Boxing and music. The two dirtiest businesses in the world, and Aimee Mann has gotten herself mixed up in both of them.
“Well, y’know,” she remarks, casually dressed in singlet and jeans, sequestered in a room in the Morgan Hotel, Temple Bar, “both of them look like easy money.”
And both are predicated on the exploitation of predominantly working class dreamers.
“And innocents who are focused on… I mean I don’t have any business acumen, but I’ve got a great manager and he knows what he’s doing. I’m pretty much one of those musicians who just wants to be left alone to write songs and play some shows and make records and not have to deal with the business part of it. I think most artists are like that, and it makes them easy prey.”
The subject of boxing arises when I walk into the singer’s suite and find her trying to secure an Internet connection on her Blackberry. “There’s a guy in a boxing match in Los Angeles that I want to go see,” she explains. “I’m trying to find out who he’s fighting.”
I mention that I come from a boxing family, my old man having won an all-Ireland amateur title in the ‘50s.
“No kidding,’ she says. “And how did you feel about it as a kid?”
I loved to box, but I wasn’t a good fighter. I didn’t have that pit-bull impulse.
“Yeah, I find that sort of tough,” she considers. “If I’m fighting somebody… well, it’s like a very small pool of people for me to spar with in this little gym I go to. Like, I don’t want to go to a real gym and get the shit kicked out of me, you know what I mean? So there’s some women that I spar with and then there’s some guys.
“But y’know, the guys are always 20, 30 lb heavier, so if somebody’s not as good as me, I’m hesitant to hit them really hard because that just seems unfair, but if they’re much, much bigger I don’t want to hit them as hard as I can because I don’t want them to hit me as hard as they can, because inevitably the heavier guy’s gonna win.
“So the only people I really ever end up hitting full strength are the trainers who are real boxers and are used to being hit, so I don’t worry about it, they’re skilled enough to not cream me. I’m only like 120lb. I don’t think I can put on much muscle.”
Are more and more women taking up boxing in LA?
“I think so, yeah. This little gym I go to is in the middle of Pasadena, it’s a real nice area.”
Talk turns to FX Toole’s book Rope Burns, a collection of stories drawn from his career as a boxer and cuts-man that successfully translated to Clint Eastwood’s film adaptation Million Dollar Baby, particularly Morgan Freeman’s recitations of the various semi-legal tricks used to staunch blood flow long enough for the fighter to finish the job.
“Very semi.” Mann laughs.
Does boxing provide her with a release for 20 years of suppressed rage at the music business?
“Y’know… I did an interview yesterday and the guy kept saying things like, ‘So, is it music business executives that you picture in the ring?’ (laughs). But you know, having boxed yourself, it’s not really like that. There’s not much anger in it. I would say in our gym there’s only one guy that kinda’ gets on my nerves ’cos he’s really young and cocky and very disrespectful to everybody that he spars with.
“And he spars with all the girls, he’s like six-two, and so, yeah, I get a little irritated at him, but it’s pretty rare I get angry in the ring. That’s what I find fascinating about boxing and I’ve found it really applicable to life – you cannot get distracted. By anything. Including getting angry at somebody because they hit you.
“You have to keep your eye on whatever your objective is, because that kind of thing is just gonna fuck you up. In boxing you have to keep observing and watching for your opportunity and your opening. As in life, I mean, what’s your goal – is getting angry gonna help you or hurt you? And usually it doesn’t help you.”
One of the great quotes about boxing is from Norman Mailer’s book on the legendary Ali/Foreman face-off The Fight:
“Before fatigue brings boxers to the boiler rooms of the damned, they live at a height of consciousness and with a sense of detail they encounter nowhere else. In no other place is their intelligence so full, nor their sense of time able to contain so much of itself as in the long internal effort of the ring. Thirty minutes go by like three hours.”
“That comes for me at round two!” Mann laughs.
The point being that, the levels of concentration required by fighters are matched in intensity perhaps only by performers. Miles Davis said, “Great musicians are like great fighters. They have a higher sense of theory going on in their heads.”
“Exactly,” Mann says. “To me boxing and music are very similar, but it’s really hard to describe to people. There’s a lot going on that is invisible. A kind of concentration that requires you to think of four things at once.
“There was another Miles Davis quote where he says that he felt that boxing and music were similar because you’re always adding onto them. And that makes a lot of sense. They both seem like a discipline that will never be learned perfectly. The more I do learn about it the more I start to feel like it’s impossible to master. Especially at the age I’m taking it up.”
If Mann gets a physical buzz from the mechanics of boxing, then her artist’s instincts are also titillated by the pulp-noir images associated with the sport. Her latest album, The Forgotten Arm, a song cycle about two lovers, the drug addict pug John and his small town sweetheart Caroline, deliberately evokes a B-picture netherworld of doomed bruisers and losers. “They sort of border on white trash a little bit,” she says. “White trash with brains, which really does exist, I’ve seen it. It’s like a peculiar southern thing.”
The lovers’ tale is set in the drug-addled early ‘70s, when attitudes to narcotics were considerably different. As novelist and Studio 54 veteran Dirk Wittenborn once pointed out, heroin was the only taboo – coke looked too clean and wholesome to be loathsome.
“I remember people in the ‘80s saying cocaine was not addictive, and I remember thinking even then, ‘That can’t be right!’ Mann laughs. “People’s definition of what’s addictive was, I guess, that you developed a tolerance to it or something like that.
“That it took increasing amounts to feel an effect, or there was a physical withdrawal. And even at that, when I was a kid I did a little cocaine, and there is a physical… I mean you do a little and then you wanna keep doing it all night – like, surely that’s the definition of addictive?! But that was kind of the accepted line on drugs.
“Heroin was addictive [but] nothing else was. But then you realise that the physical component of addiction, like with smoking, in three days it’s over.
You don’t have any withdrawal symptoms, and the ones you have are pretty unnoticeable, but it’s the obsession part, that’s what addiction is all about, it’s a real mental problem.”
The songs on The Forgotten Arm were conceived with the same attention to period detail that director Paul Thomas Anderson (whose inclusion of Mann’s songs in Magnolia rehabilitated her career with Oscar and Grammy nominations) brought to Boogie Nights.
Her choice of producer (Joe Henry) and cast of musicians were intended to evoke vintage albums by Elton, Rod and Mott.
“When we were mixing I got a stack of records that I thought were relevant,” she says, “and we played our mixes next to those records and there were a lot of really significant changes. I was really shocked to go back to records from ’68-’72 whatever and realise how little was going on instrument-wise.
“As simple as you think you’re getting on a modern record, it’s way, way overproduced compared to records from those days. And I always feel like records from those days have a harder hitting sonic impact than modern records that I can never figure out. It seems logical that if you had more that it would sound bigger, but it’s exactly the opposite.”
But if Mann conceives of her albums as mini-movies, then the amount of sheer stupidity she’s encountered in her own career is more akin to the film industry than any other.
“Well, industry, that is the watchword,” she says. “I mean, anytime anyone deals with a large corporation I think they encounter that kind of thing. Certainly there’s a good friend of mine, a woman that does the art direction on my packages, and she works at Sony records as an art director.
“And she’s a great creative person, and she has to deal with idiocy. Little things, like, y’know, the edicts that come from on high about what certain packages or photographs should look like, not allowing the artist to have any say in their artwork, stuff that’s ridiculous and constantly frustrating for her as an employee. So it’s not easy for anybody who gets sucked into it.
“I’m just lucky that another option came along. But major labels were the only game in town for so long, and the odd independent. Once you were signed to a major label, there was no getting out of it. I tried many times, there’s no getting out of it.
“And because of a merger they (Geffen) got overrun with acts from other labels and they couldn’t handle them all. It was just luck that I was able to leave and that I was able to buy my record back (Bachelor No. 2, containing many of the Magnolia tunes), because a lot of artists they dropped, they not only wouldn’t allow to take their record, or buy their record, they wouldn’t even allow them to re-record the songs, so they couldn’t even remake the record on their own time. It’s crazy.”