.

“We’re gonna play almost entirely new stuff. Anybody expecting to hear Round and Round is probably gonna be disappointed.”

Anybody who wants to see Shags on stage, however, will be very happy indeed. At Golden Plains the two goofed off theatrically in front of 8000 people, Pink put an imaginary key into Shags’ back and declared “Shags, you’re my Teddy Ruxpin!”

It’s no exaggeration to say Shags – along with The Germs’ Don Bolles – were integral to this record. Black Ballerina was done with Bolles, who did pah-lenty on the song including the sleazy, anime *coming-of-age skit in Ballerina that takes place in The Number One Strip Club in LA and features the words “panties”, “topless dancer” and “areolas”.

“Don Bolles did the voice of the leprechaun character. Piper (Puro Instinct’s Piper Kaplan) did the voice of the stripper from the number one strip club in LA and I did the voice of Billy. It’s a mixture of spontaneity and a Dogme-ish approach which is what I bring to the recording process, which is what I excel at,” he says.

This boast is backed up in just a moment when we’ll check in with Shags aka The Coolest Guy In Melbourne.

“It was a harnessing of different forces. There was pre-planning. I had a perfect, exact vision and then you go with the flow. You have to be at home in that universe. I seek results, I don’t belabour things too much, I know what’s going to make the cut. I mix as I go as well. It’s all been pre-screened,” he says, again talking in short soundbites.

That synth-bassline in Black Ballerina apes Polyester Girl almost to the point of lawsuit. Almost. “My brain’s on auto-pilot, it receives transmissions from another planet, another dimension,” he says, smirking. Ground Control to Major Pom.

In a freewheeling 45 minute conversation with Shags while he manned the record shop counter at Licorice Pie — selling an original mono pressing of John Coltrane Love Supreme, an early Rotary Connection album and some Haruomi Hosono — he took us inside Pom Pom.

Play the tape!

Shags I think I can hear you singing “Elevators, manufacturers” on Black Ballerina and -

(interrupts) “Yep that’s me. Well spotted. I was eating an apple in the studio (chomps loudly) and that’s the apple chomping percussion on that song too (chomps again).”

Man, you’re all over this thing. How did it all happen?

“I arrived in LA on the first day of recording. The Lost Animal tour finished in LA. I got up, Ariel called. He said (imitates Ariel’s hurried, low Kermit voice) ‘Hey, I’m going into the studio, wanna come in and play bass or something?’ He had a whole bunch of songs he’d spent two weeks writing. Tim the bassplayer was still in Amsterdam so I was in. The rest of the band had only heard the songs the day before. I walked in without having heard the songs. They were about to do a take.”

Which song?

“The first one we did was Exile on Frog St. The version of that was the first or second take. They quickly played the chords to me and I was like ‘YEP YEP YEP, I think I got it.’ The first take (sounds stoked) ‘That’s pretty f–king good’, the second take we got it. We were like ‘OK, next song!’”

Where was this?

“It was a seriously great studio. I think it’s called Seahorse Sounds. The studio was so well equipped. It had harpsichord, marimbas, all these organs, everything was fully working. Anything you wanna play you could play. Usually you go into a studio and there’s an old keyboard in the corner that doesn’t work.”

So which songs did you record in those sessions?

“That session we did Sexual Athletics, Jell-O, Plastic Raincoats in the Pink Parade, Exile on Frog Street, One Summer Night, Nude Beach A Go Go, Negativ Ed. Both those last ones got re-recorded. We did that for a week. It was cool. It was shotgun recording.”

Ariel has said even though it is billed as his first solo record it’s the least solo record he’s ever done.

“Any idea you had Ariel was like (Kermit tone) ‘Yep!!’. You’d jump up, have a crack and he’d know pretty much on the first take. He was so open during the whole record to other people’s ideas. We had such a hive mind workflow going on. Four brains, one vision, especially towards the end.”

Who was there at that stage?

“In the home stretch it was me Don and Ariel. Kenny Gilmore was acting as engineer. He was catching it all. We had a synergy.”

Is that you on White Freckles doing the ocker ‘Where’d ya get those (White Freckles)?’

“Yep. We’re all into Michel Polnareff so we wanted something like that on the album. I looked up how to say “White Freckles? Me?” in French so I say. ‘Taches de rousse se blanches qui Moi?’ And I say ‘Barbecutie, where’d you get those…. White Freckles?’ (sings).”

[Customers approach the counter as Shags is singing. He serves a blushing acolyte then returns].

“Ariel would just say (impersonates a hurried-speaking Ariel) ‘Shags, you do something here’. There were sections I completely improvised. The middle of Dinosaur Carebears, the crazy circus bit. It’s all ‘What have we got here?’ That was one take when I was talking through a horn, like a witches hat. Then I did another take over the top. ‘Here we are again’. I did one in Jell-O first take. In the middle, the rocking out ‘Step right in, step right in, we got Tommy Hall coming in, Go Go Go, Billy Ho” We were trying to fill with Thirteenth Floor Elevators style, the guy who played the bottle with the water. That made it in there rather than (makes loud, rather catchy sounds) DO DO DOO DOOO DOOO.’”

Sounds like a hoot.

“The emphasis was on fun. We had shitloads of fun. He didn’t want it to ever end. He was sabotaging it so we’d have to keep recording. He’d flip it on its ear.”

He’d do what?

“Ariel would be have the track recorded and finished and he’d say….’Let’s do it again another way’ just so we’d keep recording because it was so much fun. Deliberately sabotaging it.”

He had his dream team.

“I was there for a lot of it. I ended up hanging out in LA for three months. We’d go to Cole’s (M. Greif-Neill) place who’s a great engineer. Ariel would just hum a melody into his phone then play it to Cole. All these had a real electro vibe. I was on synth bass, Ariel and Cole would program the beat. From those sessions, we got Lipstick, Not Enough Violence, Four Shadows.”

I thought with Black Ballerina maybe you’d played him Polyester Girl. The similarities are off the charts. That ultra-fun saccharine yo-yo bassline…

“Ariel actually had the bassline already, we workshopped it and changed it. There’s more of me on Lipstick than any other songs. Cole made a beat. We had a jam on that idea. Me, Cole and Ariel just jammed on it, Ariel was playing the smooth chords over the top. We arranged it into two sessions. It sat there for four months until I went back to LA. It was this great instrumental.”

And then wha’ happened?

“Oh actually in those sessions. Cole came up with the flute idea, the piercing flute with the delay, that set the tone for Lipstick. Jimi Hey came into one of those sessions, he thought there should be a Kraftwerk style delay. Speaking of Jimi, he played finger drums on Not Enough Violence. (Shags does finger drum beat boxes, customers heard laughing affectionately).”

Another day in the stone henge-ian recording studios.

Back to Lipstick…

“Lipstick was a great instrumental. Ariel tried some vocals, I added lots of Moog Realistic. It was starting to come together. We realised all the different vocal parts were working at the same time. Him and Don have great ears for melodies and vocals. They did some sessions while I wasn’t there. Lipstick – even before there was lead vocals. I just did a (sleazes it up) “YEAHHHH” and “MMM AHHH TISHHHHH”. It just added to the atmosphere. I did the album sequence as well.”

You did Pom Pom’s sequencing!?

“Yeah. It took me three days. The flow is my DJ mind coming into it. I absorbed everyone’s tracklist suggestions. Every song is very specifically in the spot that it is. The first song sums up the album’s psyche, the second song sums up the complexity then White Freckles is technically the most complicated thing, the third song sums up the theatrics and then BAM that’s when we hit with Lipstick.”

Lipstick levels everything out, it’s like the first three songs are hectic and all over the shop and then the listener needs some affirmation and it goes ‘YEAHHHHHH’…

“Exactly, that’s exactly what I wanted people to think. It was fun doing that. I divided that up into a bunch of different styles/different roles. The synth pop songs I gave a D which stood for Devo. I had a T for Theatre Rock which was Black Ballerina, Dinosaur Carebears. I had an S for Side Starter. An asterisk was next to what I considered the Best Overall Songs. E was for Emotional Pop like Picture Me Gone, Dayzed Inn Daydreams and One Summer Night. I’ve used this system before like on Pikelet’s Calluses. Perfect flow.”

It works very nicely. Although it seems unwieldy at first I found myself waking up in the middle of the night with all these weird choruses and phrases in my head like “I dedicate this selfie to the little guy who will outlast me when I’m gone” and all the squiggly effects.

“Ariel was so good, he trusted me to do the track listing. He was having so much fun. As I said, he kept sabotaging things so the recording process wouldn’t end. Don Bolles is one of the most fun people you can hang out with. Everything he says is funny. He’s one of the kookiest. Put the three of us in the room, you get Pom Pom.”

Go straight back to LA and make another one!

“(Laughs) We manipulated the sh-t out of everything. We completely warped and transformed a lot of stuff. It’s an extremely modern day digital, it’s still analogue. We just left the buzz of a guitar amp to get the (makes fuzzy hessian-scraping-on-Sennhesiers sound) ‘SHHHHH’ on there. It’s an avant-garde theatre rock children’s record.”

The Rocky Horror on bad acid vibes are heavy on Four Shadows. Is that you in the middle part being a frisky Frankenflirter?

“Yeah that’s me saying (theatrically) ‘And what always is shall not be’ I added the synth solo. Ariel – he just comes out with catchy lines and words.”

Like “Only darkness in the light”.

“He’s a lyrical and melodical master. Who else comes close? Each take would be completely different.”

How did the recording work, day to day?

“It was like a job. I stayed at Ariel’s house. In the last two to three months we’d sleep ‘til lunchtime, Don Bolles would come over at 12.30pm. We’d go downstairs, jump in his van head out to Montrose and work on the record every day. He (Ariel) never had a chance to think. We’d wake up and go out there. Ariel would sit by himself and write lyrics rally quickly. He has the knack of coming up with words on the spot.”

What was the label 4AD saying? Especially with all the petty churnalism swirling around and distracting people from what Ariel is best at: making weirdo records.

“They wanted the album …then he got told we had another month. It had to be done in a month. We still kept recording stuff. The last two days was when the mixing got done. There was a real vibe amongst the LA underground while we were making it. We’d work ‘til 7 or 8 pm and then we’d go to Don’s club and we’d be playing new mixes every week. People we’re hearing the record develop. (It was cool) having all that build up and build up until we finished the record. There’s a real vibe there at the minute. There’s even more cool people moving to LA coming from San Fran. I’ve never seen someone have such respect for elders. Ariel submits to older cats like Don.”

Let’s cut to The Don for the final word.

He answered these questions via email within an hour of me “cold-calling” him.

Shags tells me Ariel was very respectful of you, being an elder statesman, how did you guide Ariel to where he and the songs needed to go?

“The ancients called it ‘electronic mind control.’ Aside from these never-to-be-revealed techniques, I just tried to help keep it all balanced somewhere between total chaos and the various pop disciplines we were channelling.”

The whole recording process was very on-the-run, getting songs down quickly. What were the moments in those initial recording sessions you knew you were onto something good? Which songs specifically, Don?

“All the songs were good, for one thing. That was a clue. The way we recorded the album is unlike any recording techniques I’ve ever encountered. Most of the takes were finished before we actually knew the parts — which was infuriating at the time — but gives the recordings a cool edgy quality that wouldn’t have been there if we were more comfortable. Plus we mixed as we went, every day. A lot of first and second take stuff, and a surprising amount of “live” in studio stuff, especially considering how edited everything ends up sounding. Dayzed Inn Daydreams was one of first tracks I played on and the song just floored me when I heard it, lyrically and sonically. World class Songwriting, IMHO. A couple of us actually cried when we first heard the second verse, it was so emotionally resonant… Then when four of us stood around a mic and whipped out the harmonies in Put Your Number In My Phone live, first take and it sounded like the Beach Boys — that’s when I knew we had a tiger by the tail. The song that sounds the most edited and disjointed, Dinosaur Care Bear, was actually recorded live in studio in one take, no edits. Crazy.”

Lipstick is an incredible jam, what were you going for with that song? I get a vibe of a late ‘80s/early ‘90s drive-in cinema where they’re showing a double bill Wild At Heart and Something Wild…

“Exactly!”

Tell me about the dialogue in Black Ballerina. “She’s a topluss duncer!” What bits did you come up with? Has that horny leprechaun voice been a party trick for a long time?

“I don’t really know what happened with that, exactly; Ariel had me stand in front of a microphone and said ‘Do something’ and that’s the last thing I remember.”

What were some of the reactions/feedback you got when playing the songs in your club at night? Sounded like the LA underground were lapping it up…

“Ever see Ken Russell’s The Devils? It was like that without the nun habits. There were smashed Hydrox cookies and melted plastic army men everywhere. It was insane.”

Bolles will join Shags, Ariel and Pink’s regular band when they tour Australia.

Sugar Mountain, Southbank, Jan 24. sugarmountainfestival.com

*mind the spelling.

Support the Pink dollar: Pom Pom (Remote Control) out now.

REVIEW:

POM POM

ARIEL PINK [BEGGARS/4AD]

**** 1/2

You’ve just gotta give in to Ariel Pink. Who else would answer critics after recent Madonna-baiting controversy by putting out a song like Black Ballerina? It’s one of the finest yoyo, YOLO jams of the year, veering into seedy rite-de-passage-strip-club territory, just staying on the right side of tasteful within a tune as catchy as Polyester Girl. Pink sings about mannequins, fertiliser and being ‘a sex king on a velvet swing”. Dig the aviator shade-wearing pimp ‘Yeaaaah” at the start of Lipstick. This is music that’d give Frank Zappa a spank, slapper. It’s surf-punk, cheerleader glee, ‘70s advertising jingles and ‘60s faux-folk. Long live the midget maestro.

Sounds Like: Pink’s in a purple patch. Again.

In A Word: Smudged

Originally published as Pink’s Pom Pom
www.news.com.au/entertainment/music