Hello Kirk!
I recently came out to see Unkle John's Band, and had a great time dancing to all the wonderful tunes and meeting you and the other band members.
I am very pleased for this opportunity to interview you for Dirty Dog Live!

What is your musical background?

I began taking lessons when I was 10, in Seattle. I began taking lessons at a music store...

Guitar?

...Yeah, guitar. And I have taken lessons on and off over the years but I have never studied music as a major. I did take music theory in college.

What do they teach you in music theory?

Mathematical things. Music is a lot of math. That's why I didn't become a music major. The math is very complex. I studied biology for a while, and gave that up, and thought about music, but some of us don't have aptitudes for math the way others do.

I always believed you're either more creative or more mechanically inclined. I think you're probably more creative.

I think people who do science and math are creative in their own ways, it's just a different kind of creativity; more conceptual, and a different way of thinking and creating.

How did your creative writing come to you as you were growing up?

I have pretty much always written fiction and poetry. What happened was during a certain point in my graduate studies in English, I decided, ~well I didn't decide so much as I just kept writing and getting published, particularly fiction, and I think I realized, sometime when I was getting my PhD I would be teaching creative writing as much as literature because I liked it so much. I didn't really study creative writing the way some people do. I studied literature.

I know your literature has been published. Have any of your songs been published?

Not really, no. We haven't done an album. I've written songs but I have never taken any of them that far.

Any particular reason why not?

It has to do with being in the right frame of mind and being with the right people. We are talking about it, as a band we have original songs we're working to put together. I think it's been a timing issue.

Who are your current band members?

John Hyatt, Richard Freysinger, Jordan Cylak, DP Warner, James Reedy, myself.

John is a teacher at Meadville Area Senior High, I'm a professor at Allegheny College, Richard is a teacher in Linesville. Jordan just graduated from MASH and teacher guitar lessons. DP Warner is a professor of art at Edinboro. James Reedy is a professor of dance/yoga at Allegheny. He teaches a variety of similar courses.

And how long have you all been playing together?

Most all of us, except for Jordan, about 5 or 6 years. Though James and I go back a dozen years and John and Richard and I all have had connections in various ways for years. But the Unkle John's Band has been together 5 or 6 years.

Who are your musical influences?

Grateful Dead, Stones, Tom Petty, Talking Heads is a big one, Rusted Root, though we don't play any of their songs.

Do you have any immediate or long term goals pertaining to your music?

Mainly we just want to have fun. A few of us are interested in putting together an album. It's a time issue. All of us are pretty well entrenched here with jobs and families.

That makes touring tough.

I am interested in you and your literature and book writing and publishing. That is also fascinating to me for many reasons.

I can say too that the fact I write poems means something to lyrics, and there are some songs of mine that were originally poems that I kind of gave up on as poems and turned into songs. I made the rhymes very obvious.

And why don't you do more of your original songs when out?

We should do more of them, but it seems most people want to hear cover music.

I've heard that from other bands also.

We could do more , in fact I would like to hear people ask for more original music.

I would like to hear the local radio stations play more of the original music because musicians in this area have so much talent. Many of the bands here have Cds out, and they're all very good. I use local artists on Dirty Dog Live's MySpace page. One artist's song is so good I know it could make a top chart.

Define the word "Success". What does success mean to you?

I think it's different for every band member, and I think it's different for each of us, show by show, but for me, as far as mucic goes, it's going out and playing and feeling unified with the band, and communicating something to an audience.
There's a kind of an exhilaration a person gets from doing music that's transferrable, and when that doesn't happen, then we haven't succeeded. I don't tend to think about success in the way of moving ahead in terms of a musical career. In a most practical way, part 2 of success is if there are no people there, then that is not a success. If we're playing to ourselves, and the help, then part of success is getting people through the door.

Yes, that's a big thing right now too, and it's something I see a lot of while out.

What do you see as success with you personally and your publishing right now? Are you looking for that one great book?

Yes, I think we all are. Not with poetry, I don't think poets think that way really. They may think about prominence in the field of poetry, which is pretty obscure, even the biggest poets in this country are very obscure. I have written four novels and none of them have done anything. Two of them have been pushed by agents.

What are they about?

One is a Gothic rock novel. It's partly set in Mexico. And another is called Mr. Erotic , which began as a short story and evolved into a 325 page novel. It's about this aging DJ, his fantasies, freak-outs, his disengagement. It's very difficult to break in with commercial success and even harder if you're writing fiction.

What if you could write a book that would be required reading for every high school student in every classroom?

That would be lovely. That would surely be success. One would hope when you write that the money would pour in and you could just continue to write. Salinger pulled it off with his book Catcher in the Rye. It's one of those books that is required reading for all of these high-schools. Part of it was the story of those kids and that situation, and the rest of is that it captured the imagination of the whole population, actually the whole world. That book is translated into many, many different languages.

How does music affect your life and the world around you? Do you have a song in your heart?

I would say I have lots of songs in my heart. But the favorite ones keep changing. I would say that music is a necessary staple for me daily, and certain types of music I'll need. They have to round out my day emotionally. I like to hear baroque music, or Renaissance music in the morning, and in the middle of the day or afternoon a more serious rock or alternative. I listen to a lot of Gothic rock. I'm a DJ for Gothic rock on campus every Monday from 8 to 10pm. I tend to listen to a lot of new electro-industrial and dark wave. The music I listen to tends to be fairly synthetic Gothic, heavy synthesizer. In the evenings I like ambient music. I have a satellite dish and I'll play Audio Visions and tune into space music, which means I'm sort of tuning out while I'm tuning in.

I have that on our Dish, and a lot of the time I'll listen to Moodscapes, but I prefer the Roadhouse type of music.

It depends on the time of day. Music is really nourishing that way and it helps me to write.

What are some of your pet peeves?

I think it's criminal that they still allow smoking in bars because the musicians are exposed to a greater amount of smoke. I'm not down on the smokers, but the establishments that are still allowing the smoke. That's a peeve, ingesting second hand smoke. I don't have many peeves. I'm generally a very agreeable person.

What do you feel is your greatest achievement so far?

My daughter. She's a fashion model in Los Angeles. She was on the cover of Pasadena Magazine lately.

What's your favorite thing about playing in front of an audience?

It's the give and take. Working together as a band and it all comes together. That's when it gets really exciting, it's almost magical. It's actually hard to talk about. It's just something that happens.

I've seen that with bands. All of a sudden something really magical will happen, and some people in the audience will pick up on it, and will just stop what they're doing and listen and watch the magic happen. Some people are oblivious to what's going on, but I'm one of those people who will see the magic and I have to stop and listen. Some of the greatest performances come completely by surprise.

Exactly.

And Finally:
Where do you see the music industry going now? Things are different now. There's YouTube and MySpace, and everything has changed.

I guess I see people really enjoying a greater variety of music. Music is so available that people can easily choose what they want to hear any time of the day. I know I certainly like a variety.

*DDL
Check our Calendar for gigs with Unkle John's Band and Kirk!

A brief biography:

Kirk Nesset is author of two books of short stories, Paradise Road (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007) and Mr. Agreeable (forthcoming), as well as a nonfiction study, The Stories of Raymond Carver (Ohio University Press, 1995). His books of poems and translations are also soon to appear: St. X (Lewis Clark Press) and Alphabet of the World (University of Oklahoma Press). He was awarded the Drue Heinz literature award in 2007 and has received a Pushcart Prize and numerous grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His stories, poems and translations have appeared in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, Agni, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, The Sun, Fiction, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing and literature at Allegheny College.

Dirty Dog Live interview with Kirk Nesset
Kirk Runs with the Dog!