eMusic Q&A: Stew

If you managed to miss Passing Strange during its short but critically celebrated Broadway run, you have my sympathy. The debut musical by the singer-songwriter Stew – and longtime creative partner and Negro Problem bandmate Heidi Rodewald – was the smartest, wittiest, and most thoroughly entertaining example of what Stew calls a "post-Civil Rights approach to blackness" to ever hit Broadway. (They don't call it the Great White Way for nothing, pal.)

Stew played the Narrator in his semiautobiographical meditation of sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, and motherhood, and the rest of the cast was as formidable as he. Although Passing Strange won only one of the seven Tony Awards for which it was nominated, the original cast album distills the show's sexy redemption songs and avant-garde satire into one of the year's finest albums, period. . eMusic's Richard Gehr caught up with Stew after the Tony mayhem had settled:

Wasn't Passing Strange's original cast recording supposed to be a studio deal? How did it end up as a live album?

I originally wanted to make a cast album like I'd make a Negro Problem record, with lots of double-tracking, weird keyboards and studio shenanigans. Welcome Black was the first record we made where most of us were on marijuana. Heidi wasn't high, but I did a lot of vocals and mixing stoned, which I'd never done before, and that was really freeing. For Passing Strange, I wanted to build this communal environment in the studio, with all these people basically freaking out, and see what would happen.

But that was not financially feasible because of Actors' Equity. It would have cost us a crazy amount of money, astronomical amounts. I believe the word is "prohibitive." The bartender at the theater stopped me on the sidewalk one day and said, "I love the promo recordings you made in the studio, but nothing sounds better than you guys live." This guy hears the music every night, so I thought, "Oh, yeah, the live thing!" One guy saying that was enough. So we just set up, invited some folks down for the performance, and the great Frank Filipetti recorded it. I could tell it was going to be a good show two songs in, and that was a great feeling.

Passing Strange sounds like a rock show, but it's undeniably theatrical. What musical theater has influenced your music the most?

The stuff I hate. I believe something John Cage said, which is that the best music criticism — and please don't be offended by this — is actually music itself. Like, if you're Debussy and you think Wagner sucks, then write some Debussy-sounding tunes. And if you're Samuel Beckett and you realize you're never going to top Finnegans Wake, you've got to be Beckett and write really small, quiet things. The whole point of Passing Strange was to make a musical that didn't sound like those on-the-nose kinds of musicals.

But you've obviously listened to a lot of Sondheim, for example.

Yes, but I'm also a Noël Coward fan. Everything's an influence, sure. But being able to play those ugly industrial chords we play during the Berlin section, the ones that sound like Einstürzende Neubauten, is as important to me as some inner rhyme that could be considered Sondheim-esque – and which is really less Sondheim than Cole Porter or Noël Coward, in my opinion. And I'm not as much in awe of Sondheim's music as I used to be, frankly, because Rodgers & Hammerstein and Kander & Ebb kick ass, too. It's all amazing shit. Sondheim is the easy one for rock dorks like me because he's our contemporary. But when you look at some of the stuff that came before him, you realize it's different and just as amazing. But he was the only musical theater I knew for a long time.

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Rex Harrison was like the first rapper I was actually into.

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What's your idea of great musical theater these days?

I worship My Fair Lady, although I only know the movie. Rex Harrison is a huge influence on me. There's more Rex Harrison than Bob Dylan in a lot of Passing Strange. Like the thing I do at the beginning of "We Just Had Sex": "Open up the floodgates/ Knock down all your fences/ The real is just around the corner/ Test drive your new senses/ Unfetter/ Unsweater/ It's wetter/ And it just keeps getting better/ And better..." Rex Harrison was like the first rapper I was actually into. He's got this flow and can't really sing, but he's very rock 'n' roll because he's still up there working it.

It's really obvious, but I still think Hair is the only musical — with the exception of ours — whose cast album you can put on at home or in the car or at a party and it just sounds like music, like an actual band with a bunch of singers. That's what Passing Strange sounds like to me, and I can't say that about any other so-called rock musical I've heard. And since my feelings about so-called rock musicals are fairly well known at this point, we probably don't need to go over that. I also worship How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying because it's so self-referential. It used to excite me when I watched that movie as a kid. "Wow, they're actually saying they're in a movie!"

What does being nominated for seven Tony Awards feel like?

It was kind of terrifying. I was never very comfortable with the idea of 750-odd people deciding what the next six months of my life were going to look like. No record company, booking agent, publishing company or Downtown theater has ever controlled my life. But these voters had control over aspects of my life where I wasn't sure if it would be a good thing if we won everything. I never wished for any of this; I just went for it. But believe me, it was very humbling to have people literally coming up to me on the street, both downtown and uptown, grabbing my arm and looking me dead in the eye and going, "I really hope you win." They weren't saying it like, "It would be nice if you won." They were saying it like, "It would be important if you won." That was pretty deep. I'd never had an experience where people felt such a kinship or connection with what we were trying to do and how that would affect theater as we know it. But I didn't think we would win best musical for a second. The Tony thing was like running for office in a country I'm not sure I wanted to rule anyway.

Did the Tony hype fluff ticket sales to any great extent?

There's money and there's money. The show could still close at any time. It's always up to the whims of the producers. Shows don't make a profit for years. They all lose money.

You've been doing eight shows a week since February. How do you keep it fresh?

It's built in. Every time we play the songs in a club, we figure out something new to do. Like last night, during the part in "Keys" where all the actors are going "it's alright" and it's supposed to be my moment to get all Otis Redding, I just stood there looking at the audience and this African trance thing happened. It was great. So we'll always come up with something to keep it fresh. That's the challenge and the fun.

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I'm not a Broadway performer. That's not my gig. It just happens to be my job right now.

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Have you considered taking Passing Strange on the road?

I'd have fun doing that, because touring is fun. I'm going stir crazy on Broadway. I'd love to put down stakes in Chicago for three weeks, and in all the other cities I've only visited for one night in the rock 'n' roll van. Hell yeah! In a second.

What would you be doing if you weren't onstage eight days a week?

I write every day. Heidi and I have a film that should have already been made by now, a cheap little indie project we developed at Sundance called We Can See Today. I'm very excited about the film, but you can't do eight shows a week and make a film, so that ain't gonna happen. You can make a record while you're doing eight shows a week, however. It's not ideal, but that's what we want to do: make a record. Get the music happening. While everybody else was shopping for tuxedos and shoes the Monday before the Tonys, which was my off day, I recorded demos in the studio all day. I knew I had to get my life back and I had to remind myself of what I was, or am, and I didn't care about finding the right shoes. I need to get back in the studio. And it was a great day, because I'm not a Broadway performer. That's not my gig. It just happens to be my job right now.

Heidi and I are also working on musical-theater pieces that go further than Passing Strange, musically. I want to get into more extreme stage productions. I want to hear Glenn Branca and Sun Ra stuff in theaters. This isn't for Broadway (although I said that about Passing Strange, too), but I want to do a play where maybe one night the sax solo is really long, and that's just the way it is.

How do you think the race thing has shaken down for you? You don't see many other black faces on Broadway these days, not to mention entire casts.

I'm used to it because people have always made a big deal about us being a black band in the rock world — which is kind of boring because we're really not. But Broadway is obviously damn lily-white. There's a question I'm glad you didn't ask, but I'll answer it anyway. People always ask me, "So, do you think things are changing now?" And I'm like, Why don't you ask the people who made Hair?

I talked to [Hedwig & the Angry Inch creator] John Cameron Mitchell and said, "I bet when you guys came out, everyone was like, 'Things are gonna change forever now.'" And he was like, "Look around and see what's changed: nothing." OK, so you've got Spring Awakening and us two years in a row. Maybe that's saying something. But I don't think so, because Spring made a gangbusters impression and our play is still struggling to "find its audience." If we'd won as many Tonys as Spring, that might have heralded some kind of change. Because as we all know, change really happens when there's change being made! Unfortunately, no one's going to make another Passing Strange unless it's Passing Strange lite, with some cute kid as the protagonist.