Interview with Clif Flynt

Clif Flynt is a computer programmer by vocation and avocation. "These days, I specialize in the Tcl/Tk programming language and web/control applications," says Clif. His recordings include Fragile Wall with Mary Ellen Wessels (1986), a duet tape with Bill Roper called Lift Off To Landing (1987), and several convention tapes in the '80s and early '90s. He and his wife Carol live in Dexter, MI.

How did you "discover" filk?

I got seriously interested in guitar during high school. A friend and I formed a rock band a year or so later and went on tour. We went on stage at his house until the neighbors complained, and then we toured to mine, until my neighbors complained, and then back to his, until his neighbors complained, etc.

I started writing bad songs during college, when I also started attending the campus SF club meetings. I didn't hit a con until after I graduated. I suspect this has something to do with why I graduated.

My first con was FanFair III in Toronto.

Twas early July, in '75. Hardly a fan is still alive
Who remembers that fateful Con and Year,
And the Friday night wail, "We've run out of bheer!"

I was in the habit of attaching myself to groups of strangers heading out to eat, and meeting the most ... different ... new folks. During this convention, the different turned out to be some folks with these hymnals that they started singing from (loudly) in the restaurant.

I was mortified, and decided I wanted nothing to do with this.

My next convention was a pghLange in September of '75, where there was no filking at all. My main memory of that convention is eating hot dogs from a cooker Filthy Pierre kept in his room (25 cent donation for a hotdog.)

Filthy was becoming known about then for his Pierreno and his MicroFilks, but I didn't know this. I just knew he left his door open and the hotdog machine running all day long.

Next convention, Anonycon I, I walked into the filk room just as a well-known filker reamed the audience for talking during someone's performance. I walked right back out. I wanted nothing to do with this bunch of self-important prima donnas.

At the dead dog party, Mark Glasser (Beyond-the-Fringefen) pulled out a guitar and started it passing around the room. We had a marvelous time, and I was hooked.

I went home and wrote my first filk, to the tune of House of the Rising Sun. There's a good reason most folks haven't heard this one. It was in that no-man's land between bad and not-horrible. I think the next one was The Ballad of Egor, which won the Boskone filk competition the next year, followed in short order by The Unicorn, Mama Rosa's, and Dreams.

For a long time, I wrote a filk a month. And kept about 1 in 3.

How long have you been filking?

Well, when I first hit filking, Juanita Coulson was the wise old mother-figure of filk, and we all revered her. I'm older now than she was then, and while sometimes folks may refer to me as a mother-f*, the word usually isn't figure.

You've been in filking a long time...do you have any comments about the development of filk and the filk community over the years?

I hit filking about the time it started moving from the back corners and three folks in a hotel room into real function space designated for our use.

That was a rocky period when you'd get in trouble with the hotel if you had 37 people in your room singing "What do we do with a Drunken (Sailor/Wookie/Trekker/Dorsai/BEM)", but the ConCom's really didn't understand (or much like) filkers. (We were the noisy ones that made trouble with the hotel.)

The assigned function space was frequently right next to the bar ("And the next band in Heavy Metal Combat is..."), or refrigerated to sub-arctic levels, or had an air conditioner hum that was louder than even Juanita can sing, or...

Around 1978 Steve Simmons pointed out to the Convention running community that any event that keeps 1/3 to 1/2 of the attendees occupied is a major programming event and must be dealt with seriously. The fact that filking doesn't cost as much as movie rentals, and pleases more attendees really got the attention of the ConComs.

Over the years, filk has mutated several times, but the recurring flavor of "anyone is welcome" has stayed pretty much constant.

A skinny runt with an out-of-tune guitar, a wavery voice, and a weird song about an orbiting whorehouse was welcomed in '76, and I think we're still open to the less-than-professional quality of music and musician.

There have been moments when this almost got lost, but the fact that we are amatuers doing this because we love it always resurfaces.

What are your most infamous filk songs?

Probably Ian the Grim and/or Unreality Warp. At opposite ends of the spectrum. The Mary O'Meara parodies probably got me the most funny looks. Preparation H+ certainly got me some strange looks the time I did it in a folk music venue.

Where do you get those ideas?

Everyplace.

The Ballad of Egor is a true story.

Please Remember Me is a song I heard in a dream and when I woke up I still remembered it.

My former house-mate Chris Clayton once told me that he'd like to hear a song with the line "He's Dim, Jed" in it. That evolved into Unreality Warp.

I had a set of chords that I liked, and sounded like a sea song. After I'd played this set of chords and whistled what I wanted as a melody, I decided it wanted to be a story about the Flying Dutchman. So I asked George Hunt, my other housemate at the time, if he knew the legend. He gave me the plot of the opera. That's where the Flyin' D came from.

I once told a friend that if I could move to a space station, I'd do it in a minute, and instead of just saying something like "me too", they challenged whether I really would do it. I thought about how hard it had been to leave my friends in Syracuse to join new friends in Ann Arbor, and realized that I might not move to a space station. That became the first song of my Outer Space Rocket Trilogy.

The second part of OSRT is the tune from the theme of the Imax movie North of Superior. I really liked the tune, worked out the chords, and translated it to the rugged individuals who will take a chance on asteroid mining.

The third part of OSRT I wrote one night when the moon was full and I was sitting on the back porch playing guitar for myself and wanting to be there.

I wrote Tales of the Harriman because I really like Gordy Dickson's What Will I Do With My Sho-Sho-Nu, and I wanted to write something as fanciful and fun as that.

I wrote Sing you a Song for a friend who was having trouble adjusting to living in a new town. Life was better there, but it wasn't home. Just like I think the folks who move to the new planets will sing songs about the old worlds, not the new. (Just like all the immigrants into the US and Canada keep ties to family and friends in the old world until they stop thinking of themselves as visitors and "here" becomes "home".)

I wrote Preparation H+ because of a line in Juanita/Buck Coulson's song Ennui - "Then the other planets knew them, and their dread atomic piles". It's a great, serious song, but every time I heard that line, I always thought about medications for those piles...

I sometimes write silly doggerel by opening up a magazine at random, and writing a song about *something* on that page. (Someday I'll finish the sequel to Gilbert der Chemiker in which he grows a cracking plant, that you can tap at the base for heavy industrial oil, or at the top for natural gas. And the problems with adiabatic cooling.)

I wrote No Morning while I was doing a contract in Ohio and downloaded my daily social contact from a BBS in Ann Arbor. Doing a short term contract away from your friends is a lot like being between Mars and Jupiter on a single-ship. (This was pre-internet days, I had some phenomenal chat scripts to automate downloading the bbs activity.)

I wrote Artie and Merle because I'd just read Prince Ombra, and I was thinking in terms of Arthurian legends, and I was having problems with a company whose theory of engineering personell was use-em-up and get a new one. Artie and Merle is really a treatise on enlightened management practices.

Dreams, Fragile Wall and Nightmare are me trying to come to grips with reality: that fine line between living with what you've got, wanting what's not real, and making the possible parts of that become real.

In your opinion, what is filk?

Filk is what I'm pointing at when I point at something and say "That's filk".

Would you like to hear my definition of a circular definition?

For material at a filk, I'm partial to anything I haven't heard before. I'd rather hear someone with one bad note sing a new song, than hear Julia Ecklar sing Rest Stop yet again. (And I love hearing Julia sing anything.)

As music goes, filk music is generally more influenced by lyrics than tune and production value.

Every so often a group of professional musicians will hit a filk to "show us how it's done". Some of them adapt and convert, and some of them will empty a filk room playing much better music than we can make, but not what I (and others) came to the convention to hear.

The filk scene is much more like the folk/coffehouse scene than it is like the rock bar and dance hall scene.

Do you have any upcoming filk-related projects?

Was it much of an adjustment to start performing regularly with someone else rather than solo?

Not really.

I consider myself more of a songwriter than a performer. I'm an adequate guitarist, but I recognize that my voice is not something to try and make a musical career on.

One of the reasons I moved to Ann Arbor was to sing and play with Steve Simmons, Mark Bernstein, Pat McCarthy, and others that were living here at the time.

In 1978 and '79 we got together every week to work on nifty harmony arrangements and polish our stuff. My biggest regret is that I didn't keep our best practice tapes.

By '82 I met Mew, and she and I sang together a lot over the next mumble years. My first tape, Fragile Wall is as good as it is mostly because of what Mew added to the songs.

With Mew, I got into the habit that I'd perform my funny/talky stuff solo, and if I had something powerful or pretty, it would be a duet (or trio if Roper was handy, or quartet if we could find Joey, or...)

In '87 I was in Chicago and met Barb Riedel and Carol Roper. They were doing duet stuff, and I managed to co-opt some of that into trio material by adding a new part when they weren't looking. Then, once they were off guard, I dragged them into some of my projects. Most of our trio stuff is on Auditory Confusion.

Roper and I have done a number of duets over the years. And varieties of multets depending on who couldn't escape right then. (Aside: Bill Roper and I met at Chambanacon in 1977. We were both new filkers with a couple songs. Within minutes of meeting we were admiring and critiquing each others music. We've been friends ever since.)

For that matter, I've dragged certain floutists on stage with me at the last minute to make my stuff more palatable.

I try hard to work out arrangements with folks that matches their styles and voices. I don't do many arrangements in a classical manner, with sheet paper, etc, but usually hear a second part in my head, and sing it for that person, or (best case) I sing the song, they add a second part, and I modify my part to fit their part better, and they modify their part to match mine, etc, and we get something that's very whole and organic.

The downside to this is that I have several different arrangements for some songs, depending on who I'm singing/playing with. Sometimes they are different enough that if we try to put the different arrangements together (person A from arrangement 1 and person B from arrangement 2), it just doesn't work any more.

Carol and I haven't added much duet material to what each of us had as solo material. Life has been busy since we got married.

What advice do you have for those new to filk?

Practice. Memorize your material.

When you've memorized the song you transcend the need to read and watch your fingers and you can start to live the music. It sounds silly, but when you are one with the song, and not worrying about what the next lyric is, or how to move your fingers, the magic of the song flows. This is the big difference between a technically competent performer, and one who moves you to tears.

You don't necessarily need to be technically great to involve the listeners emotionally. Bob Dylan has a terrible voice, but you can't listen to him sing without groking what he wants you to grok.

Now, you couple being in a zen state with the music and a marvelous voice like Marty Burke, Julia, Kathy Mar, Moonwolf, Carol, or several others, and you've got some seriously good music.

When I was getting started, I had time to play the guitar for a half hour or hour a day. If a song was so unmemorable that I couldn't remember the lyrics after a few days of playing it, I figured that it wasn't really worth putting my friends through.