As Loud As Possible:  Michael Shipp, The Adventures Of Roosterboy

PETER READ
NIGHTFLYING The Entertainment Guide (Holidazed Edition)
December 1, 2003

Michael Shipp is an Arkansas musician who has definitely blazed his own trail in music.  His guitar playing is known throughout the world, and he has been compared to ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons . . . which makes sense as the two are long-time friends and have even collaborated together on Shipp's most recent recording.

His guitar work can be summed up in one line:  "Less is more as loudly as possible."  One can immediately see the influences in his music, from gruffy Delta Blues to even remnants of Chicago-style blues à la Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, with a heady dose of pure rock 'n' roll tossed in for good measure.  Living in the Benton area, Michael was a part of the band Tres Hombres, a ZZ Top tribute band that moved to and worked out of Houston back in the 1980s, and played all over the country as such.

His most recent road-work was as guitarist in Billy Bob Thornton's band, touring the country and Europe extensively.

At home in Benton for a time, he's just released a signature CD, Michael Shipp Xcursion: The Adventures of Roosterboy, and has taken the winter off to help his wife Kim have their first child.

The following are excerpts of a recent telephone interview.

PR:  You've got a New CD you're pushing.  Tell me about it . . .
MS:  The concept began when I was on tour with Billy Bob Thornton in Europe.  WE discussed me writing a screenplay, and I realized the subject matter was very much like these three or four songs I had . . . so it gave me an idea to do a sort of concept album with this main central character, similar to what was done a lot in the late '60s early '70s.

PR:  Like TOMMY and JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR and HAIR?
MS:  Exactly . . . the music I think back on a lot.

PR:  Is it biographical then?  About your life and experiences?
MS:  Not exactly, but it all certainly draws from things I've been through . . . it's really about just a down-on-his-luck guy from Arkansas.  He has the lost loves . . . the found loves . . . all the usual--you know--demons haunting him and all the problems we all deal with . . . and you throw in all the self-righteous family crap like what bothers so many people . . . so this all weaves in and out of this poor guy's life.  It starts out where he's in south Arkansas heading down Highway 65 towards Mississippi.  The first track on the CD is called Voodoo In Tallulah, and the reason I chose that song is that everybody writes blues songs about the other side of the Mississippi River, but that stretch of Highway 65 has just as many roadhouses and just as much history as Highway 61 . . . I mean going way back, to the slave days on forward.  And there's probably more poverty and hard times along it any more than across the river.  Well the guy ends up in Tallulah, and that's where all these demons start to crop up in this guy's life, and he's wondering what in the heck he's going to do and which way is he gonna go . . . easy or west . . . but really with his life.

PR:  Tell me about Blue Malibu.  It sounds like a love song about a car . . .
MS:  It's about a guy that makes mistakes, and one line says "I spent the night with the wife of a sheriff, and he sent me away from a crime."  Well, when he gets out of prison he goes back and grabs the lost love . . . the only thing he has left in his life and it's that damn car.  We've all kind of been there, I think . . . where you don't really have anything, and you're starting all over again . . . it's about returning to his life . . . .

PR: All these songs seem to tie together in a thematic, almost directional sense without being purely autobiographical . . .
MS:  Oh, yeah, they're all in line with personal experiences . . . but more, they're similarly flavored in my moods.  Every song kind of ties together . . . I tired to structure the record that way.  And it ends up with two songs towards the end . . . one called Voices, which is about the self-righteous people that we deal with.

PR:  This song has the best guitar work on it, in my opinion.
MS:  Well, thank you.  I think so, too.  But it also had short lyrics that are the most personal and meaningful to me.  You know, "People listen, they don't hear, they sit in churches year after year . . .  . "  You know, those people who are sitting there looking around at everyone else, trying to figure out who the preacher's talking about when it's really them!  It really goes back to when I was a child and the experiences I recall . . . like when JFK was killed and how I felt at the time.  I can always remember that drum that went on forever it seemed, with that haunting, soldierless horse.  And that's just one of those voices that I can hear back there.

PR:  The next song is intriguing.  Where did that come from?  And I see it's attributed to Col. Bruce Hampton.
MS:  CBH Sermon From A Cell Phone.  I became good friends with Col. Bruce Hampton during SLING BLADE, when he had that role in it . . . he's something of an advisor, I guess . . . but I'd recorded this black preacher as I just happened to walk by this television, and he was doing this screaming, yelling into the microphone kind of sermon, so I taped it.  But then we got concerned about copyright and rights and all.  So I called Col. Bruce on his cell phone and played this sermon and then asked him to do his take on it . . . so he listened to it and then called me back and gave me this sermon and we got it on tape, right there on the answering machine.

PR:  I guess that's where art comes from
MS:  I was surprised at how good it came off.

PR:  I noted there's another track on this disc that isn't listed.
MS:  A Soul Of A Man is a hidden track, and I think it's the saddest song I've ever written . . . and the reason I wanted it on there is it's a true story.  it was based on a story of a friend of mine, John Briggs of ASCAP, who was at a convention in Austin, Texas, and was staying at one of those high rise hotels on the river.  Well, he went to his window one night and saw the flashing lights of emergency people around a guy on the bridge . . . and as they reached him the guy just eased backwards over the bridge railing and he could actually hear the splash of him as he hit the water.  He never knew what happened to the guy, and I guess he won't because he left early the next day . . . but I decided to let that poor soul be who the CD's about.  Now the thing is, on the CD, we're not really sure he jumps off the bridge.  He's at a crossroads, and he can kind of go either way . . . and I kind of wanted to leave the album hanging about which way he really went . . . which also ties in back to the first song. "Tell me Voodoo Mama, which way is the best, do I turn towards the east or take 20 towards the west."

PR:  It ties it all together and brings it all home, Michael.  It's also a good way to set the stage for a sequel, only this is music, not a movie.
MS:  Well, like I said, it really began as thoughts around a screenplay, but it does play out like a bit of a movie in my head.

PR:  And now more voices added to those that are already there.  How do you hear yourself think?!
MS:  I don't know sometimes.

PR:  Did you ever write that screenplay that you and Billy Bob Thornton were talking about?
MS:  No, I've never done it . . . yet.

PR:  How do you feel about the overall record?
MS:  Well, I'm very proud of my guitar tones here.  Actually the credit for a lot of that goes to Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top.  The month before I was going to record he invited me down for a bit and he wanted to analyze all the songs for the project.  And he listened to all the demos I had and he kind of wanted to help me form a guitar tone.  now my songs differ from theirs in that they're a lot more serious content, but a lot of the guitar parts are pretty similar in structure, but hey, he's kind of the tone master in the guitar world.  And when Billy Gibbons wants to add something to your guitar work, you ought to listen to him!  So we went out to their studio out west of Houston and spent the next few days working on just guitar tones.  He took time out to help me while they were recording Mescalaro, and it really meant a lot to me.  I mean, even after I got back to Nashville he kept working with me over the phone on it . . . and that was one of the nicest things anyone's ever done for me, personally or professionally.  Anyway, that got me what I feel is some of the best sounding guitar work as on anybody's record.

PR:  And where in Nashville did you record this?
MS:  We recorded the whole thing in a little studio out in Gallatin, Tennessee, which is out past Hendersonville.  It's a studio called Red Alert Studio, and it's run by a friend named Shawn Conley.  It's a nice, nice place.  He's got like 42 acres where he's built this studio and rehearsal place, and it's a struggle for him because nobody wants to leave Music Row to come out there.  But it was exactly what I wanted.  I could go and stay weeks at a time.  In fact, that's where I wrote a lot of the songs.  And we used a lot of studio players from the Nashville area.  I guess the most prominent musician on there is Kimberley Dahme, who did the background vocals.  We went through lots of girls, trying to find someone who would fit my voice . . . you know, that raspy kinda been-around-the-block voice.  She plays bas for Boston right now, but after their current tour I'm hoping she'll go back out with me on the road.

PR:  Tell me about your association with Billy Bob Thornton.
MS:  Well, first off, he's a good friend, and I'm grateful for everything that's happened with regard to him.  But it's actually come back around to where it sometimes works against me.  I'm pretty serious about my music, and so is Billy about his.  Fact is, everybody seems to try to use me to get to him, and all they seem to care about is that he's an Academy Award winning actor . . . but if they really knew him, they'd know that he's a really serious musician and was before he made it big in acting.  And it ends up haunting him, too.  He takes the music as seriously as anyone, and they're always treating it like it's just some kind of hobby for him.  When he plays, he doesn't particularly care that he's a well-known actor, and sometimes I think they hired his band thinking they're going to get this movie star making a public appearance.  And these press people make it worse.  They'll ask all these questions about Angelina or something when we're trying to do a press conference about the band.

PR:  Do they tend to perceive him much like William Shatner?
MS:  Oh yeah . . . a lot.

PR:  Only he's a real musician who just wants to play his music and live his life without the press being too much a part of it?
MS:  Definitely.  I mean, the press has its place and is terribly important, of course, but there's a place for an artist to do many, many things.  And the fact is, we were doing this way before he even went to Hollywood . . . and he meant it then.  We hooked up from here just out of high school and played in the band, went off to Houston and did the Tres Hombres thing, and that's where I kind of got into being compared to Billy Gibbons.  We went to work for Lone Wolf down there, and we might well have been the first tribute band in the country as far as I know.  There weren't a lot of those at the time, and we were billed as a ZZ Top tribute band.

PR:  I remember the record you put out.
MS:  Yeah, I've been seeing some of those lately while out on tour.  Which is surprising because I didn't think there were more than 50 copies sold.  There was one sold on EBay lately that went for a couple hundred pounds.

PR:  Wow . . . and how much of that do you get?
MS:  Nothing, I guess.  Somebody bought it from a private seller, I guess thinking it was somehow related to ZZ.

PR:  You would have probably sold your own copy for half that much!
MS:  Oh, yeah!  Or less . . . .

PR:  So what is the plan now?
MS:  Well, I'm taking the winter off because my lovely wife Kim and I are having a little Roosterboy in January, and I've got some important things to tend to here.

PR:  I guess so.  And you're sure it's a boy?
MS:  Oh, yeah.  It's a boy, and he'll be called Peyton.  And we haven't settled on a middle name yet.

PR:  Have you decided when you're going to go back out playing?
MS:  I don't play to play out until South By Southwest in March in Austin.

PR:  Is that where it is?
MS:  Oh yeah, I forgot who I'm talking to here!

PR:  No problem . . . but I think sometimes people are tired of me talking bout it.  Being in on starting that is one of Nightflying's finest moments.
MS:  I guess so!  It's gotten mighty big, that's for sure.

PR:  What about after that?
MS:  Then we'll go on tour around the country.  I plan to recruit a band to go out with me.  A good drummer, maybe a B-3 player, you know.

PR:  And promote the CD.
MS:  And promote the CD.