Ginger Baker wasn’t an easy man to deal with, but Chris Goss learned early on how to put his head in the tiger’s mouth without getting it bitten clean off.
“It depended on your approach,” Goss says of his relationship with the ex-Cream drummer. “Hit him at the wrong moment, and you’re gonna get an acrid reaction. I knew when the right moments were available for me, and we got along wonderfully.”
Baker was a member of Goss’s band Masters Of Reality during the early 1990s, and played on their second album, 1992’s psychedelic desert-blues jewel Sunrise On The Sufferbus. In the end, Baker stayed with Masters longer than he was in Cream. “Oh yeah,” Goss says drily but fondly. “I heard that every day.”
Baker isn’t the only notable musician to have entered Goss’s orbit in the past 35 years. He’s the thread that connects much of modern American rock, working with everyone from Josh Homme, Dave Grohl and Rick Rubin to Scott Weiland, Mark Lanegan and honorary Americans The Cult. He helped spark the early 90s stoner revolution via his production work with Kyuss, and subsequently became a key part of the extended Queens Of The Stone Age family. He almost produced Nirvana, and definitely did produce Gladiator star Russell Crowe’s long-forgotten rock album.
Yet despite all that, Goss remains a fringe figure. Masters Of Reality may be beloved by those who have heard them, but those who have heard them are in the minority. The Masters’ career has been fitful, with brilliant records – six albums at the last count, the most recent of which was released in 2009 – followed by long periods in which the band have gone dark. “I just directed it in whichever direction it went in,” Goss says of his career. “And that’s where it ended up.”
It’s 6am UK time when Goss calls from California, making it 10pm over there. “I can’t shed these music hours,” he says, his speaking voice as smooth and hypnotic as his singing voice. “I’m old and I still have them.”
He’s not old, though. He was born at the end of the 1950s and came of age during the dawn of the rock era. The Beatles, the Stones, Cream and Hendrix were his early guiding lights, later augmented by Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Aerosmith. Goss credits Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page with fostering his interest in magick and the esoteric.
“I wanted to know what he knew,” he says. “And I stepped through that door. It blew my mind. I learned how to astral project, to leave my body at will. I learned the Luciferian concepts of shining light on the darkness. Once you go there, it changes your life for ever.”
By his late teens, Goss was mixing it up on the New York scene, pinballing between punk meccas Max’s Kansas City and CBGB, and disco hotspots such as Studio 54 and the Paradise Garage. Talking about it today, he makes the whole period sound electrifying.
“Oh, it was,” he says. “Art, dope, the excitement of being in a place where the air was charged with music. You’d go out at midnight and just dive into the night. You didn’t know where the fuck you’d end up. And I ended up in limousines, at parties, art galleries. The energy was palpable.”
He’d been in bands before, but New York and its crazy matrix of creativity changed how he looked at music. “Not just emulating Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin,” he says. “Looking at it more like Picasso – anything’s possible.”
He put together the first line-up of Masters Of Reality way back in 1980, with guitarist Tim Harrington. They were a two-piece at the time, mixing electronics with heavy riffs and a drum machine; Kraftwerk-meets-Black Sabbath, maybe, or Nine Inch Nails years before Nine Inch Nails existed. Whatever they sounded like, it wasn’t a recipe for mainstream success. Not that that was the intention, then or now.
“I was a drunk at the time,” Goss says with a laugh, “so it was a wonderful way to get fucking shit-faced and also get paid.”
The two of them plugged away, playing the occasional gig in upstate New York. At one point, influential Chicago industrial label Wax Trax! – home of pipe-banging pioneers Ministry and Revolting Cocks – began sniffing around, but nothing came of it. Eventually Goss decided he “was tired of fucking around with a drum machine”, and decided to get a flesh-and-blood drummer, for more spontaneity.
The Masters transformed from an unconventional two-piece into a more conventional four-piece, albeit one with their own distinct identity. “I felt a pull back to where I came from,” he says. “I loved Kraftwerk, but I never let go of my love of Black Sabbath.”
And that’s how they carried on for a few more years, until one of their tapes landed in the lap of Rick Rubin. That’s when Masters Of Reality made one of the greatest cult debut albums in history. Except Chris Goss doesn’t quite see it like that.
When Rick Rubin signed Masters Of Reality to his label, Def American, in 1988, he was the hottest of music industry hotshots; he had launched the careers of hip-hop heavyweights Public Enemy, LL Cool J and The Beastie Boys. But Rubin was a rock fan, who put out Slayer’s controversial 1986 thrash metal landmark Reign In Blood when other record companies blanched at the prospect.
Masters Of Reality’s self-titled debut album – colloquially known as The Blue Garden, thanks to its gothic-copse cover and majestic second track – sounded like nothing else at the time. This was stripped-back blues-rock with an otherworldly edge, a dimension away from the pouting glam-metal pretty boys and biker-rock bozos clogging up MTV. As anyone who fell in love with the album at the time can vouch, it was a bona fide masterpiece.
Goss doesn’t see it like that. Today he talks about Rubin with barely concealed contempt. In his eyes, the producer stripped away the magic of Masters Of Reality, remoulding them as a barebones blues-rock band.
“Here’s the biggest producer in the world at the time, saying: ‘I want to dry up your sound’,” he says. “It was like a dare – a dare I regret making. Because that first album sounded nothing like we sounded live. He picked out the bluesiest, most fucking Americana part of what we did and emphasised that. We had a lot of goth in us before that. He took away the purple fog. And I like the purple fog.”
“He’s a ‘svengali’,” Goss continues, the word dripping with irony. “So it was tortuous for me. I’m searching for bliss while I’m playing, and it wasn’t blissful making that record. What came out of the speakers was a Masters Of Reality I’d never heard before. A lot of our close friends heard our record and their body language was devastating. They were saying: ‘This man ruined you.’”
For Goss’s part, he says there are remnants of what he wanted to sound like on the album – on the kaleidoscopic The Blue Garden, the swirling John Brown and the malevolent psychedelia of album closer Kill The King.
“The masterworks on the record,” as he describes them. “If you added more keyboards and more reverb and echo and mysticism to it all, you would have gotten the real fucking thing.”
The album was released in January 1989. Despite Goss’s issues with the record, a few of the savvier sections of the media recognised its brilliance. The public less so: the track The Blue Garden got a few MTV plays, but Masters Of Reality were a bunch of gnarly-looking dudes in their early 30s at a time when bands were judged by the frothiness of their tunes and the glossiness of their manes, and Masters Of Reality failed to trouble the charts. It was all a moot point anyway.
“There was a hatred between two factions, which Rubin thrived on,” says Goss. “He loved that shit.”
Within a year of releasing the debut album, the line-up that recorded it had fallen apart. When they resurfaced a couple of years later, it was with an unexpected new member: Ginger Baker.
Of all things, it was polo that brought Goss and Baker together. The drummer was an avid player, and so was Goss’s manager at the time. The latter suggested Baker jam with Masters Of Reality.
At first, Ginger rolled his eyes in that lovely pirate manner,” says Goss. “But we jammed, and within two minutes his grin went from ear to ear. That jam lasted five hours. At the end, Ginger stood up and said: ‘We should do something together, Chris.’”
Today, Goss talks about Baker with admiration and love. “We clicked like twin brothers from the moment we met,” he says. The album they made, Sunrise On The Sufferbus, gave the Masters their biggest hit with the whirligig shuffle of She Makes Me (When She Got Her Dress On). Baker’s presence drew comparisons to Cream – inevitable, but incorrect and tiresome.
The end for this Masters Of Reality line-up came in early 1993, when they supported in the US. The beery, flannel-clad rabble didn’t want to see what Goss calls “old, fat-ish dudes” on stage. The feeling was mutual.
“Ginger was repulsed even by the name of the band,” says Goss. “He just didn’t give a fuck.”
The final straw came when Alice In Chains singer Layne Staley OD’d and the tour was cancelled. “When Ginger got back home, he called me and said: ‘Chris, I can’t do this shit any more,’” says Goss.
The two men stayed in touch. When Baker died in 2019, Goss fronted the band that played a tribute gig at hallowed London jazz club Ronnie Scott’s, playing Eric Clapton’s Cream guitar parts while Clapton himself looked on. “No pressure, then,” he says, laughing. Then he’s serious. “I miss him very much.”
Baker’s departure meant Goss had to rebuild MOR all over again. He spent a year in LA’s most expensive studios recording an album, The Ballad Of Jody Frosty. Goss’s label – “beady-eyed creeps” – complained that they didn’t hear any singles, and by the way, Goss owed them £492,000. But a contractual snafu on the label’s part meant that he could walk away without having to repay the debt, although the album was shelved.
Goss wasn’t too worried. He’d parlayed his fleeting status as Rick Rubin’s “golden boy” into production work. The first band he hooked up with were Palm Desert four-piece Kyuss. He’d fallen in love with them after his wife played a cassette of theirs incessantly. The first time he saw them was at some tiny bar in Los Angeles.
“They were tuned down lower than anyone I’d heard,” he says. “It was a liquid lava that moved slowly but aggressively forward. It bowled me over. I made it a creed not to let another producer touch them, because they would have just fucked it up.”
The holy triumvirate of Kyuss albums that Goss produced – 1992’s Blues For The Red Sun, 1994’s Welcome To Sky Valley and 1995’s …And The Circus Leaves Town – became the foundation stones for the 1990s stoner rock movement. Years later, Dave Grohl told him that Nirvana had considered him to produce the follow-up to Nevermind.
“I was like: ‘Gee, thanks for telling me now, Dave’,” says Goss. “They used to listen to Masters Of Reality and Kyuss in their van. But I don’t know. I would have wanted to fuck their sound up.”
Goss did just fine without them. When Kyuss split and their guitarist Josh Homme launched Queens Of The Stone Age, Goss was by his side as a mentor/guru/musical foil. During the 90s he was involved in albums by QOTSA, Stone Temple Pilots, The Flys (whose Goss-produced debut album Holiday Man went gold in the US) and Russell Crowe’s barroom rock 30 Odd Foot Of Grunts, whose sole album, 1998’s Gaslight, he produced.
“He charmed me into it,” Goss says of the latter. “I’d go into the control room, and there’s a bar set up with different kinds of top-shelf liquor and a buffet. He assumed that was the lifestyle I was living [laughs]. If only he knew. I saw a work ethic with Russell like I’d never seen in my life before. He’d be on a movie set until midnight, then back in the studio, then back on the set at six a.m. the next morning.”
Goss himself was doing well out of it, making “forty or fifty thousand dollars” per album. He even wrote music for the cult cartoon show Ren & Stimpy. He’d bought a house in the desert outside LA, and built his own studio there. There was the occasional Masters Of Reality show – one of them, at the Viper Room in LA, featuring a guest appearance by Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland, was recorded and released the 1997 live album How High The Moon.
But the Masters had largely gone dark again, and so had Goss. After Baker’s departure he’d been hit by a bout of serious depression, something which he’s dealt with periodically ever since. He credits the author William Styron, whose book Darkness Visible, about his own struggle with depression, helped him find a way out of the darkness.
“What I learned from him is that it’s like being in a storm at sea, in a little boat,” Goss says. “You’re so sure you’re gonna fucking die, and it’s terrifying, but it calms. I just want people to know that.”
When Masters Of Reality finally re-emerged, it was with 1999’s Welcome To The Western Lodge album. It felt like Goss had poured all his hopelessness and anger into the record. The title of the opening track said it all: It’s Shit.
“It was made in hell,” he says of the album. “Ten years of being fucked over by the music industry. I wanted to make a dark version of side two of Abbey Road. It’s a fucked-up little record.”
By this point Goss had long abandoned any expectations of commercial success – “Commercial? Come on…” he snorts – although that didn’t stop him following up Western Lodge in relatively short order with 2001’s Deep In The Hole. But any momentum they had built was derailed in 2004 when Goss nearly died after contracting an infection while in hospital.
“Within one day, my organs began to shut down,” he says. He spent 13 days in a coma. “I was travelling in the astral world. It was magic.”
He spent a month in critical care in hospital, and it took him several more months to recover at home. Even then, he was hooked up to an intravenous line, and had a nurse visiting him daily.
By 2006 he was finally well enough to release a new album, Give Us Barabbas, with songs recorded a decade earlier for the shelved Ballad Of Jody Frosty album. Goss recovered, but since then there has been just one more Masters Of Reality album, 2009’s knotty but beguiling Pine/Cross Dover. He says the radio silence, studio-wise, was partly down to him (“I needed a vacation”) and partly down to the changed landscape of the music industry. “There’s a lot of fucking fear out there,” he says. “I can’t work with that. You cannot make fearful music.”
The good news is that Goss is working on a new album right now (a single, Sugar, was released in May via Mascot Records). It’s “three quarters” done, he says, but sciatica is slowing him down. “I was standing in the studio, trying to sing, and my legs would go numb,” he says. “I had to sit down. It’s the first time it’s happened to me in my life. I’m dealing with this bullshit.”
For a man who has spent large chunks of his career dealing with bullshit of one kind or another, Goss is sanguine about how it has all played out. He insists he wouldn’t change anything, except maybe he’d have liked a better quality of touring life: “The only thing I would have appreciated about being in a huge band is five-star hotels and First Class travel.”
And while he’s been a hostage to record labels and producers before, that’s not been his style for a long, long time.
“I’m not at the mercy of the music industry,” he says. “They’re at the mercy of me.”
