Mr. Poe’s Wild Ride

“Why does it always have to be this way?” moans producer Hal Willner.

It’s two weeks before show time and he’s forced to admit that he still doesn’t have a complete list of performers set to appear in his Halloween Edgar Allan Poe show at UCLA’s Royce Hall.

Granted, it isn’t last minute yet, so maybe it isn’t even fair to ask. Besides, he’s had a busy month. He just finished producing Lou Reed’s new album, “POE-try” (a separate Edgar AllanPoe project written by Reed), provided comedy-sketch music for two new episodes of “Saturday Night Live” and is co-producing an all-star tribute show to pop songwriter Doc Pomus as a benefit for the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York on Nov. 7.

In the meantime, he’s experimenting with bicoastalism. For the past several years, he’s been shuttling between his home base in Manhattan--a city that (even before Sept. 11) he felt no longer resembled the one he moved to in 1974--and a bungalow on the Venice canals.

“You’ve heard ‘Closed on Account of Rabies,’ haven’t you?” he asks, sitting in that bungalow. It’s a reference to the double CD he produced, starting in 1994, of performances of Poe’s works by Christopher Walken, Diamanda Galas and Dr. John, among others. Those sessions launched the first Halloween Poe event, in New York in 1995, a show Willner says ranged from “brilliant beyond anyone’s expectations to absolutely awful beyond belief.” He has reprised that show twice in New York, and now he’s bringing it west, where he hopes to make it an annual event.

“So there, you know,” the 45-year-old producer says, in what he hopes will pass as clarification. What he means is that, in degrees, the UCLA show will be like the epic productions that have come before it, combining dramatic and musical offerings meant to rescue the writer’s exquisite language and obsessive psychological explorations from the embers of many a bad campfire rendition of “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

There will be some famous and not-so-famous participants; some but-of-course ingenious pairings of performer and material; and some baffling, must-be-seen-to-be-believed perfect choices. It’s that mix that has become the hallmark of Willner’s live shows and his other specialty--”tribute” or “concept” albums, like the ones he has done for the music of composer Nino Rota, jazz greats Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus, and even the Disney Co. songmeisters, with juxtaposition, collage and wit as the tools of his artistry.

Willner reveals that 11 performers and two bands are confirmed for Halloween 2001, and his co-producer, Janine Nichols, has hired a set designer to provide a minimally gothic drawing room reminiscent of the claustrophobic settings of Poe’s stories. Actresses Amanda Plummer and Chloe Webb, Ken Nordine of “Word Jazz” fame, author Hubert Selby Jr., singer-songwriter Syd Straw, Chris Parnell of “SNL,” and the bands Elysian Fields and Antony and the Johnsons are all participating, although Willner hasn’t matched the performers with their texts. He is still combing through a 9-inch stack of books of Poe’s collected tales, sketches and poems for a good balance of familiar and unfamiliar material to fill out the bill.

He is also holding open slots for a list of maybes that won’t be finalized until the 11th hour. The goal is a “complete meal” of artists from all genres.

“It’s important to me to have artists that are not that well-known with ones that are well-known,” Willner explains. “There should be some from this world, some from that world. Poe’s not easy. Not everyone can do it. It’s not a matter of good or bad, it’s a certain kind of thing.”

Pressed to say what the “certain kind of thing” is, he cites Poe’s attitude--”you can call it darkness, darkness meets beauty.” Whatever it is, Willner trusts his intuition and spontaneity to guide him. “I’ve always kind of left it open to run into people.”

Jazz guitarist, Bill Frisell, who is one of Willner’s most frequent collaborators, says that his genius is the kind that “people take for granted. It is the genius of fitting people together who you wouldn’t normally fit together.”

But getting it just right can be a wild ride. “Working with Willner,” says David Sefton, the new head of UCLA Performing Arts, “is a dream and a nightmare. It’s a wonderful chaos. You strap yourself in; it’s absolutely terrifying.”

To the small degree that he’ll attempt to articulate what he does, Willner talks about the free-form FM radio he listened to growing up in Philadelphia in the 1960s. It was the seemingly random combination of music, drama and politics that entered his bedroom over the course of the radio day that inspired him.

“For me, that is the foundation for everything. They were basically pop stations, but you heard Dylan in the afternoon and it would get a little harder at night. You heard King Crimson. You’d hear Captain Beefheart and stuff at 10. At midnight, they’d play an Orson Welles radio show or Ken Nordine or play a whole record, and at 2, you’d start hearing Ornette Coleman and Coltrane and Miles. You’d also have a classical show, a folk show on the weekends and a political show. I loved the overall, how everything connected. It was audio cinema.”

Willner left Philadelphia for New York in 1974 to attend New York University’s experimental University Without Walls, which allowed him to go to school while beginning a career in the music industry. The son of a delicatessen owner and Holocaust survivor, Willner went to work as a gofer for the one contact he had in the business, Joel Dorn, who had produced, among others, Roberta Flack and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. He also began fantasizing about making his first album, “Amarcord Nino Rota,” the tribute to the composer for most of Fellini’s films. The project, completed when Willner was 23, took more than four years to produce and culminated in a trip to Rome for the director’s blessing.

At about the same time, a call to “Saturday Night Live” to promote a friend’s band led to the beginning of a 22-year stint on the series, in jobs ranging from music coordinator to his current gig selecting music for the sketches. “SNL” has provided a degree of economic stability that has allowed him to pursue an entirely personal career path while introducing him to a steady stream of actors and musicians whom he filters into his independent productions.

Los Angeles got its first taste of Willner’s particular brand of entertainment with last April’s Harry Smith Project at UCLA. During five-plus hours on each of two nights, more than 60 major and minor musicians from all genres collaborated to explore the huge body of songs collected by Smith on the album “The Anthology of American Folk Music,” first released by Smithsonian Folkways in 1952. (It won a Grammy when it was re-released in 1997.)

To give an idea of Willner’s audacity, Marianne Faithfull sang “John the Revelator” with Beck, Todd Rundgren and Steve Earle as backup vocalists. Mid-show, the Spinal Tap crew of Harry Shearer, Christopher Guest and Michael McKean came onstage in candy-cane striped shirts and fake beards in a parody of bad folk music that was so good the review in the Hollywood Reporter missed the joke entirely.

In the fourth hour, David Thomas performed a show-stopping “Fishing Blues” that made the Cleveland-born former lead singer of seminal ‘70s experimental rock band Pere Ubu seem like he’d spent a lifetime in Appalachia.

“That was the moment I started to relax,” reminisces Willner. “I was standing backstage, watching David doing ‘Fishing Blues,’ which he interpreted as an angry song. I always thought it was a happy song. Van Dyke [Parks] is on strings, Percy Heath on bass. I looked around, there’s Philip Glass waiting to go on, Elvis Costello watching, and Beck. I thought my God, there’s every type of music on the stage. This is amazing, it’s working. It was a moment that I look for, finding myself where all these things meet. Some would call it taking my unhappy childhood out on the world. I’m not out there performing--I play a little piano and guitar--but I put montages together.”

It was actually Willner’s third go-round with Smith. The first Harry Smith Project was organized for London’s 1999 Meltdown Festival, then under Sefton’s leadership and curated by Nick Cave; a second was performed in New York later that year. When Sefton arrived at UCLA, he hired Willner to stage the event yet again because, Sefton said, “I wanted to come in with all guns blazing.”

Sefton wasn’t disappointed. “Every space in Royce Hall had some megastar and world legend. There was so much talent in the building, you’d pass Todd Rundgren on the stairs asking, ‘Am I supposed to be in the rehearsal room or in the lounge?”’ Sefton says. “David Johansen was smoking, trying to set the fire alarms off. People wandering everywhere. The process was very organic, people joined a configuration, they sat in and wanted to participate; it was left pretty loose. The potential for it to end in conflict was huge, but it didn’t. Everyone came in determined to have a good time.”

Both shows sold out the 1,800-seat hall, with the overwhelming majority of the audience staying put for six hours on the first night and five hours on the second. The reviewers knocked its length, but Times pop music critic Robert Hilburn called it “a memorable event in L.A. popular music.” The LA Weekly called it “exhilarating,” and the Daily News said it was a lot like Smith himself: “eclectic, unfocused at times but often invigorating and joyous.”

The key to such an event is Willner’s uncanny ability to connect the dots--among artists and across genres and eras.

“Willner has an insight other people don’t have,” says Lou Reed, another of Willner’s frequent collaborators. “Hal really knows things you’re capable of that you don’t.”

The lines he draws, and the links and associations he establishes not only spark his own work, but often send his collaborators off in new directions as well.

Take his long-standing relationship with Marianne Faithfull. Willner first worked with Faithfull in the mid-’80s on the Kurt Weill album “Lost in the Stars,” his third tribute. A friend had introduced him to Faithfull’s 1980 album, “Broken English,” and Willner, hard at work on Weill, thought, “She’s gotta sing this music.”

She contributed “Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife” to “Lost in the Stars,” and followed it with a 1989 Willner-produced concert of Weill’s “Seven Deadly Sins.” In reviewing the performance, then-New York Times rock critic John Rockwell wrote: “There has been a succession of ‘new Lotte Lenyas.’ ... Now we’ve another claimant, perhaps the best one yet, in Marianne Faithfull.” After that, Willner produced “Strange Weather,” her first full-length CD of standards.

A few years later, Willner’s connection with Faithfull helped seal the deal for him on a project he refers to as “magical, one of my most treasured memories.” Michael Minzer of Paris Records had approached him to produce a spoken-word album with Allen Ginsberg. Willner, who was then only familiar with the most famous of Ginsberg’s poems, was intrigued. He conceived it as readings that would come across as music, pairing Ginsberg’s recordings with scores composed by different musicians.

Ginsberg, however, didn’t exactly jump at the idea. “Allen had recorded so many albums that hadn’t gone anywhere that he wasn’t really that enthused about doing another,” Willner says. It wasn’t until Faithfull, who was teaching at Colorado’s Naropa Institute with Ginsberg, played him “Strange Weather” that the poet changed his mind.

In the course of making the album, Willner sat in Ginsberg’s apartment while the poet read from his work for hour after hour against a background of a neighbor screaming at them to shut up. They chose 80 poems, then pared those to 50, which Ginsberg recorded. Willner asked a group of composers who included Marc Ribot, Bill Frisell and Gary Windo to choose three poems each. Finally, the set was narrowed to the 17 tracks that appear on “The Lion for Real,” an album that has been reissued twice since its 1989 release.

In the end, Ginsberg was so happy with the results that when he agreed to do a boxed set for Rhino Records, he brought Willner in as his producer. Willner retrieved a shoebox of tapes from under the poet’s bed--including what is probably the earliest recording of Ginsberg reading his work and the first public reading, in Berkeley in 1956, of “Howl (for Carl Solomon).” The resulting four-CD “Holy Soul Jelly Roll” went into royalties in Ginsberg’s lifetime, to Willner’s profound satisfaction. Perhaps too modestly, he doesn’t take credit for contributing to the renewed interest in Ginsberg’s work, but he is clearly touched that in the last five years of his life, Ginsberg “got to see where his place in history was going to be.”

For Willner, the collaboration with Ginsberg opened up a new universe of spoken-word productions. There were multiple recordings with William S. Burroughs, a posthumously released album recorded with satirist Terry Southern and more. Another spoken-word project, an eight-hour Rhino Records boxed set of previously unreleased material by Lenny Bruce, is still on the shelf, held up by legal problems.

The Ginsberg project also lead to Edgar Allan Poe. Once again, the starting point was Minzer and Paris Records, but this time, initially at least, Willner wasn’t intrigued. It was Ginsberg who pushed him down the path with the enticing words, “Everything leads to Poe.”

Ultimately, it was only in producing the live shows that Willner really got hooked on Poe. He has found that unlike his previous music-based projects, where “the artists tended to bring the composer into their world,” with Conqueror Poe, as he likes to call the author, the opposite occurs. The readers--and the audience, and Willner too--are enveloped by Poe’s “feverish atmosphere” and rich, melodic language.

The almost-but-not-quite-last-minute preparations for the Royce Hall Halloween show look surprisingly calm to a visitor at Willner’s tiny Venice bungalow. The main room of the house--which doubles as an office--is dominated by artwork by his friend Ralph Steadman, who drew the nightmarish raven that graces the cover of “Closed on Account of Rabies.” In one corner of the sparsely furnished room, a desk overflows with electronic equipment, papers and books, including the stack of Poe reading material.

But for now, the texts go unread, the phone doesn’t ring and finalizing the Royce lineup can wait for another day.

Willner is happy, instead, to introduce a visitor to the material that he pulled together for that stalled Lenny Bruce project. He puts on the CDs, points out rare bits--Bruce reading from the transcripts of his narcotics trials, scratchy interviews with the jurors and live recordings of Bruce’s increasingly paranoid nightclub act. “All people know are the Carnegie Hall shows,” Willner says, clearly as engaged now as he was when he first started the project.

Willner’s collaborators are extravagant in their praise of just that sort of commitment: He’s passionate, a careful listener, supportive. Reed, thinking about the “amazing” body of Willner’s work, says that rather than the producer doing any more archival boxed sets, it’s time for “someone to do the Hal Willner collection.”

For his part, Willner seems satisfied just being hip-deep in words and music.

“I’m not a scholar,” he says. “I don’t have anywhere near the knowledge of someone who has spent 25 years on a subject. I get to dive into the material and then move on. I’m just incredibly lucky to get to do these sorts of projects.”

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Hal Willner’s Halloween Show, Royce Hall, UCLA, Tuesday, 8 p.m., $25-$45 ($17, UCLA students). (310) 825-2101.