Artikel © Rock Candy
Issue October / November 2024

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DARK DAYS

Masters Of Reality has never been a commercially successful band and took a whopping seven years to release a debut album after first forming back in 1981.

But Howard Johnson believes the group is “one of the most creatively interesting rock outfits of the last 40 years.”

Main man Chris Goss explains how he does it despite a litany of career setbacks…

REALITY ATTACK

BACK IN MAY a piece of music titled ‘S.U.G.A.R.’ slipped out onto streaming platforms, just one more song trying to create a little buzz in amongst the white noise of so many artists juggling for everyone’s limited attention span. I

t’s hard to know how commercially successful the project was, but for me it was a seismic artistic moment.

Why? Because ‘S.U.G.A.R.’ was a recording by the band Masters Of Reality, the first new music in 15 long years from what is in my opinion one of the most creatively interesting rock outfits of the last 40 years. ‘S.U.G.A.R.’ didn’t disappoint, either.

Like most of the work from this curious and exhilarating band, the song sounded deeply familiar, and yet totally original at one and the same time.
How does anyone pull that off?

‘S.U.G.A.R’ drifts easily between dreamy and dynamic, with band guru Chris Goss’s vocal floating across the top of the song, adding melody that I think is best described as understated majesty. If you like your rock music to really challenge you, then Masters Of Reality is a ‘must hear’.

“One of the things I love is that almost every assessment of what I do says that Masters Of Reality is bluesy and a bit retro, but at the same time it’s also modern. I’m really proud of that because that’s paying attention to a current aesthetic without going so far as to chase a trend.”

Chris Goss has clearly thought a lot about this weird duality his band possesses. Masters Of Reality – that’s Goss on vocals and guitar, guitarist Alain Johannes, drummer John Leamy, and bassist Paul Powell – sounds both rooted in the blues music that started all this rock business in the first place, and yet attuned to contemporary music’s constant need to shapeshift and reinvent itself to stay relevant.

“David Bowie is probably my ultimate hero,” he tells me. “He instinctively understood those aesthetics and how to navigate them. In the world of rock we saw the greatest example of that shift in the early ’90s when grunge fundamentally changed the landscape. A lot of rock bands of the era got knocked on their ass, still wearing their Spandex tucked into their cowboy boots. ‘Come on buddy.

You’re not paying attention.’ Even though I didn’t really care for them, Jane’s Addiction were smart enough to make that  transition from hard rock to that nouveau ’90s style. They managed to bridge the gap.”

MASTERS OF REALITY music is a million miles from Jane’s Addiction, and I guess if you’re being harsh you might suggest that the band has never been able to punch up to where the big boys hang out.

Masters has never been a commercial juggernaut, but having spoken to Chris it’s pretty clear that from an early age he knew himself well enough to understand that commercial success was never going to be the band’s primary focus.

“I’m the worst businessman in the world,” he tells me. “I really am. I don’t wake up in the morning ambitious. I seem to need to let things slide until the last possible second, until it needs to be done urgently. I´ve been that.

way my whole life, and I think it’s probably due to the fact that I lost my dad at a really young age. I was eight years old, and he died of a heart attack when he was just 44. He had an executive job and worked his f*cking balls off. We had the Leave It To Beaver lifestyle in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and I think what I took from the experience of his death was simply ‘Why?’ This type-A personality worked incredibly hard and then just dropped dead. I think a lot of my life has been a reaction to that. That’s why I’m a lazy son of a bitch with a ‘f*ck you’ attitude.”

“I’M THE WORST BUSINESSMAN IN THE WORLD.

I REALLY AM. I DON’T WAKE UP IN THE MORNING

AMBITIOUS. I SEEM TO NEED TO LET THINGS SLIDE

UNTIL THE LAST POSSIBLE SECOND, UNTIL IT NEEDS

TO BE DONE URGENTLY.”

If you’re looking for the path of least resistance in life and music then that’s probably not the best attitude to attach yourself to. And that could well have something to do with the fact that not only have Masters Of Reality never been a big numbers act, but they’ve had more than their fair share of ‘dark days’ moments over the course of a career that has nevertheless endured for more than 40 years.

Chris Goss appears to take it all in his stride, though. “It’s odd, man.” he muses. “I guess being very comfortable living out here in the desert at Joshua Tree has something  to do with it,” he says. “I’m into home life with my cats, and in some ways I feel like I’ve been semi-retired for half my life.”

But if you’re sitting there trying to make the sums add up as to how this guy who’s never really scaled the commercial heights as a musician is in this state of perpetual comfort, it’s important that you’re in possession of all the facts.

Chris Goss isn’t just the main man in Masters Of Reality. He’s also a well-respected producer. Some call him ‘The Godfather Of Stoner Rock’, the bastard offspring of grunge and metal that took hold with its furious riffs and hip-swinging grooves in the early part of the ’90s, though he most likely wouldn’t thank me for reminding him of that.

Between 1992 and 1995 Chris was at the production controls for three albums by Kyuss, the greatest desert/stoner rock band that ever was.

Kyuss never made much commercial headway either, though guitarist Josh Homme would go on to have huge success with Queens Of The Stone Age. Their music, though, was off-the-scale brilliant. The band’s second album – and the first they did with Goss – was ‘Blues For The Red Sun’. According to Goss “that record started to attract a lot of ears.

At the start of the ’90s the budgets for albums were astronomical compared to now. I could earn $45,000 just from spending two months in the studio with a band. I started producing for the cash.” He corrects himself quickly. “But I never produced a band solely for the money. I had to love the music. I could give you a list of bands that I turned down that would have made me millions. But I needed to love the music.”
There’s that ‘worst businessman in the world’ gene coming to the fore again. But that’s the thread that links every aspect of the career of this eclectic rock musician, the need to follow the muse rather than the dollar.

WHERE DID this counter-cultural ‘f*ck you’ worldview develop? Well let’s time travel back to upstate New York in 1963 where a five-year-old Chris Goss is developing an obsession with The Beatles while still in short pants.

“I had an Uncle Emerson who was a painter and played classical piano,” Chris tells me. “I often heard my parents tell me that I took after Emerson, but that’s the only musicality I know of in my family.”

Chris’s dad, the business high flyer who died aged just 44, was a linguistics expert, his mom was a housewife.

“The music thing I really attribute to my older brother Michael,” he says. “He was four years older than me and came home with all these strange records that totally intrigued me, stuff like Cream’s ‘Disraeli Gears’ [from 1967] and their ‘Live Cream’ album [released in 1970], Yes’s ‘Fragile’ [from 1971]. It was all magnetic, and there was nothing I could do about it. All day long in school, all I could think about was going home and putting my headphones on and listening to music – and it became an obsession. I was really lucky to be undergoing my musical awakening at that time because the period between 1968 and 1974 was an incredible era for music.

There was an absolute tidal wave of great stuff of all different styles, from jazz and jazz fusion to rock like Zeppelin and the Stones, then Neil Young, Crosby, Stills & Nash, hippy music. All these genres were popular at one and the same time, and people were open to all of it, from Emerson, Lake & Palmer to Chaka Khan. It was unbelievable.

“The pigeonholing of different styles of music hadn’t been sorted for greed purposes by that time, so it was the Wild West, really wide open. In general I don’t like the idea of nostalgia. I like to look forward. But that’s a hard thing to do once you’ve experienced an era like that when people still had the attention span to listen to whole albums.”

WHEN A friend of Michael’s started leaving a guitar hanging around the Goss household, young Chris couldn’t help himself.

“I was so curious to see what I could do, and very soon it became my total escape.” Not that he was suddenly going to turn into one of his heroes,
Jimmy Page…

“I still haven’t truly mastered the guitar,” he tells me, at least sounding deadly serious. ”To this day I can hardly play a major scale on a guitar without f*cking it up. I’m totally technically inept, and while in some ways that’s been an advantage, at my age of 66 I do look at guys who can play the sh*t out of a guitar and say to myself, ‘Maybe I should learn a couple of those things.’”

I wonder whether Chris’s lack of technical dexterity impacted on his growing interest in the punk rock scene after feeling his way through the more trad metal in the ’70s.

“I was in a few cover bands in the ’70s,” he confirms. “Doing Aerosmith, Blue Öyster Cult, Queen, and Montrose, all the hard rock of the time. But then I started to wander.

There had been so many musical transitions in such a relatively short period of time, from The Beatles to Hendrix in under five years. It was a time of great political upheaval too, but music to me had nothing to do with politics. It was all just sensual pleasure. And what I found was that by the time it got to 1977 I was ready for punk rock. Some friends started turning me on to Patti Smith and Television, early Ramones.

Now at this point I was a major, major Yes fan. Their melodies were incredible and the technical genius of the individual members at that point was stunning. So I think if punk hadn´t come along, then maybe I wourd have made enough technical progress to be able to play prog music.

Punk gave me an exguse not to have to learn to play like that.

“What you also have to remember is that the artistic aesthetic of punk and the pure spectacle of what was starting to happen in New York was very exciting because it was available to me. I was a four-hour journey away, so I started spending more and mor time in New York going to clubs like Max´s Kansas City and CBGB.

What was really interesting about that time, too, was the fact that there was some kind of symbiotic energy between the punk rock that was happening downtown and the disco music that was uptown.

I loved disco, that repetition of beats mixed with the electronic element that had started to come in. Probably my favourite piece of music in the world is ‘I Feel Love’ by Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder because even with its lack of human rhythm there’s so much humanity in that song.

It may not ever be topped. Electricity was in the air for all this music in New York City and it was stunning. And so I started collecting both disco and punk records.

When Iggy Pop played his comeback show with David Bowie on keyboards at the Palladium in 1977 I was at the show. On the way to the gig, I stopped at Bleecker Bob’s record store in Greenwich Village and bought the ‘Anarchy In The UK’ single by the Sex Pistols.

I literally had that single in a bag in my hand watching Iggy Pop on stage, so that was a pretty seminal moment.

It felt like there was magic in the air, like something new was happening.

New York, art, drugs, and music broadened my horizons incredibly.” Like most music obsessives who lived through punk, Chris was inspired to start something of his own.

He’d been to college with a guy called TIM HARRINGTON callsometime around 1973 or 1974. “And Tim had a picture of the album cover from King Crimson’s, ‘In The Court Of The Crimson King’, stuck up in his locker. I knew he must be cool.”

By the time the early ’80s came around, the pair’s paths crossed again when Chris noticed Tim playing Top 40 stuff in restaurants.

“He was making a living playing guitar, which I could never do. With me, it was always my way or the highway.

I was never going to play a f*cking Barry Manilow song for anybody. But somehow I saw that Tim had this brutal, dry sense of humour, and I thought to myself, ‘There’s a musician inside this guy who’s probably pretty interesting. ’So we organised a jam and it worked really well.”

The pair started making up songs and recording them to cassettes.

“I wanted to make this dark, dancey, rhythmic thing, kind of ‘drum machine meets heavy metal’ vibe, and I think we managed to pull it off – with the aid of plenty of alcohol. Tim’s playing really complemented the sound.

He said he added validity to my half-baked ideas.” The band first made their way under the name of COUSIN IT and then THE MANSON FAMILY before finally settling on MASTERS OF REALITY in 1981.

“I pulled out a copy of ‘Master Of Reality’, the Black Sabbath record, and the Warner Bros. label on the vinyl had a misprint. It said ´Masters of Reality` with an S, and straightaway it was, ´There we go. There’s the name.’ So thank you Warner Bros. for your useful ineptitude.”

MASTERS OF REALITY bummed around for seven, maybe eight years, “and Tim and I got on pretty well writing together,” remembers Chris, who kept himself solvent by working as a club DJ.

“It was a great way to drink for free,” he laughs. “Most of the time from 1979 to 1987 I made my living as a DJ.

Masters Of Reality would only do four, maybe five shows a year. It was something we’d drag out for special occasions.”

Nevertheless, the band eventually started to garner some attention in New York City and even further afield. Wax Traks! in Chicago took a look at the band. But just at the moment when it looked as if things might be taking an upward turn, the internal politics of the band took something of a nosedive.

“I suspect it happens to lots of bands,” says Chris. “After that amount of time together you start to get f*cking sick of each other. You know what the other person’s going to say, what they’re going to do. I’m sure Tim felt the same way about me.”

By Goss’s own admission Masters Of Reality were “very gothy,” but nevertheless the rhythmic element of the music the band was making came to the attention of a certain Rick Rubin.

“I had a friend who worked at MTV called PETER DOUGHERTY, and in 1987 he gave a demo we’d made to Rubin. Rick had done some production work with Run DMC by this time, and their sound had in some ways mixed drum machines with guitars.

When I’d first heard them I’d thought that suddenly what we’d been doing for six years was happening on the funk side of things.

“We had a manager at the time, STEVE LATHAM, who also ran a restaurant in New York City called Exterminator Chili. The restaurant was in Tribeca and at the time Tribeca was the up-and-coming neighbourhood in New York.

Rubin used to come to that restaurant, along with [hip artist Jean-Michel] Basquiat and MADONNA.

It was a very trendy, hip little restaurant. We became the freeloader band that would hang out at the restaurant, eat there, and even play some shows there. And so, after the introduction to Rick Rubin, we would hang out at Exterminator Chili. I noticed from the start that a lot of what Rick did was for the show, right down to the way he ordered food. He made a thing of being into junk food, burgers and hot dogs and that kind of stuff. He was a very, very strange guy, a hard person to figure out. But I knew that he was probably the most popular producer in the world at that time – Beastie Boys, Run DMC, Aerosmith, blah, blah, blah.

There  was a courtship ofsorts that lasted quite a long time. He wanted to sign Masters Of Reality to Def Jam.”

IT’S FAIRLY clear from the way that Chris discusses Rubin that he was somewhat suspicious of him back then…

“Rick wasn’t a drinker or a smoker. He was a very, very sober guy. I think he said he’d drunk beer once in his life and regretted it, or something like that. I’d spent my years hanging out the window of a car throwing up, with music blasting out of the car speakers. I was the quintessential ’70s teenager. So here was this very sober guy who was really hip at the same time. But I knew there was this little thing missing, that he didn’t actually live the lore. He knew the aesthetic of the rock’n’roll lifestyle really well.

You saw it in the Beastie Boys’ song ‘(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!)’, the self-destruction and the humour of it all. But he was an observer and not a participant. So I was suspicious of Rick, but I was willing to overlook my suspicion for money and for fame.”

The courtship lasted so long that by the time Rubin signed Masters Of Reality he had already split with his business partner Russell Simmons (“a very kind man”), leaving Def Jam to start the Def American label in 1988.

By the time the deal had been struck, though, the band was in poor shape. “By that point I was easing up on the booze, but Tim Harrington wasn’t, and the band had split into two factions. It was me and the bass player [Googe] versus Tim and the drummer [Vinnie Ludovico]. We all didn’t get along, but we were hanging in there because now Rick Rubin’s producing us, the label’s spending a lot of money, and we’re in Atlantic Studios in New York.

Keith Richards was mixing his ‘Talk Is Cheap’ album at the same time in the studio. I’m seeing Keith Richards in the hallway of the studio every day, and saying hello, so as you can imagine the whole process of making an album was very enchanting.”

Up to a point. According to Goss, once the band started working with Rubin, things quickly spiralled out of control. “It became completely ridiculous. We ended up doing take after take despite knowing that we’d got ‘the take’ 12 takes ago.

But Rick made us keep going, and we’d end up with 15 takes of one song. I think we ended up with 75 reels of two-inch recording tape.

“Tim and I started working on overdubs in New York and then suddenly Rick said, ‘We’re moving to California to finish the record. Pick out the takes you want to use.’

We had something like two days to get all this together and so we’re wading through 75 reels of tapes with well over 200 takes of songs. It was insane.”

By his own admission, by this time Chris had already arrived at the point of “not giving a f*ck anymore. I knew I was watching stupid decisions being made, but I didn’t have the wherewithal to fight it because of the internal conflict in the band. I was literally just saying, ‘Yeah, that take’s fine’ without really caring, just to get through with it, man.” But there was more…

“During the recording process, the original sound of the band was kind of corrupted and dried up. We were a gothy band that used lots of echo. But Rubin took the most whimsical, bluesy part of us and dried the goth part up, the part I called The Purple Fog. You know that thing The Cult had on the ‘Love’ record? The Purple Fog of ‘She Sells Sanctuary’?

And then Rick Rubin got a hold of them, and it became AC/DC. That changing of a sound was happening to me during the recording of the ‘Masters Of Reality’ album.

It felt like it was happening  surgically. ‘There goes my liver. Oh, they’re taking a kidney now. I’ll wait until they take an arm.’”

So Chris Goss made a decision… “I said to myself, ‘OK, I’ll get done with the album and then I’ll do one video. And then after that one video I’ll do one tour. And then I started counting down the days until I could get the f*ck out of it.”

Chris says that things didn’t get overtly nasty between him and Rick Rubin, though. “Both of us wanted to be polite to each other. It was very English in a way. We were just kind of tolerating each other, thinking that the end result would pay off for both of us. But by the end of the record Rick didn’t show up at the studio as much as at the start. I think he was getting bored with it.”

Rick Rubin was not only the producer of the debut album that appeared in 1988, but also the owner of the label that was putting it out. Clearly this made the breakdown of the relationship between him and Chris even more problematic. “It’s funny though,” Chris laughs. “When you don’t give a f*ck, suddenly it doesn’t matter. At that point I was beyond worrying about it. When you really reach the end of your rope then there’s no rationale, that’s just it. We did a video for one of the songs from the album called ‘The Blue Garden’, and then we went out on tour with King’s X, which was a terrible combination.

But like I said, I’d decided I was going to quit, so that’s what I did. “I knew I’d signed a contract, of course, but once I walked Rubin called and said, ‘Well, what are you going to do? You’re still under contract.’ Well I’d already had an idea. I said to him, ‘What I’m going to do is stand in front of your office on Sunset Boulevard and play acoustic guitar for a living starting tomorrow. I don’t care what you do to me, so sue me.’ Of course then we started negotiating. But I had this terrible, inept lawyer negotiating on my behalf with Rubin’s people, which was the biggest legal mic firm in New York.”

On the surface, things didn´t look good for Chris. But behind the scenes things were happening.

“When I was on the brink of leaving the band I called a friend of mine called Matt Dike. [Dike had previously worked as an assistant to Jean-Michel Basquiat from the Exterminator Chili days.] He was a major hip-hop fan and had started a label called Delicious Vinyl in 1987.

I told Mike that I was quitting Masters Of Reality and was heading to LA. He said, ‘Dude, get off that tour. I’ll sign you, no problem.’ Matt was a beautiful, lovely genius, so I knew I had some back-up from him.

So I quit the band and went to LA with a woman I’d fallen in love with.” Of course Chris knew there would be fallout in the immediate aftermath of his decision to walk out of Masters Of Reality.

“A lot of people were shocked by the commotion it caused,” he says. “Fortunes had been spent recording, there’d been a lot of press, and then the singer quits the band mid-tour on the very first tour. So there was a lot of bullsh*t, a lot of phone calls and all that stuff. But I just didn’t give a f*ck.

I left my fate to the four winds and said, ‘OK, life can take me wherever it wants off the back of this decision. Who cares?’

The pain was too much. It was ruining the love of my life. Music had been pleasure, and in many ways my entire existence. Suddenly it had become a cancer.”

To my surprise, Goss didn’t get into an arm wrestle with Tim Harrington over the band name.

“The guys who were left back in Syracuse thought I was going to crash and burn. They thought I was going to fail. So they were like, ‘He can take the band and the name. Who gives a f*ck? What’s he going to do with it?’ They thought Rick Rubin had me over a barrel with the contract, so they signed the name away to me.

But I think Rick knew he couldn’t win a fight with me. I was like the Viet Cong. We were never going to win in Vietnam because those people were fighting for their lives.

Rick knew it was game over, so he sold my contract to Delicious Vinyl and recouped as much as he could.” Within a month Masters of Reality was up an running again – but this time with a really surprising new member.

“So I signed to Delicious Vinyl,” Chris explains. “And at the time they had [rapper] Tone-Loc on the label. Now Tone-Loc’s manager was a guy called MARTY SCHWARTZ, and Marty played polo with [legendary Cream drummer] GINGER BAKER.

There was a barbecue at Marty’s house in the Hollywood Hills that I was invited to, and who’s at the barbecue? Ginger Baker. Now Marty, a lovely hustler guy, knew my situation, that I’d just left the band and didn’t have a drummer. So he said to me and Ginger, ‘Hey, you guys should jam.’ And I remember Ginger’s face. He immediately rolled his eyes back like Lurch from [American TV show] The Addams Family. But three days later, Marty had got Ginger’s drum kit to SIR Rehearsal Studios in LA, and he´d got Ginger there to jam with me. We hit it off immediately, and it was five hours of non-stop smiling. “I wasn’t nervous at all. I couldn’t wait to play musical ping-pong with someone as good as Ginger. I thought, ‘I’m going to throw this guy tons of riffs and see what he throws back.’ Back then whenever I got stoned I was like a riff machine, coming up with one blues riff after another. So I was in a room with a drummer who could throw those riffs back, turn them around and upside down…

When he played one of those tom tom runs of his right in front of me, I was immediately transported back to being a little boy with headphones on listening to Cream live. It was so transportive, sheer magic. We had a f*cking ball, both of us grinning from ear to ear. And after we were done, Ginger said, ‘We should do something, Chris.’ I said, ‘Yeah, you should join my band,’ and that was it. It was that easy.” Chris reckons what sealed the deal was the fact that he never played any Cream material in the whole jam session. “I knew where Ginger’s boundaries were.”

The second Masters Of Reality album – recorded as a three piece with Goss on vocals and guitar, Baker on drums, and Googe on bass – was called ‘Sunrise On The Sufferbus’. It was released in 1992 on the Chrysalis label. “Delicious Vinyl thought the album might be too ‘rock’ for an independent rap label to promote properly,” explains Goss. “The company president, Mike Ross, was friends with the head of Chrysalis, and struck a deal with him to release the album.

“Recording ‘Sunrise On The Sufferbus’ was a completely different experience to the first album,” continues Goss. “Very creative. There were times when Ginger was miserable in the studio, and he would yell and do his thing. But I knew when to leave him alone. When he wanted to throw a tantrum I said, ‘Chill out Ginger. Let’s take a break for a minute.’ I had patience because I knew we were working on something great, and I knew it sounded fantastic. The drum sounds were the best.

Finally the man was recorded properly, and you could hear everything he did. I was very proud of that, and I think he felt proud of that too. He loved the songs and was really complimentary about the songwriting. “I was riding a high being appreciated by this man who was one of the architects of what I’d devoted my life to. And here he was devoting himself to my music. It was incredible. It was rough for a while, too, but all good things have a hard part, and I’m proud of the end result.”

AS SEEMS almost inevitable with Masters of Reality, though, the good times didn’t last. “We went out on tour with Alice In Chains and again it was a bad match-up,” says Chris. “There were kids in the front row in Megadeth T-shirts and they were throwing shit at Ginger.

We were a threepiece jazz blues outfit trying to open for a heavy Seattle band. Some nights it worked, and others it didn’t. Then one night [Alice vocalist] Layne Staley OD’d on stage and the tour was cancelled. Ginger had toured with me even before we started making the second record, so he’d put nearly three years of his life into the band.

He called me and said, ‘Chris, I can’t do this anymore.’ I said, ‘I don’t f*cking blame you.’ It wasn’t the way it had been in 1968, and I think that reality had sunk in for both him and me.

“Ginger suggested we take his son Kofi out as his replacement, but by this point Ginger being in Masters Of Reality was becoming the story. I started thinking people would buy tickets believing Ginger would be on drums, and then when he wasn’t it was going to be a nightmare.

Looking back, I probably could have pulled it off. But there you go with the lack of ambition thing again…” And that was the point in time that we jumped in on earlier, when Chris Goss’s life took a different direction as he moved into production.

“I was still an artist surrounded by musicians, dealing in rock’n’roll aesthetics, guitar tones, and song arrangements. So producing did replace 80 per cent of what I had being in my own band. But I was always sure that Masters Of Reality would return.”

INDEED THEY did,but only sporadically, ant not without the odd false start. An ill-fated alliance with Epic Records in 1995 saw an album, ‘The Ballad Of Jody Frosty’, shelved.

“It was the era of grunge on the one hand and new girl intellectual stuff like Fiona Apple on the other. I didn’t fit in with either category. Over the years, pieces of that record have gotten out, though.”

Only four official Masters studio albums have appeared in the 32 years since ‘Sunrise On The Sufferbus’: 1999’s ‘Welcome To The Western Lodge’, ‘Deep In The Hole’ in 2001, ‘Give Us Barabbas’ in 2004, and 2009’s ‘Pine/ Cross Dover’. I assume that Goss’s successful career as a producer means that there’s now no commercial imperative to make Masters Of Reality music. He just waits for the muse to hit.

“That’s a part of it,” he concurs. “But it’s also a matter of a record label saying, ‘Do you want to make a record?’ It really is that simple. And if they can give me a budget that allows me to make a decent record then I’ll do it. Music is the only weapon I’ve been given to set things straight in my own way. But the motivation… The problem is that I’m amused by a lot of things. I can watch TV for 10 years and not even know that 10 years went by. I’m a foodie and I like comfort traveling. It’s actually a very strange situation, because it’s kind of coming to a head at this point. I’m getting older so it’s like ‘OK, you have to do this now because a few years from now you may not be able to do it.”

Chris is 66 years old now, and so the idea that you’re running out of life seems to be a pretty good motivator for getting on with getting on. That’s why he’s “in the midst of finishing a new album now, making sure it has the edge I’m looking for. Given the state of the world, though, I do wonder whether I’d be better off spending my time growing food and raising chickens rather than playing music. Maybe I should be preparing for the Internet and the ATMs going down. That can be done with the flip of a f*cking switch! So should I be fighting for my own survival and the survival of my loved ones rather than putting out a f*cking record?”

Who knows the answer to that one? But what I do know is that I for one need Chris Goss to keep making his relentlessly weird, relentlessly brilliant music. And I think deep down Chris Goss needs to do it to. “There’s always that little bit of hope,” he chuckles as we take our leave. “That little bit of hope that someone new out there might just pick up on this odd little song from this odd little band.”

“GIVEN THE STATE OF THE WORLD, I DO WONDER WHETHER I’D

BE BETTER OFF SPENDING MY TIME GROWING FOOD AND

RAISING CHICKENS RATHER THAN PLAYING MUSIC. SHOULD I

BE FIGHTING FOR MY OWN SURVIVAL AND THE SURVIVAL OF MY

LOVED ONES RATHER THAN PUTTING OUT A F*CKING RECORD?”