by Daniel Colussi | King Khan And The Shrines is what happens when a dozen or so punk, soul and RnB freaks get together and throw their tastiest licks into a big black melting pot. King Khan is the shaman/cook who stirs the pot and adds the mystery spice, or something like that. In truth, Arish Ahmad Khan has been toughing it out in various scuzzy garage rock projects since the mid-nineties. To wit, The Spaceshits were hardly known and barely understood during their time but have since gained legendary status, while King Khan & The BBQ Show put out a sound that was truly something special. Khan is a showman in the classic soul tradition, and to see him backed by a most potent and deadly band is a definite spectacle. Their most recent album – Idle No More – is the result of six years of serious mental toil. Khan left planet Earth for a while, but then he came back and he gave us his most focused, moving record. I reached him at his home in Berlin shortly before his recent Vancouver show to discuss the bizarre and tragic circumstances of this album’s creation…

Can you tell me about the titling of the album Idle No More and your empathy with that movement? Well, when I was a teenager two of my best friends were Mohawk Indians and I used to actually seek refuge at one of their houses when my dad would kick me out of the house. I spent a little bit of time on the Mohawk reservation. I guess when I was in The Spaceshits we had fans from the reservations near Montreal, and it was like a lot of these juvenile delinquents loved what we were doing. I guess in some ways I learned a lot about how to be a fierce punk rocker from that community. And one of my best friends was Mohawk and he actually passed away two years ago, about a year after Jay Reatard had passed away. In fact, one of the songs is kind of a requiem to him and also to Reatard. It’s called So Wild on the record. During the recording process of this album I was reading about the Idle No More movement, and it was really heartwarming to see indigenous people rising up, especially knowing the background and the conditions of what a lot of the reservations were like. And I was kind of shocked because any Canadians or Americans that I would try to talk to about Idle No More, they didn’t have any idea that this was even going on, so I thought that it would be a good shout out to them. I wrote to them, too, and asked for permission to use it and they were totally into it. It’s been pretty cool actually, because these newspapers all over Europe and America have been asking about it or have looked into it. I’m really happy to spread the good word.

Spreading the good word, sure, and this album maybe has a different tone than the earlier Shrines albums. There’s a lyrical heaviness to this album which is, I guess, based on this really intense process that you went through with yourself. There’s like…moments of really good things that happen and moments of pure pain, and I guess all that chaos going on at that time spun me into this kind of madness. It started off in a kind of funny way, with me and Mark Sultan in Australia playing for this festival that Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson had invited us to perform at, which was mind-blowing in itself because I admire those two people so much, and just to know that they listen to what we do, and to invite us to play at the Sidney Opera House…it was really amazing. And at the same time I’d been touring so much, and I’d actually been jailed twice before that…it was just icing on a really greasy cake! And then while I was hanging out there I wasn’t sleeping and I befriended a homeless aboriginal guy and wanted to start the Black Panthers with him in Australia and brought him to meet Lou and Laurie. I was definitely kind of going crazy. It didn’t help that I’d lost three of my best friends and I’d never grieved properly, so there’d be moments of talking and suddenly you just start crying. A lot of crazy stuff was going on. And eventually me and Mark had this big falling out. We played a couple more shows but then in Korea we had this huge falling out where I had to take refuge in a Buddhist monastery.

And how did you end up in the monastery? You just wandered in? I was just not part of the world anymore and I wanted to get away so I walked into this huge monastery and I waited at the door for the head monk and then when she sat me down it was really pretty crazy because I looked insane. I had nail polish and these mystified, crazy googly eyes. And she sat me down and heard what I was telling her, that I wanted to quit everything and start again. You could imagine at the same time I was writing these letters to my family, telling them I was going to quit everything and become a monk, so my wife was obviously pretty concerned. And then I showed up at home with a blonde mohawk looking stark raving mad. In a lot of days there was this synchronicity; when I had the first huge freak out in Korea it was the same time that my friend Jason, the Mohawk I was telling you about…he died that same night. I shaved a Mohawk on that day, but I didn’t know he’d died. I guess in a lot of ways, in retrospect, we were spiritual twins. We were born on the same day. He had a black snake tattoo on his chest and I did, too. So it felt like a big piece of me had passed away. From then on it was basically a plummet into…my family intervened. One of the people that really got into my head at that point was my sister in-law, the actress Rose McGowan.

Oh yeah? Weird. Yeah, it was really weird. Her sister married my brother. But I was writing these mass emails to my family and she was writing back saying, You know you’re just having this maniac, mad episode, a lot of people have this, especially artists. You should seriously go get yourself checked. That was the one person that really got into my head. So with her guidance, I went in and then it was a few years of heavy drugs and chemicals that basically…I describe it as burning down the viking ship! During that process you start to really learn what are the most important things in your life, the people that you love the most. And then after a couple years of really having to shut off from everything, the song Darkness crept into my mind. Before that I was in a vulnerable state where I didn’t know if I could do music anymore, let alone be what I was because I was sort of wiping the slate clean. But after that song Darkness came out I felt this confidence again…to continue. And then slowly the album slowly took shape over a period of about two years.

So it was a protracted recording process? With The Shrines it’s always tough to get everyone together to do stuff, but it really took almost five years. We started piecing songs together. Some of them were older songs that we just never tackled. But once Darkness had been birthed, the rest of it seemed a lot easier and it felt like it was ready to take form.

One song in particular that really struck me was Of Madness I Dream. I thought it was really sweet song and a lovely way to end the album. It seemed like almost a summation of your experience, maybe. What can you tell me about that song? Thank you. Well, that song, I mean…I’ve always said that music in general is for me a very spiritual thing and ultimately the power it has is to be able to transform pain and agony and torture into something beautiful. So in the process of making music I’ve always kept that in mind and tried to be a vehicle to allow pain and suffering to turn into something else. So with that song especially it really felt like a light was shining out and I was receiving the lyrics. I gotta say, I feel like it was a weird gossamer. Not to get religious, but it felt like something was being said to me. It’s amazing how simple everything can be at certain points. With the right words, it’s amazing…

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Daniel Colussi is the Music Editor of Scout Magazine and a contributing writer to Ion Magazine. A veteran employee of Zulu Records and tuneage aficionado, he DJs on an infrequent basis (about four times a year) and is a musician around town who plays in several ensembles.