Magnet - January 2003

Magnet magazine interview - By Fred Mills

While I was conducting my MAGNET interview with Joe Strummer, who should stroll into the Irving Plaza dressing room but Mescaleros fiddle player Tymon Dogg. He, of course, will be familiar to anyone versed in Clash history and recordings (particularly notorious is his solo turn on Sandinista! “Lose This Skin”), and his association with Strummer goes back to the early ‘70s. Dogg arrived brandishing a violin bow in need of serious repair. Following a lengthy discussion between Dogg, Strummer and myself about bows, strings and what a violin sounds like being played minus any strings (Dogg: “GRSNKKREKKK!”), I sat Dogg down to grill him a bit about Strummer and the Mescaleros. A friendly, low-key sort with a soft voice not unlike former Monty Python man Michael Palin, Dogg was happy to reminisce.

MAGNET: You two hooked back up again last year at what Joe called the Poetry Olympics, right?

TYMON: Yeah. I’d just bought a ticket. There was a flyer, a Xerox. They didn’t publicize it! Poetry people don’t - it’s a bit against the grain to publicize them. Vulgar, isn’t it, to let people know! “It’s a hidden gig!” [laughing]

MAGNET: And had you been doing bands all along? Did you have to bribe Joe to let you into the band?

TYMON: I’d done a couple of things, yeah. I mostly worked on solo deals. We carried on playing until about seven in the morning. We were going through songs we used to do and everything. We’d played together about a year before at a gig for one of our mates who’d died, the bass player in the 101ers. We met up there. We said let’s do some music together then, and after that I’d got my son looking after him a lot. He’s nine, so I’ve spent lots of time with him. Before that, I’d got stuck a bit in Spain for a couple of years and I had lost touch with quite a lot of mates. When we were in London, we kept in touch, but then Joe moved out of town, I moved somewhere else. Friends scattered about the countryside with wives, babies.

MAGNET: So Joe just said to come down to the Mescaleros session, right?

TYMON: Yeah, to come put some violin down on some tracks. I left about five days later because we just slept in the studio, worked all night, then crashed there. Those first four or five days, I’d never met Martin or Scott, and Pablo [Cook, drums] was there, and we only had one song. The rest were written in the studio.

MAGNET: How did you find the group dynamic, or vibe, to be?

TYMON: I just took it to be the way they worked. I didn’t know until after that it was kinda peculiar for them. There was “Bummed Out City,” which Joe had written, he had that one. But no other music. So we just started jamming - “Gamma Ray” was one, I just started to play melodies across the chords, and it sort of worked like that, really, where a few things happened. Richard Flack was really on it. He was watching all the time, and literally if you picked up a guitar, he’d be listening: “Oh, you know, maybe we should record that now!” And we were just getting little ideas as they were being written. “Johnny Appleseed” was being recorded as it was being written. Not the end result, but the actual melody. I picked up a mandolin from Scott, who was playing some chords on guitar.

MAGNET: You played that on the Letterman show the other week.

TYMON: Yeah, it’s an easy one to get across on TV. It’s a kind of country set-up. In fact, I was picking it out on violin the other day and thinking it sounded like a banjo.

MAGNET: At soundcheck, I watched you guys working out “Minstrel Boy,” and you were leading that. Was that something you suggested to the others?

TYMON: I remember back in ‘83, I’d go around to Joe’s house. And he’s sitting around with a Fostex or a little tape recorder, and he had a little keyboard and a songbook that was open to “Minstrel Boy.” I knew the song because my mum used to sing it when I was a little lad. I always quite liked it. I think the lyric is 200 years old. The tune is hard to know. Somebody did write it, but no one remembers so that’s why it’s called “anonymous” or “traditional.” [laughing] Or maybe a woman wrote it! He was sitting there with the little book, which I thought was strange because the Clash was still together. Mick had not left yet. I said, “Are you going to do that song there?” And he said, “Yeah, I’d like to.” I thought, funny song to do. I think it was a bit of a trip that Joe wanted to do that; Mick was going into hip hop big time. Joe had picked up a music book in the streets of London. I was trying to get away from the studio after about four or five days. This book had “Minstrel Boy” and Joe started talking about it, and then about two in the morning he said, “Let’s go back and knock it down.” And that’s the exact recording [on the album]. In fact, that recording has me getting the violin out of the case. I’m playing it to Martin, who’d never heard it before.

MAGNET: Joe told me that 22 minutes later, you stopped and he said, “OK, this goes on the album.”

TYMON: Well, I’m still surprised about that. Because as I say, it’s literally getting the violin out of the case and starting the song. There’s a point that goes dah-dat-dat-dat-dat about six minutes before it ends: that was where I thought we’d started. I thought the rest was just for Martin to learn the chords.

MAGNET: Sometimes the best moments happen when the tapes are rolling and no one expects it.

TYMON: Well, however we explain it - it IS excessive! [smiles] In fact, quite a lot of songs we jammed for quite awhile on them. “Gamma Ray” I think is about seven minutes.

MAGNET: Any songs have more rather than less of your input?

TYMON: I suppose “Mondo Bongo,” because I was trying to keep inside this thing of writing in the studio, but when I was leaving my house, which is about 60 miles from London, I was going to take my Spanish guitar with me and I picked it up in the kitchen and I wrote a part, thinking, “Isn’t that Peruvian? Bolivian?” Just a Spanishy/Latiny thing. I think it’s partly because my son was at the time getting into pan-pipe music. When I got to the studio, I played it for Joe.

MAGNET: I can draw a pretty direct line in my mind from Sandinista! to Global A Go-Go. There are the international sounds on that more prominent than on other Clash albums. You were present for that. What was it like recording then vs. now for you?

TYMON: Yeah, there’s a lot of similarities in a lot of ways. A lot of freedom. I think in some way it was already coming from Joe’s attitude. He wanted, after we did the tour with the Who - “why bother going home?” “Well, I gotta go home some time!” [laughs] It went from being, “who is this new person in the band with the violin?” to playing that first gig with only one rehearsal.

MAGNET: “By the way, you’re in the band.”

TYMON: Yeah. I think, anyway, on that tour - people underestimate the listening audience. Quite often, they’re a lot more sophisticated than the musicians give them credit for. And the history of music, which we’ve got more of it recorded than ever now. And the Internet can give you a lot. It seems silly now if musicians are making records to please an A&R guy and it flops, because then you end up pleasing no one. We’re lucky as a band that we’ve got someone like Joe to work with. He’s not obsessed with making the next top of the charts record.

MAGNET: For the record, Joe called himself “a hack.” What were your expectations of this tour?

TYMON: Too old to have expectations! But you know, expectations are sometimes a pathway to disappointment. I just get on with it and enjoy it. I just thought we’d get the record finished and see what we had. Same with every gig: what is tonight’s gig, tune in to that place and what’s happening and making the most of it.

MAGNET: What do you see in the faces of the audience?

TYMON: Every performer wants to sneak a peek at some point and see how they’re reacting. A lot of enthusiasm, really. Open-heartedness, as well. For me, ever since we did the first gig in the 100 Club, which only holds about 350 people, when Joe said we were starting with “Minstrel Boy,” which at the time was still a very long piece, for the die-hard punk audience - I thought Joe was calling my bluff. “OK, we’ll open with you and that violin playing that tune.” But it went great. We did six new songs before anyone had ever heard them. They’d only been written about five days before.

MAGNET: Is this band one that automatically found its footing and got a group vibe going or did you have to let that develop as you toured?

TYMON: No, I think we just got on. There’s obviously different ways people can see. Martin’s a very proficient, sensitive person who can play a lot of instruments and is quite serious about his music. But yeah, we work on things and try to give each other a buzz as well. That’s the way I see it.

MAGNET: Watching soundcheck, it looked almost like you guys were getting into a Neil Young & Crazy Horse-like circle onstage. What kind of buzz do you get onstage?

TYMON: Yeah, we are. Because we sort of wrote the songs from a jamming thing, now we’re doing that onstage. That’s happening onstage as well, and it’s nice. We don’t hold it down too rigid. In fact, we might do different things [from the arrangements] as long as we’ve outgrown our expectation for the songs. If we’ve said, “OK, it’s gonna be like that,” then it’s fixed. And we can always do that as a last resort. And we have parts as well, some of them we’ve only rehearsed once or twice, that we can go into.

MAGNET: You’re playing guitar and fiddle onstage - what are some of the older things you enjoy?

TYMON: I don’t play on much of the older stuff. I play keyboards on “Rudie Can’t Fail,” a few chords. Which is kind of strange because I was involved with a couple of albums and I played a bit of stuff on Combat Rock and Sandinista! I dunno; Scott and Martin actually take the older stuff quite seriously inasmuch as they wanted it to sound like the record. So Joe often says to me, “Tell ‘em there was a violin on this!” [laughing]

MAGNET: You encored with the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” last night - was that Ramones with a fiddle?

TYMON: No, Spanish guitar. We did “London’s Burning” with a fiddle, though. When you get a violin revving away it’s quite a noise.

MAGNET: Fiddle in rock ‘n’ roll is an underappreciated instrument. There was this late ‘60s band called the Flock and they had a wild man on violin.

TYMON: And there was a band It’s A Beautiful Day too. Jean-Luc Ponty, some of his solo stuff was great.

MAGNET: Some people cite ELO, but while the first few albums were good, they became sort of the epitome of “bloated” and wound up giving strings a bad name.

TYMON: Yeah, almost this fake classical sound. Papa John Creach, with Hot Tuna and Jefferson Airplane. It’s a very handy instrument to have in rock. It’s small, you can get on planes. That’s one of the reasons I took it up, because I played guitar and thought, “It’s too big, this.” [laughing]

MAGNET: Can you give me some impressions or memories of those early days, pre-101ers, that you and Joe shared? He said he used to collect money for you in the London subways while you were busking.

TYMON: Oh yeah, there was about three years of that. When I met Joe, I had a recording contract, and I did a whole tour, and even did a support gig at the Albert Hall. I was making records but I didn’t particularly like them, I was 17, 18, and they were trying to make me out like the Monkees or something. I was being played on the radio and stuff like that. But I just wanted to get away and grow up and travel, you know? My heroes were people like Dylan, Cohen, people with depth, songwriter sorts. I started hanging out in a student house, and he was crashing on the floor at the time. This was about ‘71. I did a couple of folk gigs and Joe would always turn up. He was always in the house, dead interested in music all the time. Then we went a bit of traveling, off to visit one of our friends in Holland. On the way, we’d busk to get money for dinner. And we got gigs as well.

MAGNET: Could you make a living like that back then?

TYMON: Well, the problem was, like, we went to Amsterdam once, and we lined up a load of gigs, about five, which is all right. But I’d always arrive penniless, just bad organization. So I’d say to Joe, “Let’s go out and play a couple of songs before the gig in the streets, and then we’ll have a meal.” They [police] took the violin, basically. So Joe had to go scour the town to turn up a violin for this gig! Stuff like that happened. [laughing] Then we had to hang out in Amsterdam to get it back from the courts. Couldn’t leave it! So all the money that we had, we had to pay them back. They couldn’t allow busking, such a “free and liberal town” at the town. You could smoke pot, but no street music. I remember hitchhiking out of town with absolutely nothing again! We’d just bought the violin back.

MAGNET: “Came, saw, conquered, left broke.”

TYMON: Yeah, and left. On the way to Paris, a guy picked us up in a car, who was going to this big gig in Brussels, so he asked us to play in the bar while the theater was going on. We ended up hanging out in this place in Belgium for about four days. So stuff like that was going on all the time. Going from day to day, week to week.

MAGNET: Last night after soundcheck, I saw a subway player, a guy doing classical violin, and I couldn’t help but think of you.

TYMON: Instrumental music’s good for busking. And now they’ve got little amplifiers and stuff like that, just shrieking away. I tended to go down to London and play for about two hours, and if I played this Irish-y stuff, just instrumentals - I learned to play the violin and harmonica together - from about quarter past 10 to a half after 11 when people were coming home, I’d get enough. Maybe 100 quid. But I didn’t really do much after around 1976.

Fred Mills has written for Spin, Magnet, The Bob, Option, Harp, Stereophile, No Depression, ICE, Detroit Metro Times, Stomp & Stammer and other publications. He has also contributed liner notes to numerous records and CDs over the years. His favorite band of all time is The Who, his favorite solo artist is Neil Young, and his favorite song is 'Shake Some Action' by the Flamin' Groovies.