Nez made a couple of cute, goofy expressions as he thought about it and then said "Uh... No...there the same!"
"Uh... No...there the same!"
The Question & Answer Session In The House Chamber
Question 1: Nez was asked about the guitarist on The Monkees' song Valerie and was Nez going to do a follow up to LSHONZ.
Nez had trouble hearing that last part of the question so the people in front explained what was asked. Nez responded "Oh I see it's in reference to how good the guitar player was. I don't have any idea who played the guitar on Valerie. I pretended to play! Yes I'm definitely going to do a sequel to Nefton Zamora and keeping up with my own sensibility, it wont have anything to do with this book! Before the next question was asked Nez made a clever comment appropriate to us being in the House Chamber. He said "I have a couple of laws I'd like to put into motion but I don't think you guys can do anything about it."
Question 2: What was your role in Repo Man?
Nez responds 'Well not to be horribly crass but it was money. When Alex Cox was looking around to get the film made he sent me the script. He was the writer as well as the director and I was knocked out, it was a very off beat film, if you remember back there were no other films like it, now there's a stack of films like it, so getting it set up was impossible and he needed someone to finance it so I agreed to do that. It's a great and interesting story that's too long to tell now but I didn't really have anything to do creatively with it except just to say to oh that's pretty, let's put that there."
| Question 3: How is writing a book similar or different from
writing lyrics? Did you notice anything different when you were going through the creative
process of writing the book as compared to lyrics? Nez made a couple of cute, goofy expressions as he thought about it and then said "Uh... No...there the same!" |
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Question 4: Where did your philosophical bent come from?
Nez answered "I don't know, I'm not very well read. I never graduated from high school. Nez told us he spent all his time in the choir room never attending his other classes and that after 2 years his choir teacher said "Aren't you in choir too much?" So he left and he didn't go seeking any further schooling than that. He continued to tell us that once he gets hold of something he needs to learn he will pick up whatever manuals he can find and try to figure it out. He stated "The Bible is an interesting manual (he also mentioned 2 other manuals he uses for spiritual ideas) and I attack them in the same way I attack how do you increase the volumetric efficiency of an internal combustion engine so it sort of rolls into the same space. I also think that there is an internal clock that everybody has that pushes you along a certain way of thought, independent of the way you are raised. We tend to discount the way we are raised. My mother was a very ardent and active Christian Scientist and I attended Christian Science Sunday School for the first 12 years of my life. And then from there I switched into different sensibilities but when somebody asks me a question like you've just asked me, aside from what I just said to you ,I'm not sure that any of the things I just told you have any merit or reason to have any effect on me at all. So the real answer is I don't know. I just get up and have a latte and see what happens."
| Question 5: What the most recent revelation you had in your
life? Nez broke up the entire room with his response "The most recent revelation I've had in life.. Holy Toledo! Uh.. you know, you just went outside the envelope!" |
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Question 6: Since you did Elephant Parts, which is kind of the beginning of music videos, I'd be interested in your comments on where it has gone and how it has effected other media.
Nez responded "Well certainly Elephant Parts created the wonderful new drink the "Marn'engrita" and the Cof O' Cuppee. Aside from the silliness, I think that we are probably moving into a new age of the way we communicate and I think that music videos are harbingers of that." He mentioned in MTV contests, in the past you were asked to send in your thoughts written in 25 words or less to describe something , now they want you to send in a short film to give your point of view. "I'm just watching it like something with incredible horsepower sort of take over the collective consciousness. I didn't invent them or think them up, I just sort of did one very early on. I think they may be one of the more significant events of the music community."
Question 7: Where you aware that you were in The Beatles film A Day in the Life?
"I made good friends with John Lennon in the sixties, we stayed in fairly close touch while he was recording Sgt. Pepper. He asked if I wanted to come down to that session , the one that they filmed. I knew they were going to film it, he said come prepared to have a picture taken. When I got there I was sitting with John and the camera come up on both of us and I said 'Now what do I do" and John said "Nothing". (Nez says 'Nothing" in a very deep voice) So that was that moment with him and it was repeated on the bookend years later when Alex Cox gave me his student film "Sleep is for Sissys." Nez describes a scene in the film where a sniper shows up at a Hollywood party with the guests standing around the pool. He said the sniper takes one of them out with a shot and they fall down and all of the people at the party do "Nothing" and slowly the sniper just takes everybody out. (Nez says the word "Nothing" exactly the same way he spoke it the first time)
