It’s a very special episode this week as Bernard presents Sound Conversations, a collection of interviews with directors, documentarians, actors, festival programmers and, most importantly, sound designers, about the art of sound in film. Technique, philosophy, tradition, experimentation—all angles of sound design are covered as we explore one of the most underappreciated aspects of filmmaking with some of the most talented people in the biz. Joining the show are the sound-obsessed artists behind Love & Mercy, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, 10,000 km, Gett: The Trial of Vivianne Amsalem, Foxcatcher and many more. Listen in and listen close—it’s Sound Conversations!

Topics

• Bel Powley & Marielle Heller (2:23)
• Carlos Marques-Marcet (5:17)
• Shlomi Elkabetz (11:57)
• Chris Strachwitz, Chris Simon, Maureen Gosling (35:39)
• Bill Pohlad (21:45)
• Oren Moverman (25:57)
• Anita Monga (33:06)
• Paul Hsu (38:31)

Articles Referenced

The Diary of a Teenage Girl Interview
10,000 km Interview
Gett: The Trial of Vivianne Amsalem Interview
Love & Mercy Interview
Anita Monga Interview
Time Out of Mind Interview
This Ain’t No Mouse Music Interview

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The setting is an outdoor blues concert in Louisiana. Sitting in a chair in the middle of the audience wearing earth tones and a baseball cap is Chris Strachwitz, the 83-year-old founder of Arhoolie Records, one of the leading roots music labels in the world. It’s an intermission in between sets, and there’s some modest music playing on the speakers. “God!” he screams, plugging his ears with his fingers. He’s visibly frustrated with the sound, mocking the middling tune openly, for everyone around to hear. “Hah! I think Stravinsky would have dug this crap!”

What’s causing the aged but vivacious Strachwitz such agony is what he calls “mouse music”, middling, commercial pop tunes lacking any real guts. Fittingly, the clip is the sole trace you’ll find of it in This Ain’t No Mouse Music, a heartfelt music doc by filmmakers Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon. The rest of the film is full of footage of Strachwitz smiling from ear to ear, happy as a clam, listening to what he lovingly refers to as “the hardcore stuff”: Down home blues. Minority roots music. Sounds born of pain and hard labor that kick you in the chest and leave you bruised, inspired, and stricken with the irresistible urge to bob your head and tap your feet.

Strachwitz grew up in Germany and was forced to move to the US at 15 after WWII. He quickly fell in love with the blues, and in 1960 at age 29 he founded Arhoolie for a simple reason: He wanted to find obscure blues artists, record them in their natural environments guerrilla-style (often recording outdoors), and spread the joy of these undiscovered musicians with the world. “I just fell in love with making records,” Strachwitz recalls in voiceover as we see vintage photos of him with a full head of hair, standing next to old tape recorders, wearing a sunny grin. It’s that smile, maybe more so than the music, even, that leads us through the film and sticks in our minds long after. More than anything, the film is about the wondrous effect music has on the soul.

From Mance Lipscomb, the legendary blues guitarist who was the first artist Strachwitz discovered; to Clifton Chenier, the Cajun “King of the South” who played the most soulful accordion sounds you’ll ever hear; to one of Strachwitz’s new discoveries, a young roots band called No Speed Limit led by a teenage girl with an old-school country wail, the list of artists explored is exhaustive. Strachwitz’s love of Mexican and Tejano music is represented as well, through artists like Lydia Mendoza and Flaco Jiminez. We see him gush in a vintage TV clip: “I think it’s fascinating music. The songs are the poetry of the people.”

The access Gosling and Simon have is incredible, following Strachwitz from his home in California (where he runs his shop, the Down Home Music Store), through Texas, the Appalachians, down into Louisiana as he meets up with his musician buddies and records them doing their thing, hanging microphones over their heads. It’s a lot of fun to watch him have a ball, bouncing up and down to the jams, despite the film being somewhat cinematically flat. Friends Ry Cooder, Bonnie Raitt, and Richard Thompson are interviewed and elaborate further on the Strachwitz as a man, as well as his significance to the down home movement.

This Ain’t No Mouse Music accomplishes two primary things: It chronicles Strachwitz’s life and career and celebrates American and Mexican roots music, weaving them seamlessly into a cohesive picture. This cohesion likely came naturally to Gosling and Simon, as Strachwitz and the music he loves are so deeply intertwined. The racial dynamics of a white man acting as an evangelist for minority music are barely grazed upon here, which is the right choice; this isn’t a political film, but an emotionally charged portrait of a man’s love affair with an art form, a culture, a community. Strachwitz never got married or raised a family. But says friend Davia Nelson in the film: “He might not have his own kids and his own wife, but I think he makes family out of everyone that he loves.”

This Ain’t No Mouse Music trailer

“If somebody wants to sing, sing god damn it!”

Chris Strachwitz, founder of Arhoolie Records and purveyor and evangelist of obscure, down home blues music, isn’t the biggest fan of modern pop music. He likes the “hardcore stuff” (whatever that means). He likes no-nonsense music that grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go, and he’s been recording artists like Mance Lipscomb and Clifton Chenier play their music in living rooms, front porches, and front yards since the label was founded in 1960.

Filmmakers Chris Simon and Maureen Gosling celebrate American minority roots music through Chris’ story in This Ain’t No Mouse Music, a documentary that, in chronicling Strachwitz’s life, invites us to discover the true beauty of music that’ll rough you up a bit.

We caught up with Strachwitz, Simon, and Gosling in San Francisco where we got to the bottom of what “hardcore stuff” really is, talked about Strachwitz‘s love of spontaneity, his approach to live music recording, Simon and Gosling mirroring his style in their filmmaking, exposing young people to down home music, the joy of record hunting, and much more.

Chris, there’s a dichotomy about you I want to talk about. Some of your colleagues describe you as a bit of a perfectionist, but on the other hand, the way you record music is typically on-the-fly and spontaneous.
Strachwitz: I don’t consider myself a perfectionist at all! I’m not sure who said that. If the band’s totally out of tune, I’ll say, “Listen, guys. This has got to stop; let’s see what’s going on here.” I like spontaneity. That’s very true. I used to love these Bob Wills records. But all of a sudden, when they reissued them in the complete Bob Wills sets they had a alternate takes on “Steel Guitar Rag” He starts the track saying “Look out, friends! Here comes Leon!” I thought they improvised all that on the spot, but it was exactly the same way on all the alternate takes. They were professional recordings, but I thought they were much more ad-lib. Some are. That’s why I like Lightning Hopkins so much, who seems to be totally spontaneous. Once I heard him in that beer joint in Houston I was convinced that he would just make up stuff on the spot. Whatever happened to him that day. He was really a rapper, but he sang gorgeously and with a guitar. Much better than any rapper.

That’s the great thing about musicians like Lightning Hopkins: I feel that, whether you were there or not, he’d be playing those songs. You were just lucky enough to capture it, and we’re lucky enough to hear the recordings. There’s a real purity to him. He’s not contriving anything.
Strachwitz: Later on he did. He had to memorize songs, because once it was on a record and people kept asking for it, he had to relearn it.

How did he feel about that?
Strachwitz: He was sometimes rather bored with it. You could tell because he’d sometimes play songs endlessly. You knew he had to sit there for an hour. Jazz musicians sometimes feel the same thing. If they have a session to do an album, they can blow for 40 minutes, although I guess they do have a theme to come back to. But since I’m not a musician, I can’t really judge that sort of thing so well.

The way you record–sometimes outdoors, sometimes hanging mics from lightbulbs–what is it about that technique that’s so magical? Is it the room noise? The sound of random things in the distance?
Strachwitz: I don’t even think about that. It’s the fact that the [musicians are] there with this message that they want to get out and sing. It’s “cranked up”, so to speak. Back in those days, making a record was something unusual. Today, it isn’t. Everybody’s making records in their garbage can studios. [laughs] In the early days of minority music recording, those records were meal tickets. They didn’t think about them as anything but that. If you could get a record on a juke box, people might hear you. They might like you. They might even pay to hear you. You see? That’s the way to get off the cotton fields and the packing sheds, to get away from manual labor, which is where almost all of them came from.

Let’s talk about the filmmaking. Is the way Chris records music the same way you try to film?
Simon: Yup. That pretty much describes it. We like being in the field.

Gosling: We’re always looking for, as Les Blank would call them, these “golden moments”. I think that coming from a film background–as in shooting on film as opposed to video–has given us…[pauses]. Well, when you’re burning up film, it costs hundreds of dollars, so you had to go for the moment that was the best. That is what we bring to what we’re shooting now, even though it’s digital. Chris isn’t going to shoot and shoot and shoot if it’s boring. She wants to shoot for the best stuff. It’s the same with editing. We want to look for the most expressive, spontaneous thing as much as possible. We leave people out who are too stiff or aren’t really responding. It helps to make the film more vibrant, more like a haiku than some rambling thing.

In that way, your approach sounds exactly the same as Chris’.
Gosling: It is exactly the same, and we learned from him and Les, so there you go! [laughs]

Strachwitz: The only thing I feel bad about sometimes is the fact that so many of these musicians wanted me to be their agent or their promoter. I was never interested in that; I wanted to capture things I loved when I heard them. It’s just the way it was. Selling those recordings has always been my weak point. As a small company, you have a really hard time beating the bushes and getting your stuff out there. My experiences with a major companies were always unsatisfying. I used to get the blame for the fact that nothing materialized. That’s especially true with Clifton Chenier. I always told him, “If somebody comes tomorrow and gives you a better deal, you’re free to go.” I never had any exclusive contracts with anyone.

There’s rarely a moment in the film where there’s music playing and Chris isn’t beaming. Talk about getting that across in the film.
Gosling: We certainly go for that. I find, when I’m editing, if I don’t know the characters, I fall in love with them when I’m editing the footage. We know what to look for.

Simon: We want to have that positive feeling. Chris does beam [when music is playing]. There are a lot of bummer films out there. We want people to walk out of the theater feeling better than when they walked in.

Strachwitz: Unless they hate that music! [laughs]

Simon: I’ve gone to so many film festivals, and I’d say the vast majority of films make you want to kill yourself.

This is Way Too Indie. That’s all I watch! [laughs]
Simon: [laughs] Chris has an antidote for that, and we wanted to portray that happiness. We like being happy.

There’s that great scene near the end of the film where Chris is showing these young musicians old records in his music shop, introducing them to Mance Lipscomb and the like. Chris, how happy does it make you to show this music to young people?

Strachwitz: That was really quite extraordinary. I never had any children, and I forget how quickly a generation goes from one to the next. These guys had never heard many of the sounds that I was exposed to.

Gosling: That’s one of my favorite scenes. They were so excited. I wasn’t there when that happened, but I was introducing them at a festival and they were rambling on and on about how excited they were to be at Arhoolie. It was really sweet.

Excuse me for how ignorant this sounds, but I’d never heard accordion played so soulfully before seeing this film.
Gosling: I would have to say that I had a very similar experience. The baggage that I had was the Lawrence Welk baggage.

Simon: Lawrence Welk was really good! [laughs]

Gosling: Now I would probably enjoy him, but before, that was my only reference for accordions. The first film I worked on, Hot Pepper with Les Blank, was about Clifton Chenier. We were going to black dance halls in French Louisiana. It was unbelievable. The soul of that accordion music is incredible. I realized that there’s a passion in each of these traditions, and you just have to look for it. It’s there.

Simon & Gosling

Simon: There are so many different types of music that the accordion is essential to. I’m doing a film right now on a type of music called Dutch Hop, which is a polka music with accordion as the lead instrument and hammer dulcimer as the second lead. Lawrence Welk was also a Dutch Hop musician. I realized how great that music was. We just didn’t appreciate it.

Chris, in the film you say that, as far as music goes, you like the “hardcore stuff”. What’s “hardcore stuff”?
Strachwitz: [laughs] It’s without any saccharine attitude. So much of pop music has all this slop added, with this mush background that I can’t even call music. [makes buzzing sound] You can hardly hear the voices! They bury the voices. If somebody wants to sing, sing god damn it! You know? In the old days, you could hear them sing.

Is sentimentality not appealing to you?
Strachwitz: Sometimes it is. In Mexican songs there’s a lot of sentimentality involved.

I was listening to “Mal Hombre” by Lydia Mendoza earlier.
Strachwitz: That’s a tough song.

Simon: I dragged Chris to a Hawaiian concert once. He whined the whole way over, but he had a really great time by the end. There was some saccharine stuff going on, but all of a sudden one guy came on and punched it. That might be another term for it. It’s not, “Lalalalala…” It’s like, “Listen to this!”

Chris, describe the feeling of finding a record you’ve been looking for for years.
Strachwitz: I can tell you about a recent experience. This wonderful lady in Denver gave a whole collection from her radio station to the Arhoolie foundation, these old Mexican records. My friend and I went up there to pack all these records up, and there were a lot of 78s, over 1,000 or more. I came across a red label 78 that had Lydia Mendoza on it. It was not an Azteca. The only red label she recorded on was Azteca, so I said, “What is this?!” It was called “Music of Mexico Records”. I’d never heard of such a label! There was a name of a record shop in Denver on it, and it was a record she’d recorded in Denver. I’ve never seen another copy of it since. I flipped out. It was an unknown Lydia Mendoza record. As I kept packing, there was another one. I thought maybe it was an extra copy, but no! It as number two! I discovered two unknown Lydia Mendoza records in that stash, and only one copy of each.

Starting tomorrow, there will be a series of This Ain’t No Mouse Music screenings and Q&A’s around the Bay Area:

September 18 at Rialto Cinemas Cerrito in El Cerrito 7pm

• Directors Maureen Gosling & Chris Simon, Chris Strachwitz in person

September 19 at Rialto Cinemas Elmwood in Berkeley 7pm

• Chris Strachwitz in person for Q&A music by Michael Doucet

September 19 at Roxie in San Francisco – 7pm

• Post-screening Q&A with Maureen Gosling

September 19 at Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael – 7pm

• Q&A with Chris Simon & Bonnie Raitt. Co-director Chris Simon will be joined by film participant Bonnie Raitt for a discussion following the screening.

September 20 Roxie in San Francisco – 7pm

• Post-screening Q&A with Chris Simon

September 20 Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael – 7pm

• Before the screening, music by  HowellDevine. Q&A after screening with Chris Strachwitz and Maureen Gosling

September 21 Rialto Cinemas Sebastopol in Sebastopol – 7pm

• Q&A  Chris Simon, Maureen Gosling – followed by music by Will Spires