Being Calvin Johnson

As the owner of Olympia, WA's K Records, Calvin Johnson has been a key payer in the Northwest's strong and steady music scene; as a performer, Calvin has been a part of two seminal West Coast seminal indie outfits, Beat Happening and Dub Narcotic Sound System; and as a producer, Calvin has served the needs of the bands on his label supremely, and has added his touch to records by such music icons as Beck (One Foot in the Grave — Calvin is the other guy on the cover).

And though it is his position at the front of Dub Narcotic — as well as his time with Beat Happening and another project, The Halo Benders — that exposes him to the public more than anything else, it is perhaps the one job he has in which he does the least amount of work.

As a performer, a record label owner and producer, free time is something there isn't much of. K Records, which can claim releases by Beck, Make Up, Karp, and many others, is a full time job, a record company that is distributed world-wide and a name that carries weight in the industry. Much of his time in the studio is spent working with bands behind the boards, or recording his own bands, and things like practice, touring and organizing his own musical projects must also fit into the equation. It begs to question: Which is first, performer, producer or label owner?

"I guess must be all those things," Calvin says nonchalantly. "I don't seem to able to settle down to any one, so I must like doing them all."

He does admit, however, that wearing one hat gives him unique insight to wearing the others.

"I think performing, as an expression, is a lot freer than recording because recording can often be take place in a vacuum and you have to get into a different state to get to where you need to be," explains Calvin. "With performing, you have these people helping you — the audience, the people you're playing with. So I think I've learned a lot from performing about how I want the mix to feel when I'm recording, or when I'm recording other people."

Performing is something that, even as a busy music businessman and a producer, Calvin has managed to stick with. The Synthesis found him last week on tour with Dub Narcotic Sound System, in route from Houston to Austin, Texas. The band currently consists of Calvin on guitar, Heather Dunn on drums and Chris Sutton on bass. A trio is a bit of a different setup for Dub Narcotic, and Calvin says that the sound has gone more instrumental.

"I'm not doing much singing, only a couple of songs," he says. "We're doing a lot of instrumental stuff. It's similar, but as far as the performance goes, it's a really different feeling for me. I'm not just standing there at the mic, you know?"

As a member of the band who is now more deeply involved in the making of the music, Calvin has stepped away from the mic, and the band has loosened the structure of the music, allowing for improvisation and exploration.

"We have a lot of improvisation. I mean, each song's got a basic structure but they're based around the idea of improvisation."

Calvin says that the groove is in the heart of Dub Narcotic's music, and from there, each live show is a take of its own. But rhythm is central, and the rhythms that intrigue Calvin are those of the Jamaican dub set, the work of players like Augustus Pablo and Scientist.

"I'm inspired by the concepts in Jamaican music. They sort of reuse a lot of rhythm and I like that idea that you can recycle the music to find new inspiration or a whole new song out of something else, rather than feeling like you have to be original all the time," he says with a chuckle. "It's sort of like sampling, but you're actually using music rather than just a little bit of it."

And though the Dub Narcotic sound isn't dub reggae music, the band's sound is a lot funkier than the stuff that Calvin is usually associated with. The bulk of the K roster, and much of the material that bears the Calvin Johnson production stamp, is made up of guitar-driven indie rock, and the type of groove-riding low-fi, soul-tinged rock of Dub Narcotic is about as it gets in the Northwest.

"I just wanted to explore, and that's something that the people I'm working with are interested in," says Calvin. "We just sort end up where we do. I don't know conscious it is, we're just trying to make it feel right."

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