Jimmy

Okay, so I called Clayton yesterday and asked him questions about himself:

How long have you been playing and recording your music?"
C: I dunno, maybe 11 or 12 years. It started in high school, and I just never quit, seems irrational, doesn't it?
You never got any interest from the industry until recently?
C:Well, I never really cared. I guess I just figured that as long as I was eating O.K. and having a good time, then that sort of effort was unneccessary. Then Pale Moon just sort of offered to help, they don't really pay me or anything. Or pay anyone else, for that matter. I just sort of stick with them because they believe in me, and it sound better if I say that I am with them.
Success never interested you?
C:Oh, yeah I'm not fucking crazy, but I have this well-formed idea, precognition really, that no big corporation is really going to condone my activity.
I saw you at the Wake, you remember?
C:yeah. I think that it's going to close down.
I hadn't heard that-what makes you say it's going to close?
C:Well, we were there, and if that's not enough to discourage the backers, nothing will. Also, somebody told me that someone over there blew all the money on some sort of investment or something
I wanted to ask you about the whole "settler thing" that you were talking about that night.
C:I thought you had it recorded.
Well, it didn't come out as good as I had hoped that it would.
C: Well I think someone had just given the impetus for the whole deal whe they said something about how badly the settler had treated the indians, etc. That really pissed me off, man! The settlers weren't the people they were referring to, the real settlers were the native americans who were here to start with-they weren't these sort of nomadic, romantic tribes that Hollywood protrayed, they were also farmers,etc. The first group or so of Europeans engaged them in the first biological war, one for which they were totally unprepared, and it decimated them, killing like 95% or something, the first Europeans to come to Plymouth Rock came there because they knew that it was already a Native community. But by the time they got there all the inhabitants were lying dead in the streets, so the fake settlers just kind of took over the real settlers' town. I mean the crops were already planted, the fields tilled, and the houses built. All the Europeans had to do was get the tools, etc., and they just robbed the graves for that stuff. I could go on a lot more about that.
I was going to ask about the new album?
C:O.K.
Well, you said the name was "Third Planet Theater"?
C:Yeah
Well, what is it going to be like?
C:Well, it's going to continue my tradition of being as different as I am able to make it from the others, in the main, it will have more of the me speaking thing that seems to either irritate or impress people more.
Is it done yet?
C:for the most part, yes. We've got three songs that will for sure be on it-"Record Machine","Two-knife",and "La Diabla". I was also kinduv hoping that the recording at The Wake1 would come out better, so I wouldn't have to reapeat alot of those things. Oh well.
Could you tell me something about the songs so far, or the new ones? Maybe explain a favorite or two?
C:no.
what?
C:I'm sorry, it's not you, that particular question just really pisses me off. I mean, it's like asking Rodin what he meant with 'The Thinker'-I sure that pissed him off too, I mean it's almost absurd-It's like-look at it, it's a goddamn ten-foot sculpture, that's it-that's what I fucking meant. If you don't get it, fine, but I'm certainly not reducing anything I do to the lowest common denominator, just so it can be understood by people who don't get the actual work to begin with.
Alright.
C:Sorry.
This is going into a section about you personally, you have anything to say about that?
Well, besides the fact that you are doing this is fucking fantastic, I guess I can say the kind of shit I say when I first meet people-I was born in 1975, in Oklahoma, I grew up in the white-boy, uniformly mowed,green chemically treated middle class suburb of Dallas, Plano/Richardson. That part of my life, like almost everyone's sucked dick. Nobody understood me-just like now, only I hadn't developed the tools I needed to deal with it back then. Um..went to UT at Austin, uh..did a lot of drugs, and drinking, went to Mexico alot, and eventually did some time in Jail, then moved up here.-That's pretty much the really abbreviated version of the story. There's other important crap, too I guess..Like I got engaged to this girl at one point, was an addict at another, was president of various maijuana legalization groups in Austin, Like UT Norml University THC, etc. I dunno, there's obviously twenty-three years worth of answers to that question
Well we don't have that much time
C:I should hope not. I'm sure there is something that I should be doing.