Interview with John Lyman of Compound Red

Pic from John's Instagram.  I regretfully forgot to take a good photo of or with him when we spoke, maybe another time, in which I will update this image.

 

I got into Compound Red a few years ago when the song Peter Pan's Shadow was in my YouTube recommended.  I fell in love with the song immediately, and was all the more stoked about it when I saw the band was from my state.  A few years and a few haircuts later I find myself going to school in the city Compound Red came out of 30+ years ago.

I like to track down and hassle(Hassle: lovingly shower with questions and admiration) dudes who played in the bands long before I was born to dig out info about the music I love, and occasionally to take some dead-stock records collecting dust on their shelves/in their storage.  For whatever reason it took me a while to track down anyone from Compound Red, but eventually last year I found their Instagram handles and got to bugging John and Jim about seeing if they had any old t shirts or other Compound Red ephemera laying around I could grab.  After a while of chatting online and talking about various things from Milwaukee music to Tibetan Buddhism John surprised me with a picture of a the first two Compound Red 7"s and a record from his later band Only Loves Left Alive with the text "Merry x-mass".  What followed was a failed attempt or two of getting us in the same place at the same time.  Eventually we were both in Milwaukee and both had time to finally shake hands on a Friday afternoon.  I had just come back from a relatives funeral and had two hours to spare before I was scheduled to work about 5 minutes down the street from where John lives.  It was pretty spur of the moment, we never said where we were meeting but John said we could just meet at his house since it was so close-by.  He would be getting home soon after picking up his son, Tate, from school.  I arrived in the work car that I'd hijacked for the occasion and about 10 seconds later John flies into his driveway in a swank old van (I think we should bring back the word swank).  He gets out and we give each other a big smile, shaking hands, it was nice to finally meet face to face.  He introduced himself and his son and we headed inside.  The conversation was already in full swing as soon as I stepped through the threshold, but I did have some amateur-ass questions prepared for him 'cos I figured, why not?  John was amazing to talk to and I think we were both equally stoked to be having the conversation we were.

 

Anyways, here is the "interview"