Interview: Kevin Corrigan

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For much of actor/musician Kevin Corrigan’s career he’s been better known for the familiarity of his face and demeanor over his name in either the film or music business, but that’s recently changed. The Bronx NY native’s career thus far has been playing supporting roles, particularly the quintessential and contradictory sensitive tough guy in a slew of independent films and one mildly successful early millennial sit-com. This has panned out for the forty-five year old over the past twenty years, earning him a well-respected Hollywood resume, and most recently as supporting cast in the buddy-comedy action-flicks that Seth Rogen and James Franco have been churning out for the better part of the past decade.

What is even less known is Corrigan’s passion for music, and how he’s been able to channel this passion while simultaneously managing a true working actors career. Picking up guitar and bass, and building a network of friendly musicians to collaborate and gain experience with, Corrigan is finally scratching the itch to be a player in a rock band, and once again he’s the ultimate supporting cast, or band-mate. Fueled by his inspiration and encouragement of fellow actor/musician friend Daniel Harnett, Corrigan has put together a full band behind Harnett’s forgotten about lyrics and tapes, almost in a Mermaid Avenue, or Basement tapes type way.

So when the opportunity came to chat with Corrigan about his new gig on the eve of their first real tour of the East Coast with Ravi Shavi, would couldn’t help but ask him about both the acting and music world he’s cultivated for himself.

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Allston Pudding:  You have had a long career as an actor, now you’re with Crystal Robots, but you’ve been in a lot bands throughout your acting career?

Kevin Corrigan: Yeah, I’ve been in a few situations where I’ve been playing guitar or bass and trying to be a part of some groups. I wanted a guitar when I was thirteen, but there was no one really interested in helping me get one, for whatever reason. But I always loved music. I finally got a guitar when I started to make my own money, which began when I was around nineteen- the same time I got my first acting job. Which was actually a movie that starred Adam Horovitz, King Ad Rock (Lost Angels) and it was just incidental. But once I had money I bought an electric guitar, or acoustic? I can’t remember which came first. I thought it was way too late to be starting, but now I’m an old guy…

AP: and you’ve been playing for over twenty years?

KC: Yeah, so now it doesn’t matter when I started, I kept at it. I picked it up pretty quickly. If I had started playing when I was thirteen I don’t know how good I would have been.

AP: So your parents didn’t really encourage music? Was it all about theatre and acting? Were you encouraged to jump into that world or was it something you found on your own?

KC: With acting… I always drew and painted, I guess you could say I took after my my mother in that regard because she’s an artist. So I wanted to be a writer at some point, I wanted a guitar and to mess around with music, but inevitably the acting thing came along and that ended up being the thing that I was the most passionate about.

AP: There some point where they (your parents) just realized you can act really well?

KC: I don’t know, it must have been a surprise to them because I was pretty quiet kid, shy, and “why on earth I would want to be an actor or think I could get into that world?” must have been a mystery to them.

AP: You end up studying at the Strasberg Institute somehow though?

KC: When I first brought it up, I was about thirteen and they said give it a year and thought I would get over it. A year went by and I saw this Jack Nicholson in a film and it just galvanized me, blew me away, and so I went looking through the phone book for acting schools. Someone said you should go to a local theatre or acting school, so we looked under the yellow pages, in Manhattan there’s a half a dozen places you could go to. But Strasberg Institute was the place… I found out recently that it my mother zeroed in on that. She knew who Strasberg was and was sort of responsible for that. I always thought it was because it was the only school that offered us an in person interview. It was a little bit more of my mother’s awareness of Strasburg. I went to the interview with my father, but I didn’t know the connection between Strasberg and Pacino and Deniro. I wasn’t fully aware of that until I walked into the lobby. I was fourteen then so I was going into the Young People’s program and my father asked what notable people had come out of it and the interviewer said “Matt Dillon” and a chill went up my spine, because I loved the movie My Bodyguard and Matt Dillon was terrifying in that film and it began a love/hate thing with Matt Dillon. But I thought if he went to that school that was good enough for me. I want to go too.

AP: I can see the connection (between you and Dillon) always playing the cool, sarcastic, jaded bad guy.

KC; yeah, the jaded a little stoned, little punk, brooding shady guy. He ended up directing me in a Dinosaur Jr video. The whole music connection, music acting nexus, was complete by the time I was in my twenties. It was like ya know what all given if I don’t get into the music business, I could end up playing a musician in a movie.

I loved the idea of getting to a movie like Adrian Brody did in the Pianist, you get cast in a role and then they make you take piano lessons for six months.

AP: They just did that with Whiplash and the drummer.

KC: That’s right, that kid was great, Miles Teller.

AP: You’ve lived a full-life as a New York artist balancing acting and music, I’m sure there’s a lot a moments where you wondered “can I make a living doing this.” Did you have to be in New York to keep being inspired to do it when there’s all these moments of just mild success.

KC: After I got my first job in the movie with Ad Rock I thought this is it, but the movie definitely bombed. It wasn’t a useless, I got an agent out of it and it helped me get more work, but you just gotta keep plugging away and you can’t let your expectations get ahead of you. You can’t get carried away with the idea that this is it this is the thing that’s going to make me famous. It’s like Walter Matheau said; “All you need to make it is fifty good breaks”

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AP: If you look at your list of work it looks like you landed a lot of auditions strait between the sitcom to the more current movies. Is it great auditioning?

KC: I’m not a great auditioner. I feel like I have the ultimate resume of jobs that I didn’t get. It’s a really impressive list. I’ve got to work with some great people but there’s even more great people that didn’t want to work with me ultimately. I’ve auditioned for people like Spike Jones and Brian DePalma, Oliver Stone, Alexander Payne, lots of greats that were like “thanks, thanks for coming in.” Not that I was bad, I just wasn’t right, or too nervous.

AP: So it’s still deceiving how much failure it takes to build a resume like you have?

KC: Yeah, it’s always a roll of the dice. You just gotta be willing fail.

AP: You’ve worked with a lot of other actors that also make music, one of them that stuck out to me was Vincent Gallo, because I’ve seen his movies and listened to his music. Do you have a relationship with him at all? Stay in touch? From working on Buffalo 66?

KC: I’ve kept in touch with him. I get together with him in LA about two years ago. He has a very interesting website. I actually haven’t checked in with him in a few years, but I just wrote to him randomly a number of years ago and he wrote back and we stayed in touch. He continues to make films, he just doesn’t release them. I asked if I could see one and he said next time I come to LA. He said he might one day make a film that he could offer up to market place, but he said he just didn’t want to have to be engaged in making films in the film business. He just makes movies for the pleasure of it. We met an Erewhon, a health food store in LA, that’s where he wanted to meet. We never did see any films but we sat an outdoor table for a bunch of hours just talking and he told a lot of great stories. He’s a real artist, I have a lot of respect and admiration for the guy. He’s a really interesting person to talk to about anything, but yeah especially about movies and music.

AP: I had a feeling there would be some sort of connection between how you two are both so passionate about art.

AP: How does Crystal Robots come together?

KC: I met Daniel Harnett, it’s basically his band. Daniel’s been recording and releasing music for about twenty years. No commercial success or hit, but a songwriter, and an actor, a really good actor and playwright.

AP: Did you meet through acting or music?

KC: Yeah, we met a party that was thrown by mutual acting friends. He had just been in a play, an vant garde opera about the Manson family, he played Charles Manson. It was directed by Bob McGrath. Right around that time I had a movie coming out called Slums of Beverly Hills and I played a guy who was a Manson enthusiast, so someone introduced me to Daniel. They said “you’re gonna love him he’s a real rock n’ roller and I think you guys would hit it off and we did. I invited Daniel to the premier of Slums of Beverly Hills, and I started to go see his gigs at CBGB and stayed friends with him. When I moved to LA to do Grounded for Life we lost touch, but when I moved back to New York in 2005 I started seeing his shows again.

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KC: I started to become closer friends and hanging out a lot at his apartment and learning more about him. He opened a closet one day had a hundred and fifty marble notebooks with lyrics and songs, and drawers full of tapes. I would look at the hand written titles and asked if I could borrow them, and started listening to them, and it was just one amazing song after another. And I thought “do you have manager?” He didn’t. I thought it wasn’t right that he doesn’t have a manager or a label, or some kind of consistent way of getting his stuff out there. I wanted him to make full recordings of the stuff. I’ve always been really interested in John Lennon, and got into listening to bootlegs stuff, my Beatles, and John Lennon collection is about eighty percent home demos. When I listened to Daniel’s songs I heard something very similar in his music, he’s more prolific than any musician I know, with a range of styles. I thought I am going to be his manager.

I started to get a real visceral sense, creativity of what I think he is; intensely talented. I always wished I could write songs and getting to know him I could see what it takes. It’s a painful thing to have. He told me once he writes song out of an addiction, its real painful I guess. I don’t really have that, but I have love for his music.

AP: On tape was it mostly just (Daniel) on acoustic guitar, how did it go from that to a folk band, to the rock sound of this record?

KC: I would go see him at the Lake Side Lounge with his group the Griffins, and they were tremendously great, but then at the same time, I was listening to the tapes that had a lot of great songs that he wasn’t playing with this group. When I asked him why I realized he’s written 1000 songs ya know, he just had a certain amount that he played with this group. I would ask if I could make a request, and he would say some of them were more rock tunes, so I was like well “you guys should play rock man.”  He said it would have to be a different band, it was then that I started to have notions of becoming his bass player. I just wanted to hear the Daniel Barnett record that I was hearing in my head, so I pushed him to do it. I tried to get a bass player and drummer to back him up, I had some friends that I had set up to back another songwriter friend of mine, but could only get the drums.

AP: So you play bass. Was this any sort of an adjustment for you?

KC: Yeah, I had to adjust, Daniel started to write stuff in accordance with my abilities on the bass though.

AP: There mostly pretty straightforward rock numbers? His talent is the songwriting? But the song structures are simple.

KC: Yeah I can pick up the bass line to almost anything that he writes, ya know. It came together, and we made one record, Under the Veil Unseen, I wanted it to be something like Neil Young, both and acoustic and electric, something that showed both sides of Daniel.

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But then we started doing gigs to support it and we became a band, then it was like “shit now we have to make another record, because this is who we are. He said to me if you keep doing this you’ll become a great bass player.

When we went in to the studio make the Crystal Robots record we had played those songs out live about 35 times. There’s an energy in the record that wasn’t in our first attempt.

AP: So this record, it seems like there was more of a mission. You knew what you wanted it to sound like, what you wanted it to be before you went in?

KC: I wanted to have a live feel. Yeah, I wanted it to have a visceral quality, but not an effort to listen to. I wanted to make the second record something that we could rock out a little more.

AP: How did you link up with Ravi Shavi, just a booker?

KC: I met Rafay, on a movie set in Providence, about four or five years ago. He had a small part in the film? Or maybe just hanging around? I forget the name of that movie right now, but I ended up chatting with him and he was just getting ready to go off to college, and we stayed in touch. He was in New York at some kind of art exhibit and just started making records with this band and I went to see them and got back in touch. They came to see our group, and they really liked us so he proposed doing a gig together, which we did about a year ago at this place called Cake Shop. The two bands have a mutual admiration. We dig playing together. And they invited to go on this short tour.

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AP: You’re married, and you have a daughter right? What do they think of the band?

KC: What does my wife think of the band?

AP: Yeah, does she dig it?

KC: If I didn’t have her support I don’t know how involved I would be. It would be a lot harder to do.

AP: So she’s not rolling your eyes at your when you say you’re going to play with the band for the week on tour?

KC: No, she gets it. She knows Daniel and she believes in him as much as I do. My wife prefers Daniels acoustic music but she understands my friendship with him and how much I get out of it. She comes to the shows, my kid too, I’ve been married fourteen years and my daughter is ten. She loves the Beatles, she’s open minded about music.

My wife was in the movie Amadaus, so she’s quite musical. She played Mozart’s wife.

AP: Any thoughts on the Interview, I know you’ve worked with Seth and James? Seen it yet?

KC: I haven’t seen it yet but I care about those guys, Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen I met years ago before they were famous, they were a mutual friend with a friend named David Krumholtz, I guess it was around 2003 we jammed, we got together and it was great. We taped it, I don’t know what happened to the tape. But I was playing bass, Evan was playing guitar, David was playing and drums and Seth Rogen was rapping. And it was fucking a lot of fun.

So I hope they stay safe. I haven’t seen the movie yet, I want to see it. They’ve got balls.

AP; Mel Brooks said they waited until Hitler died before they made fun of him in a movie. But yeah total balls. I won’t spoil it for you, but it’s a movie you’d expect them to make, but I guess they kind of under estimated the political weight. It’s hilarious and controversial in that affect.

KC: Yeah, Seth said he has a sincere interest in the topic of North Korea and ya know that’s not a light subject matter. He did a lot of research and I believe him. I think the movie has a lot of dick jokes, but it’s not like the Killing Fields, it’s Seth Rogen, but yeah it’s still very daring waters to tread. I don’t know if it deserved all the hype, they require 24 hour security now, they can never travel to Asia. They put themselves in a position that’s a little dangerous. It’s a little weird, vicariously in a way, that that kind of controversy has crossed over into a community that I consider myself a part of. I’m sure they’ll keep writing their comedians, they’re fighters.

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AP: Its satire and the idea that we don’t have to think twice about making something satirical and worry about being safe is something maybe we take for granted until a few weeks ago?

KC: Yeah, that’s totally my thoughts on it. I dig those guys and wish them well.

AP: And you hope they’re able to put you in their movies again right?

KC: Yeah, of course, they have a creative appetite and stay busy and are always working and I’d always love to.

You can catch Crystal Robots on the Frozen Circuit Tour with Ravi Shavi and others this winter.