Celebrated rock ’n’ roller R. Stevie Moore is kicking around some rock names with me at his house in Madison, the Nashville suburb where he grew up in the 1950s and ’60s. He sticks close to home these days, and he sits for my interview amid numerous and apparently un-filed recordings of his music on cassette, vinyl and CD. There are, famously, a great many pieces of his work floating around in the world that exists outside his door. Moore, who is 66, mentions Frank Zappa, Roy Wood, Lord Buckley and The Beatles — influences a teenage denizen of suburban Nashville took to heart to create a series of now-classic home-recorded albums that track his progress from youth to old age. With his white beard and air of subdued mischief-making, Moore looks like a sage who has time-traveled from the year 1969.
We talk about his upcoming show at The East Room with his band Amnesia Insomnia, which is composed of Moore and a pair of young Nashville musicians, Will Hicks and Tyler Blankenship. An elder statesman of indie rock, Moore continues to work with younger acolytes, including popsters Ariel Pink and Jason Falkner, and his reputation among his peers has never been higher. Still, he’s dissatisfied with his place in the rock ’n’ roll firmament, which means that interviews may not be his best medium for self-expression.
“I’ve done so many interviews, and I dreaded this, too, because I thought, ‘I’m losing track with my ego,’ ” Moore says. “My arrogance is overwhelming me, and I show all this bitterness, which goes hand in hand with my personality. I need to stop worrying about Jack fucking White not knowing who I am. I know his associates — they all know about the Phonography man, even if they don’t know my songs or records.”
During our 75-minute interview, Moore’s ego doesn’t run off the tracks, and he jokes about being “10,000 years old” — a grizzled veteran of uncountable recordings and a pioneer of post-modern pop. I first read about Moore in the late ’70s in Stereo Review, a magazine that did a good job of covering power pop, the genre designation under which Moore’s genre-defying work is often filed. His first albums to be distributed in any quantity, 1976’s Phonography and 1978’s Delicate Tension, gained notice for their home-recorded, lo-fi aesthetic and Moore’s gnomic version of post-Beatles, post-Zappa pop. Moore used reel-to-reel tape recorders and inexpensive mics to make his early recordings, which are pastiches of a variety of late-’60s and ’70s styles.
Phonography was compiled from Moore’s 1974-1976 recordings by his uncle, a rock musician and future Atlantic Records executive named Harry Palmer, and released on Palmer’s HP label in a run of 100 copies. One of the era’s rock magazines, Trouser Press, reviewed it favorably, and Palmer released a four-song EP that capitalized on Moore’s newfound notice. Moore, who had been making albums since 1969’s On Graycroft collection, was on his way to becoming one of rock’s most elusive figures.
Moore was born in Nashville in 1952. His father, bassist Bob Moore, was a first-call session musician who played on innumerable country and pop dates. Though his credits include work on Moby Grape’s 1969 Nashville-recorded album Truly Fine Citizen, Bob Moore thrived in the circumscribed world of country, a region of popular music that his son found uninteresting. Bob Moore attempted to enlist his son in the world of highly compensated and well-structured session work, but the younger Moore had been seduced by Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Zappa’s 1968 We’re Only in It for the Money, audacious sonic constructions that made Nashville country seem hopelessly outdated.
“I loved bizarrity long before Zappa,” Moore says. “I loved spoken-word comedy records and Ken Nordine, and Kerouac and all that was fantastic for me. On The Beatles’ White Album, every song was a different style, and that’s me to a tee. All of my tapes are radio shows — it’s free-form, genre-hopping radio shows. Frank Zappa is a huge influence. He puts all of that in perspective, all the genre-hopping and the subversiveness.”
Whatever his relationship has been with his father, who is still living — Moore alludes to his “psychologically abusive childhood” and tells me he’s isn’t in close touch with his family — he is, like Bob Moore, a serious musician who has mastered many pop idioms. He didn’t become a session cat, and after graduating from Madison High School in 1970, he attended Vanderbilt University, then dropped out to pursue recording full time.
On the crudely recorded On Graycroft, Moore had cut the track “III (Worst),” which sounds like the tropicália Brazilian experimentalist Gilberto Gil had been making in the late ’60s. By the mid-’70s, working at home in Nashville, Moore was creating pop rock that foreshadowed the future work of Game Theory, Guided by Voices and dozens of indie-rock bands. Given the differences in recording techniques, Moore churned out work that bears comparison to that of New Wavers Squeeze and Nick Lowe, while some of his more experimental ’70s music suggests some murky fusion of power pop and The Residents.
After recording three of his best albums (Returns, Swing and a Miss and Sheetrock) between 1976 and 1978, Moore moved from Nashville to Montclair, N.J. He’d been in Nashville for a long time, and he found its musical ethos less than congenial to a fan of punk, Todd Rundgren and Captain Beefheart.
“I couldn’t take Allman Brothers anymore,” says Moore. “I was a glam guy, and we were very Beatles and Beach Boys.”
His 1978 compilation Delicate Tension, which consists of both Nashville and New Jersey recordings, contains one of his greatest tracks, “Cool Daddio,” while that year’s The North is notable for a brace of imaginative Beach Boys covers, including “Let Him Run Wild,” which Moore performs in the style of The Residents. His shy baritone voice was appealing, and during this period he often sounded uncannily like British art-rocker Kevin Ayers.
Taking stock of Moore’s prodigious output is difficult. While he has sometimes estimated the number of his album releases at around 400, he was less specific in a 2012 interview with writer Matthew Ingram, who profiled Moore for music journal The Wire. “On close inspection, 400 might seem stretching it a bit,” he told Ingram. “And yet when it comes down to every bit of home taping I’ve ever done … it suddenly becomes an unlimited guess.”
Moore’s output didn’t slacken in the ’80s, when he released some of his most fully realized albums. Teenage Spectacular, from 1987, contains his cover of Bob Dylan’s “Who Killed Davey Moore,” which is also in the style of Ayers. Meanwhile, the record’s “Play Myself Some Music” epitomizes the self-referential aspect of Moore’s version of power pop. Recorded in a professional studio, Teenage Spectacular is high-level pop worthy of The dB’s and Squeeze.
Working at record stores and rarely venturing into New York, Moore created a staggering amount of music during his years in New Jersey. In late 2010 he returned to Nashville at loose ends, having been evicted from his apartment. He began touring, an improbable development for an artist who had made a career out of staying at home.
“When I did move back to Nashville, with no idea of what I was gonna do, and no money, suddenly I got together with a young band [Tropical Ooze] in Brooklyn,” he says. “Here I am in Madison, and I went overseas four times between 2011 and 2014. I played Moscow [and] I played Mexico City in the same motherfucking month.”
Moore’s touring boosted his reputation, and by all rights he should be hunkered down in Madison enjoying the fruits of his labors. But he’s still recovering from hip-replacement surgery last year, and he tells me he’s had heart problems in recent years. He doesn’t drive, and he says walking can be difficult because of the effects of the surgery. He wishes for more money and a larger place for his record collection, master recordings and memorabilia. A couple of English filmmakers, Imogene Putler and Monika Baran, are working on a documentary about him. Cool Daddio is expected to be completed in September, but he says he has issues with their approach. He’s not a rock ’n’ roll star, but he has created an alternate universe of R. Stevie Moore rock in which he holds unlimited power.
“I have the King Midas touch, and I can make stupid stuff become something else,” he says. “Often I’ll get people to submit me unfinished music so that I can sing or play fiery shreds or whatever I wanna do. And I end up not doing it because I’m lazy.”
