So I was at “Ask Andrew W.K. Anything” last night.
The first review I’ve read of the event wrote the whole thing off as a Kaufmanesque, performance-arty in-joke on the Tiger Woods thing (he did use the opening paragraph of Woods’ statement as the opening of the event, admittedly), and perhaps I’m naive or being totally hoodwinked here, but that’s not all or even most of what I saw.
I saw a guy who, whether his problems are of his own making or not, seemed genuinely rattled by the prospect of the “Is he or isn’t he?” rumors undoing 10 years of his work, during which he got the world to believe that a man can party. Hard.
If it was or is all an act, then call me a poor judge of peoples’ acting ability.
Because I’ve written a fair deal about him, met him a couple times and interviewed him a number of years ago, I feel like a lot of people have come to me as the go-to guy as the “Steev Mike”-related rumors have been mounting. Simply put, I’m not enough of an insider to tell you much about them with any authority. By the time I was following Andrew’s career (late 2001 to early 2002, I can’t quite place when I got on board now), the things that people are speculating about now were already pretty far gone.
My strictly speculative impressions, based purely upon what I’ve observed first-hand and read, are as follows:
I think that Andrew made business decisions when he was younger, very early in his career, that still have ramifications on what he’s doing now, possibly legally, possibly otherwise, and that, either by virtue of his word or a non-disclosure agreement, he doesn’t feel that he’s at liberty to talk about them. It also seems like this drives him a little nuts (to the point where he was stammering and squirming last night in ways that were honestly uncomfortable for me to watch), because he’s all about inclusion, and to not be able to fill people in genuinely seems to bother him, especially when you have people crying “fraud” about his work because of this. For some reason, in technology, NDAs are an accepted part of doing business, but not so much in entertainment, even as the two have basically bled together.
The stuff about there being several Andrew W.K.s, at least as of early 2002, I can confirm as total bullshit. Every time I’ve seen Andrew (5 times, counting last night), met Andrew (3 times) or talked to Andrew at any length (twice, including that very long interview), it’s been the same guy. Without much hesitation at all, he recalled our interview last night: “Man, that was a long time ago, but I remember that! It was a great interview! I was standing outside near train tracks.” The location was fuzzy for him (he guessed Connecticut, it was Worcester, MA), but for a guy who does and has done a literal fuckton of interviews, even that much recall is pretty damned good.
As far as his music and who wrote or played it goes, his musical pedigree’s pretty easy to trace, and he’s played at least 3 instruments, possibly 4 (I’m blanking on whether I’ve seen him play guitar in public) on stage proficiently. He’s always referred to his records as “this music” rather than “my music”, which struck me as acknowledgement that it was something that he viewed, either from a practical, technical standpoint or a philosophical one, as something bigger than himself. By most of his own accounts and those of others, he played most if not all of the instruments on at least “I Get Wet” and “The Wolf”.
If there’s anything I’d guess that he’s had help with in the studio, particularly back then, it would be his vocal tracks (which of course gets people all riled up, because that’s somehow the benchmark of authenticity when musicians and producers have been using every trick in the book on vocals since the advent of modern recording; folks, it dates back quite a bit further than Autotune…), because his vocal style’s evolved quite a bit over the years (the man met his wife through his voice teacher, so obviously, he’s put the work in…), and live, he’s never sounded exactly like his recorded vocals. Not bad, but different. That’d suggest sweetening, and probably studio vocalists to fill out the sound, but I wouldn’t say an entirely different lead vocalist.
Writing? Producers butt in on that shit all the time when you’re a major label artist, for better or worse, and again, Andrew’s been about inclusion every step of the way from what I’ve observed, so unless I’m mistaken, it’d be his gut instinct to take advice.
I think the best parallel I can draw here is one to Andy Warhol, who had plenty of help as well, and had his share of similar rumblings from people he’d worked with (I’d say that they were more frequent and more valid in Warhol’s case, but the tone’s very similar). Both Andy Warhol and Andrew W.K.’s work could be called “pop art”. Both have carefully packaged and presented their work. The major difference between the two is that Warhol seemed to leave agenda out of it (at least to me; your art critic’s mileage may vary), whereas Andrew W.K.’s got a very clear agenda: he wants to enjoy the hell out of life, and wants to encourage others to do the same.
That’s basically what I’ve got at this point. Even putting aside the “don’t make friends with rock stars” mantra (and again, perhaps naively, I would call Andrew a friend), I do think he and his work are being misunderstood and unfairly judged, but I’ve thought that since I first really got to experience more than just his recorded output, so this is nothing new. “This guy can’t possibly be for real” was and is the first impression of just about anyone (yes, me included) who’s been around popular music for more than a week, but when you get to know the guy a bit and get to see what he does, your opinion changes pretty quickly. If that makes me a guy who wants to believe in Santa Claus, or a guy who fell for Andy Kaufman’s schtick a generation later, so be it.